Answering No.1 The Question About RSS - Why Should I Care?

Author: Andrew Henry

Website: http://www.pheedcentral.com
Email: andy@pheedcentral.com
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Answering No.1 The Question About RSS - Why Should I Care?

There is an obvious need in the marketplace for a common
sense, non-techie guide to what RSS is and how you can use
it to enhance your online presence.

A Since there are still many website owners who are unclear as to why they should care about RSS, I thought I'd take the time to outline the things they care about.

Once you get started with RSS you'll probably quickly
realize the potential it can have to help you in many areas
that you hadn't previously realized.

Before we get stuck in, let's just make it perfectly clear
again that this is designed to help the widest possible
audience by reducing the technical content so that anyone
can improve their business by understanding how RSS can
help, and how to implement RSS in the most appropriate way
for them.

There are many sources of information on RSS that go way
into the technicalities of it, but we'll leave that aside
for now and just show you how to take action to implement
RSS and the implications that will have.

Once you know How to use RSS you'll probably start looking
for Where to submit your feeds (sometimes called 'pheeds')
and find other feeds. To this end I've created
www.pheedcentral.com for you
to locate a vast amount of the places you'll first start to
look for. This should give you enough resources to keep you
busy and productive for quite a while.

What is RSS?

RSS is most commonly used as an acronym for Really Simple
Syndication (there are various other definitions such as
Rich Site Syndication, Rich Site Summary and more, but they
all refer to the same process) and in its simplest form is
just a way of displaying information that is available from
a remote location.

The most widely used application of RSS is to share website
content from a central repository to multiple sites. This is
the way that a lot of news information is now shared online.

The information is shared in several formats, ranging from
complete content to summarized information with links to the
full content. Sharing in this way allows the site that is
republishing to choose the way that fits their purpose and
some content providers go so far as to even provide
different color options of the feed they provide.

So Is RSS For Me?

The question of whether RSS is likely to be useful to you
will almost certainly be answered by one word... Yes.

So, who could use RSS?:-

1) Webmasters who are required to provide regularly updated
content on particular topics which their website is aimed
at. As most savvy webmasters will be aware, there are many
reasons for wanting fresh new content for the visitors of
your site. These reasons can range from wanting a 'sticky'
factor that will keep people returning to the site for the
updated information, to the fact that search engine robots
will tend to return more often if a website has pages that
are regularly updated.

2) Website owners who want to manage the content of their
own websites without having to individually modify each page
requiring an update. In this instance it's possible to use
RSS to save you a lot of work by producing centralized
information files which use RSS supply in the information to
external sites (controlled by the same person)
simultaneously. If you are familiar with Server Side Includes
(SSI) you'll appreciate the power of this (don't worry
that is as Techie as we'll go).

3) Website owners who have