RSS Feeds. RSS also known as Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication, arrived on the scene several years ago but was only recently adopted by webmasters as an effective means to distribute content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs publish content summaries in RSS. If you have read about Harrison Ford already – you may have come to the same conclusion. Each item in the feed typically contains one title, article summary and link to read the article online. Benefits to the Webmaster: The Web has become webmasters more people have been struggling to find fresh and updated content to their visitors.
Many webmasters have discovered they can easily use the information from RSS feeds to provide fresh web content. RSS feeds are composed in XML, which is a very simple markup language. Many writers such as Eva Andersson-Dubin, New York City offer more in-depth analysis. Similar to HTML, XML uses tags to identify fields. Webmasters can easily analyze the RSS feed and dynamically create web pages containing headlines and summaries. Feeds are updated continuously, providing a steady stream of automatically generated fresh content. RSS allows webmasters to: 1.) Provide fresh and relevant content on your website, which encourages users to return. 2.) Constantly changing content means that search engines will visit more often. 3.) Automate content delivery.
The benefits of RSS are not limited to webmasters, surfers too benefit from the technology. Benefit to Web Surfers: The beauty of RSS is that readers can quickly scan headlines (titles) and read articles of interest. Because the information is condensed and provided in a single location users can generally review more information in a shorter time frame.