RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is in short a clear overview of the latest articles or news on your website. All the major sites have RSS feeds as it gives their users a very easy way to get access to the latest news.
One can go through all the news on the page through the RSS feeds as all the various websites make it available. However, it is up to users how they want to download / view your RSS feeds, as there are many different types of RSS readers.
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What do I get out of having RSS feeds on my website?
If you update your site regularly and make sure to add those carefully to your RSS feed, you can get a steady flow of visitors through your feed.
It is thus a good way to get visitors to your website. Every time a user opens his RSS reader to view the latest news from his favorite sites, your website will also appear in their inventory.
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The user is thus continually reminded of your website and this is certainly desirable.
If your website is based on WordPress, you already have an RSS feed. With the default settings, you’ll find it quite simply using URL similar to ‘www.onlinecmag.com/feed’
Again it turns out WordPress as a very good solution for beginners. To get an RSS feed on your website you will not need to look at external solutions (like Feedforall.com)
However, there is one option I would recommend you to change in WordPress related to your RSS feed. Go To ‘Readings’ section under ‘settings’ and set ‘For each article in a feed, show’ option to summary instead of ‘Full Text’.
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This change ensures that your full texts can be found only on your own website. This is important in terms of Google as or else there is risk a sentence for the same content lying on other websites to be taken as offensive. (Duplicate Content Penalty)
How to promote my RSS feed?
Like everything else you need to market your RSS feed to achieve some good results. The more sites you can get the link to your RSS feed, the better. Here are a few suggestions for how you can get more people to sign up to your RSS feed.
- First of all, be sure to have a clear link to your RSS feed on your own website. In this way, your users are made aware that you actually have an RSS feed. Subsequently, the users can then just copy the link and paste it into their own RSS reader.
- If you have a newsletter you may place a link to your RSS feed in the bottom of the email.
- Start by signing your feed on the following pages: Rss.com, feedreader.com, feed.mikle.com.
- Otherwise, it is also good to get your feed listed on Facebook, Twitter, and possibly other websites you have, forums where it could be relevant and so on.
All in all, RSS is a great way to bring more traffic to your website. The main advantage is that when your feed is up and running and have registered on different pages, everything is updated automatically.
All you need is to create content for your website and from time to time make a couple of new direct links to your feed.
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