RSS Feeds for Daily Website Content
Author: Jason Kamara
Adding fresh content to your website as often as possible is a surefire way to attract human visitors and search engine spiders. Google continually updates its PageRank and search ranking algorithms in order to weed out duplicate content and outdated information. However, Google will continue to value current content that is somewhat unique. The best way to attract quality traffic to your website is to provide them with quality, current information.
If you have the time, energy and expertise to update your website with quality content on a daily basis then you will likely not need to finish reading this article. But if you are not capable of doing this on your own, there are other options. Of course, you could pay someone to write in your blog or forum, thereby freeing up your time. You could also pay a ghostwriter to write articles for your website or blog. These are good options, but they will cost you money.
Another (free) way to add fresh content to your website or blog is to subscribe to receive content that will be plugged directly into your website, to the exact page or area you specify. The content can be formatted to your own specifications, and will look just like any other part of your site. The integration is almost seamless. One popular way of doing this is by subscribing to RSS feeds.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a group of technologies for web feeds. They are written in XML and allow information to be delivered as RSS feeds or RSS channels. Most large content-driven websites allow you to click on a button or link to display the RSS feed for the main page or for a particular category. The code can easily be copied to a file on your web server, and then inserted into a page of your choosing.
You need an RSS feed reader in order to view these feeds. Popular readers can be downloaded for free. Using an RSS reader (or 'feed aggregator') allows the user to view only new content, thereby reducing the time and bandwidth demands. As a webmaster, you can subscribe to receive RSS feeds from particular websites that have content targeted to your website traffic. You can also visit RSS feed directories that allow you to choose from tens of thousands of different feeds.
Although there are premium feeds that you must pay for, the bulk of RSS feeds available are free. So what's in it for the feed providers? There are usually one or more links within the feed that link to the source website. For daily news feed reads, the headline and short summary are usually displayed in the feed, and then the user must click on a link to the source website in order to view the full story. So naturally, the site providing the RSS feed will get some traffic from the site using its feed.
This is a reciprocal arrangement whereby the website offering the free RSS feed gets traffic and links pointing to it. The website displaying the RSS feed gets free quality content continually updated, that it can offer to its visitors. If you would like to update your website content daily (or even hourly) without any intervention, this may be a desirable option for you.
