A few days back when I was preparing graphics for my blog on how to become a successful blogger, I realized that I have not yet written any article on RSS feeds. During a few months back I write one interesting blog on how to use FeedBurner with WordPress Blog, it clearly mentioned the importance of feed in our blogs, but still I thought it is not enough. I think this blog of mine will let you know about the importance of the RSS Feeds on different blogs, news sites or video sites, etc.

What is RSS?

Well the very first question which can arise in our mind is what exactly is a RSS or RSS Feeds?

To be very precise RSS the short form of Really Simple Syndication (also known as Rich Site Summary), is nothing, but it is a simple representation of standard web feeds for a particular website, to display the recent updated information from that particular web site. It is a simple way to get information from a particular website, without the need to open that particular website.

To be very precise, RSS is a way through which you can get the updates in the form of news, from a particular website. Just for an example, if you really like a blog, then you can subscribe to the RSS feed of that particular blog, and once a new blog is published there, you can be able to know about it without visiting the blog and thus you need not to open the particular site all the time to know about what new blog is publishing over there.

A few years back, blogs were not that much popular, but now we all are seeing the growth of blogs and there are some blogs which are now the essential part of our life. We cannot feel good without visiting some particular blogs on a daily basis. Thus, RSS feed helps us to stay in touch with those blogs.

How RSS does works?

Well, RSS feeds are the best way to be notified of the changed or updated or of new content on a particular website, be it a blog, a news site, or a site for made for videos only.

It is a fact that RSS feeds actually helps the website owners more than the visitors. Website owners can ensure that with the help of RSS feeds visitors will stay in touch with their site content, and they will have the loyal visitors and increased hits to their website.

The website owners can arrange their RSS feeds in the way that a list of notifications about their updated content is synchronized. With the help of their RSS feeds, visitor of their website can use some RSS aggregators or RSS readers to get the updates. With the help of those aggregators or readers, user can even be able to access the updates of different websites as well.

What Information does RSS Provides?

Well it depends on the website owner, but simply a RSS feed provides very basic information about the latest updated content of the particular website. An RSS feed contains the list of items (updated or new one) in order from newest to the oldest one, which consists of the Title of the post, and a brief description of the posts and a link to the same.

Sometimes, the brief description might also be the entire post, depending on the choice of the website owner, but it is always preferred to choose the brief summary to display in RSS feeds, as if you are providing the entire post in the feed, then the reader will read all of them at the feed only, and then why he/she will visit your website to read the entire item?

How to find if a Website is having RSS Feeds?

Well, one of the biggest challenges with a common visitor of a website is to identify if that particular website is having RSS feed or not? Well, to be very frank, these days’ websites are normally having RSS feeds. Especially with some blogging tools like WordPress it is available by default only. You can also read my blog on why to choose WordPress as your blogging platform? Hope it can be a useful read for you.

Coming back to our discussion of how to find if a website is having RSS feeds or not, we can search for a link to their feeds by the name of RSS or you can simply find an icon of small size of this image:

Well as in the case of my blog, you can also find an option of Subscribing to a particular websites feed on that particular website, like we did provided the same on our navigation panel.

Importance of RSS feeds!

Well, to be very frank, RSS feeds are considered as a positive factor as far as doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of a particular website is concerned. It is considered that the keywords arising in the RSS feeds of a particular website might help the site to rank well in the search engine ranking of the same keywords. The simple concept is that if your website is having more number of followers, it means your website is more popular and it will have improved rankings over competitors.

Though, search engines like Google, does not gives the importance of RSS feeds subscribers as far as the rankings of the website is concerned.

To be very precise, these days social bookmarking sites are providing users some more features, thus the use of RSS feeds has been given serious competition by them. Somehow RSS is losing its popularity now. You can clearly understand this as the search engine giant Google shut down it’s quite popular RSS feed services known as Google Reader.

Though with the increase in mobile internet users, the age of RSS feed are also reviving. Some mobile development apps are now considering about using RSS feeds to minimize the data usage of a mobile user. But anyways it is a wonderful tool.