Some of you may have noticed the RSS feed button on my left column of Dollars Blog. A lot of people still don’t know much about RSS feeds even though they have been around a few years. Learning about RSS feeds is important if you plan to have a career as a webmaster or blogger.

About RSS & Atom:

RSS stands for “Really simple syndication” and is RSS 2.0, the newest version of the RSS protocol. You can use RSS in what is called a “feed” to publish new content to people. What makes it unique is the reader doesn’t have to be on your website in order to see new content. Atom is just another protocol for sending feeds. There is technical pro’s and cons between the two which aren’t necessary to talk about here. Wordpress software uses RSS 2.0 while the free blogger software from Google uses Atom 1.0.

How RSS & Atom Works:

There is two major ways that RSS feeds are used. The first is through the use of a feed reader or “aggregator” software. What it does is you subscribe to a websites RSS (Atom) feed. When there are any new posts/stories it will automatically let you know.
There is hundreds of different readers out there. How a potential visitor gets subscribed to the feed is, they click on a RSS button from the site, or enter the feed link into their feed reader software. There is also online feed readers (similiar to the idea behind online bookmarks) so that you can access your subscribed feeds conveniently from any computer.

The publisher has the ability to give you “previews” or the full post in the feeds. The previews “entice” the person to go to their website. In wordpress blogs you can control if you want a summary or not by going into the blog panel under options and then under reading.

Another common use is for people to use it for integrating it into their own website. There are many scripts out there that you can use to display live feeds from other websites onto your website.

Feedburner:

Instead of using your generic feed format produced by your blog/web software, you can sign up with Feedburner. This feed network gives you a variety of tools to enhance your RSS feed. They have a some nice display buttons you can use for your site for potential feed subscribers. You can even have the option of people advertising on your RSS feeds. It will also give you statistics about your readers and how many are subscribed to your feed. It also has a “smartfeed” option where it combines both RSS and Atom so all feed readers will be compatible.

Recently, there is a very important reason to now sign up with feedburner. Feedburner was recently acquired by Google. Many speculate that Google will now be using feedburner information in how it ranks websites. Getting a lot of subscribers to your feeds probably will give you a boost in search engine rankings in the future.

Advantages to Publishers with RSS or Atom feeds:

1) Repeat visitors. You will encourage people to want to come back if you have it set to “preview”. When people bookmark a site often the site is forgotten or less frequently checked. Now visitors will want to check your site everytime you have new content posted. Repeat visitors adds up and is one major way you get exponential traffic growth in the long run.

2) When signing up with Feedburner, Google will now be using that information in the near future(if not already) for ranking purposes.

3) Webmasters and bloggers can streamline other people’s RSS (Atom) feeds into their page as a way to enhance their own website.