Why You Should Optimize Your Website for RSS
Like a newspaper or magazine gathers articles for readers, Internet denizens have taken to using programs that collect dynamic content of their favourite sites. This allows them to do create a single page that scans a list of websites to either previews fresh content or even provide entire articles.
It’s possible because of RSS feeds. RSS is an acronym with several definitions: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or a variation on one of those. The bottom line is that RSS is a text format pulled from a site’s XML.
In activating your website with a RSS feed, you’ve made the content in that feed available to syndication. Just like columns can appear in several newspapers, this makes the articles and blogs you publish available be viewed by any number of aggregators.
This is an easy and customer-friendly way tolet customers know that there is fresh content on your site. While email-notification also does this, more and more readers have become overwhelmed by their email inboxes and look to their RSS aggregators for this information.
However, activating an RSS feed is not as simple as it seems. Many automated RSS feeds simply default to publishing the first sentences of new content, which may not give a good insight to the blog. And publishing entire articles leaves a website open for a tactic called ‘scraping’. This happens when competitors plagiarize articles to other blogs. It’s detrimental in many ways, perhaps the worst being that it pulls your traffic away from search engines.
An experienced web designer can partner with you to create optimized feeds for RSS as well as the lesser-known formats, like Atom. RSS 2.0 especially allows for specialized information to be gathered into a feed. This allows for a blogto syndicate not only the date and title of a new article, but also a strong description and even keywords, author information, even multiple headlines. This will help foil scrapers while enticing traffic directly to your site to read what’s new.
