What is RSS feeds

Originally designed by Netscape to mainstream news headlines for portals it has gone through many changes to the simplified versions we know today. Yes there are two versions that are in use, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0! These versions was developed by two different companies and the biggest difference (there are many) are with the naming of the root element. RSS 1.0 makes use of rdf:RDF and RSS 2.0 makes use of rss.

Now that you are completely confused let's simplify the discussion. For those that are familiar with XML it should be easy to explain but for those that are not lets explain XML first. XML is a format of text. It is a way for HTML to store information and is widely used on the internet, one such an example is your web site's p3p policy. It consist out of a User readable page and an XML version which is read by a computer program. RSS in many ways resembles this in that it is a way for many computers to feed information from more than one web site This is also called to be "syndicated".

RSS, RDF or ATOM usually contain the following information or list of items.

The Title of the article XML example will look like this
<title>This is the Article Source heading</title>

The link on which the article is <link>blahblah/articles/</link>

A summary of the article <item>
<title>The Article heading</title>
<link>http://www.the-source-of-the-article.com/article.htm</link>
</item>

You will note that it resemble normal HTML in many ways. the <item> tags can be repeated again and again for every headline or article.

RSS Feeds has many online marketing benefits as it feeds news articles with your website link to many RSS reader sites. These sites publish the feeds on there sites. This is especialy helpfull in the beginning stages of your website. I ussually submit my RSS feeds to a number of RSS reader sites that on their side distribute the feeds to a number of other sites.