RSS now stands for "Really Simple Syndication". I prefaced it with "now" because the same acronym for the same idea once stood for Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. While the words defining the acronym have changed, the idea behind RSS has not. RSS allows syndication or feeds of your website content. While the purpose of doing this may not be immediately obvious, once you grasp the capabilities and opportunities RSS offers, I think you will understand why it is extremely important for any web developer or site owner looking to increase traffic and expand market penetration. And the beauty of RSS feeds is that it takes little or no extra effort on a web developers part as its included in many of today's popular development tools.

Why RSS Feeds? Why Syndication?

Ultimately, the purpose behind every website is to make a sale. Whether you maintain a site for a Fortune 500 company a small real estate site, or write in a blog, your goal is the same. It doesn't matter whether you are selling real estate, t-shirts, a political candidate, or your own ideas; every website is a vehicle to market a product, tangible or not. In order for someone to buy that product from your site, they must first know it exists and have some reason to read or view your content.

Getting visitors to a website has always been a challenge. Rather than being able to push your content onto your audience, you have to pull them in. The presents many challenges in and of itself, but as the amount of websites and content online grows exponentially, two additional challenges have popped up for website owners and developers alike.

1. Make your voice heard among the thousands of pages competing for search engine placement and ad revenue... some of which are worthless to your audience but nonetheless compete for their attention.
2. Get your information to your audience as quickly and efficiently as possible, before they move on. This will also likely keep them coming back.

RSS is a good tool to combat both and is an important step in separating your site from at least some of the masses.

Make Your Voice Head

There is a saying that you have to get your message in front of your audience at least seven times before you can make a sale. That is a bit of a generalization, as it greatly depends on what your product is and how receptive your audience is to buying, but the idea holds true. In order to make a sale, a potential purchaser must know you exist and how to buy your product. Online this means that someone must be able to find you. While purchasing Google Ads, targeted banner ad placement, and search engine optimization will all help increase the likelihood of traffic, developers who rely solely on these methods will have sites which never reach their full potential.

RSS Feeds will literally multiply the accessibility of your website content and drastically increase the ways in which it can be received. Before RSS, the only way for someone to read your content was to visit your site, but since its adoption, people can subscribe to your website content through your own website, or through a number of other feed aggregators and syndication lists. In fact, your website content can be published automatically to countless other websites at once just by updating your content that is part of an RSS Feed. Imagine updating a news article on your main corporate site that would instantly also update the news on various other department sites (internal and external) and be available to employees and customers by free subscription, sent out to various feed aggregators, and received by major search engines. Imagine writing an article for your site or posting to your blog that could be spread like an e-mail or news flash without any additional work on your part. If you can see the benefits of a system like that, than you are starting to understand the importance of RSS feeds.

Value Their Time and Keep Them Coming Back

Much of the beauty of an RSS feed lies in its efficiency. Various programs, e-mail readers, web browers, and other websites can all be used to subscribe to and view RSS syndicated content. Which means a subscriber or previous website visitor can easily see when your website content has been updated and what the new content is about. And they can subscribe to the entire content of your site, or just the portion that interests them. So without having to type in your website address, or traverse through three layers or links and ads and visitor can quickly read about your latest product, newest services, or the most recent commentary and news. And while you might think that would hurt your traffic, in practical experience the opposite is true, because what is fed to your RSS feed will likely be a headline and either a summary or introductory paragraph... to see the rest of the article a subscriber will have to click on an embedding link which will take them directly to the specific content item on your site. This allows you to tailor your information to each specific user without any real additional work. It also enables you to easily track how popular your site and subscriptions are and determine which information is more important to your customer base.

If you value a customer's time, they will value yours... you'd be surprised how much greater repeat traffic is just by making it easier for someone to find what they are looking for.

Implementing RSS is Relatively Easy

I hate broad generalizations because invariably they don't apply to the most important scenario, your own.  However, in the case of RSS syndication, implementation really is easy in most cases, although the more complex a website becomes the more challenging adding RSS will be.  Still, unless your site is hand coded, written by some outdated WYSIWYG HTML Editor, or utilizes some proprietary software, chances are tools already exists to make use of RSS for your content.

Most blog and CMS software have RSS feeds by default.  Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type all include RSS functionality or plugins.  And larger CMS (Content Management System) Software such as Joomla, Mamba, and Drupal either have RSS syndication on by default or it can be easily added by extension or component.  Even programs like DreamWeaver and NetObjects Fusion have addon products to handle RSS syndication, and some other HTML Editors like RapidWeaver include it by default in the program.

Subscribing to RSS is Even Easier

Once you have enabled RSS feeds of your content, you will want to subscribe and see how it looks.  Subscribing to RSS Feeds is easy.  Many browers such as Mozilla FireFox and Internet Explorer will let you create live bookmarks of RSS Sites that will display the latest content in the RSS feed.  If you prefer to use a third party aggregator or service, you will want to check out FeedBurner or NewsGator.  There are even programs that will send RSS feeds directly to your e-mail, like RSSFWD or FeedBlitz.