RSS Feeds?

A lot of websites, including QW Consulting's website, have links to RSS feeds that let you stay updated with the site. You'll also notice links to RSS feeds from the orange icon in the address bar (or tool bar) of the newer web browsers. Despite the increasing popularity on websites, a lot of people do not know what RSS feeds are and do not understand how RSS feeds can help their business.

Let's start at the beginning. What is RSS? An RSS feed is just a document, in a very specific format, that contains information about certain items on your website. Because RSS documents are intended to help visitors to your site stay up to date (more on that in a moment), an RSS document is highly useful for sites that update often - such as blogs or news sites.

The RSS document is special though because it allows other people to take your content and put it on some other website very, very easily. In other words, this RSS document from your website feeds content to the other websites.

What other websites? Google's and Yahoo's personal home pages allow people to read RSS feeds through their home page. Alternatively, there are feed readers, also known as aggregator websites, that let you read several RSS feeds at one time. However, RSS feeds can also be used by other websites. For example, if another website wants to show the latest items from your website on their website all you have to do is give them the link to your RSS feed. So that you know the terms, the process of accessing the RSS feed through an aggregator or some other source is known as subscribing to that RSS feed.

This is the power of RSS as a marketing tool: people can subscribe to your content and access it somewhere other than your website. The RSS feed then provides links back to your website - that way if people do want to visit the website, they have a link right there to do so.

For example, if you subscribe to QW Consulting's RSS feed, or subscribe to my RSS feed through your Yahoo or Google home page, you can see each update without having to remember to visit my website.

Now, to just give you a little more info, it is worth noting that while what I am describing above is called RSS by a majority of websites, the RSS feed is a type of XML feed. Making matters a little confusing, some sites refer to their RSS feed as their XML feed (to be honest, I use the two interchangeably at times). In most cases, that XML feed is the same as what they mean by an RSS feed.

The thing to keep in mind is that an RSS feed is a specific kind of XML file. So, while the words XML and RSS can be used interchangeably, an XML feed isn't always the same thing as an RSS feed. XML feeds share the same principle of RSS feeds - allowing people to easily share data from one website to another - but XML feeds can come in many different formats and do many things beyond what RSS feeds can do.

If you are interested in learning more about RSS feeds or setting up an RSS feed on your website, contact QW Consulting today.