Internet Marketing Journal UK

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is one of the web technologies that is often mentioned as being a way to market a website.If used correctly RSS can be a good stepin moving towards creating improved search engine positions and improving your dialogue with consumers.

Whats is RSS?

In simple terms RSS is a stripped down version of your website content. Developed in XML (Extensible Markup Language) it allows for a quick efficent way of providing information from your website. It provides either a summary of your webpages or a full content version that can be syndicated across the Internet.

Syndicating your website with RSS

The two simple ways where you can syndicate your content with RSS. You can syndicate your content:

• Direct to Other Websites
• Direct to your Community

RSS Syndication - Direct to Other Websites

One of the best ways of using RSS is on otehr peoples websites. As RSS can be integrated to display on other websites easily many will aggregate your content into their website. This is a great benefit to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign.

1. You will get links into all your new pages
2. You will get links as soon as you update your feed
3. You control the links to these pages

Every time you update your feed anyone aggregating your feed will update their links to your site. Every new page listed will get a link. Each of these links, generally, will use your ‘Title Tag’ as the anchor text. They may also use your url as well. So assuming you have good quality search engine, and user focussed, title tags andURLs within your website you get more links.

RSS Syndication - Direct to Your Community

Developing a community is at the heart of any Web 2.0 project. In the past the only way to communicate directly online with your community would be through email. It would let them know if you had new offers, information etc available on your site.

Many people, myself included, jealously guarded our email addresses. Far too often we would get spam as our email address had been sold off or the information we signed up to was not really what we wanted. It was a nightmare. What RSS allowed us to do was to sign up without our email address being given out. We simply installed some kit into our email client, or we had Thunderbird, and we got teh latest news from your website direct to our inbox. When we saw a conversation starting relevant to us we joined in (if it was a forum or a blog) or bought a product from a supplier based on the product they send me (I’m sure Colin will tell you about my love for trainers).

Internet Markeing with RSS

RSS is easy to use for website owners and simple for your visitors to subscribe from making it the perfect vehicle with which to start marketing your website online.

Marketing your Website with RSS (Part Two)

Next blog post is designed to show you how to select your syndication partners so that you can get the maximum exposure and link benefit for your Internet Marketing campaign.