RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site by allowing your followers to subscribe to your content automatically from their preferred reader. It is often overlooked when it comes to engagement strategies. When building a website, you want to give users multiple options when it comes to consuming content on the site. One of the ways in which you can do so is setting up RSS for the entire content of the site, the public site anyway.
Recently I was in a meeting with the vendor and the topic of RSS came up. I started thinking about how for some odd reason I’ve had this same discussion at a previous job, and remembering how, albeit savvy web users, most didn’t know what RSS was or how to even create one, or even the history behind this simple, yet sophisticated way of engaging with users online.
And so I went in search for the most simple + easy to follow explanation for what it is and how to create one if I wanted to. I found my answer on http://www.w3schools.com. According the site, this is how you can get your RSS feed content for your website or blog on the Web for users + followers to subscribe to.
1. Name your RSS file. Notice that the file must have an .xml extension.
2. Validate your RSS file (a good validator can be found at http://www.feedvalidator.org).
3. Upload the RSS file to your web directory on your web server.
4. Copy the little orange or button to your web directory.
5. Put the little orange “RSS” or “XML” button on the page where you will offer RSS to the world (e.g. on your home page). Then add a link to the button that links to the RSS file. The code will look something like this:
<a href=”http://www.w3schools.com/rss/myfirstrss.xml”>
<img src=”http://www.w3schools.com/rss/rss.gif” width=”36″ height=”14″>
</a>.
6. Submit your RSS feed to the RSS Feed Directories (you can Google or Yahoo for “RSS Feed Directories”). Note! The URL to your feed is not your home page, it is the URL to your feed, like “http://www.w3schools.com/rss/myfirstrss.xml”. Here are some free RSS aggregation services:
- Syndic8: Over 300,000 feeds listed. Register your feed here
- Newsisfree: Over 18,000 feeds. Register your feed here
7. Register your feed with the major search engines:
- Google – http://www.google.com/ig (Google’s personalized homepage. Google will index any RSS feed added here)
- Bing – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
- Yahoo – http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php
8. Update your feed – Now you have registered your RSS feed with Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Now you must make sure that you update your content frequently and that your RSS feed is constantly available.
A little history of RSS
- 1997 – Dave Winer develops scriptingNews. RSS was born.
- 1999 – Netscape develops RSS 0.90 (which supported scriptingNews). This was simply XML with an RDF Header.
- 1999 – Dave Winer at UserLand develops scriptingNews 2.0b1 (This included Netscape’s RSS 0.90 features)
- 1999 – Netscape develops RSS 0.91. In this version they removed the RDF header, but included most features from scriptingNews 2.0b1.
- 1999 – UserLand gets rid of scriptingNews and uses only RSS 0.91
- Netscape stops their RSS development
- 2000 – UserLand releases the official RSS 0.91 specification
- 2000 – A group lead by Rael Dornfest at O’Reilly develops RSS 1.0. This format uses RDF and namespaces. This version is often confused as being a new version of 0.91, but this is a completely new format with no ties to RSS 0.91
- 2000 – Dave Winer at UserLand develops RSS 0.92
- 2002 – Dave Winer develops RSS 2.0 after leaving Userland
- 2003 – The official RSS 2.0 specification is released
How RSS Works according to w3schools.com.
Do you RSS, which reader do you prefer? Please share in the comment.
the social plug-in 
