FREE RSS Tips

I just signed up over at Odiogo for their RSS to audio service. The good thing is it’s all free (but there is advertising within the audio). You may have noticed a new icon within each post here, that says “listen now”. That’s courtesy of Odiogo’s Wordpress plugin. It doesn’t do too bad at translating text to audio. Now that I’ve essentially created a podcast (audio feed), I have even more places I can submit that to online. Audio directories! More to come on that later…

Aren’t there enough acronyms on the web already? To top that all off, along comes one that we can’t even agree on a single meaning for. Introducing… RSS. So what does RSS stand for then?

Really Simple Syndication
Rich Site Summary
RDF Site Summary

Yep it stands for all of the above. That’s because RSS has evolved over the years with various versions. The latest version RSS 2.0 is referred to as Really Simple Syndication. Most RSS readers and aggregators are compatible with the various versions of RSS, so for the average person there isn’t much to worry about.

For those of you who understand the basics of RSS, you might be wondering what exactly to DO with your RSS feed. Do you let people know about it somehow? Is there some type of advertising you need to do?

Fortunately for us, RSS is quickly becoming very popular online. So popular in fact that there are online RSS aggregators popping up all over the place. RSS aggregators are also known as online RSS readers. A place you can visit to subscribe to many external RSS feeds and keep up to date with them.

These online RSS readers (aggregators) allow us to submit our RSS feeds to their directories. That means more exposure for your content, to the thousands of people that visit those aggregators every day. But there are also two other important points. Having your RSS feed linked within the major RSS aggregator sites provides backlinks and ability to rank in the search engines.

Bottom line is - go submit your RSS feeds to the major online aggregators! You only have to do it one time. Each time you update content on your site, your feed automatically gets updated. This gets filtered to the aggregators that you submit your feed to - so on the aggregator sites, your feed is automatically updated.

One of the most popular online RSS aggregators is FeedAgg. If you only submit your RSS feeds to that one site, you’ll be doing yourself a great service. Many people find that simply by submitting their RSS feeds to FeedAgg, they will gain higher rankings in the search engines (for their FeedAgg link - which points to their RSS feed).

Other popular RSS aggregators include:

http://www.feedagg.com
http://www.feedage.com
http://www.feedraider.com
http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php
http://www.feeds4all.com/NewFeed.aspx
http://feedfury.com/

There are many, many more popular aggregators, a more robust list is included in my free RSS guide. To receive that simply enter your name and email in the above form.

Now you can manually submit your RSS feeds to all of these directories, or you can use automated software. One such software that I use on a regular basis is Peter Drew’s BadAss RSS. I’ve recently switched to a more robust software though, also created by Peter Drew. It’s called Brute Force SEO and does a heck of a lot more than merely submitting your RSS feeds to tons of aggregator sites.

Did you know the default out-of-the-box Wordpress blog has several RSS feeds? You can access your feed through several RSS formats and urls.

Try it out:

http://www.example.com/?feed=rss
http://www.example.com/?feed=rss2
http://www.example.com/?feed=rdf
http://www.example.com/?feed=atom

Just replace “www.example.com” with the url to your blog.

The same feeds above can be reached by using these urls as well, if you are using custom permalinks:

http://www.example.com/feed/rss
http://www.example.com/feed/rss2
http://www.example.com/feed/rdf
http://www.example.com/feed/atom

You can even get individual RSS feeds based on each category in your blog:

http://www.example.com/category/specialupdates/feed

Just replace “specialupdates” with the name of your category. In all examples above, just replace “www.example.com” with the url to your blog.

So what are all these RSS formats (rss, rss2, rdf, atom)? That will be explained in a more advanced post, but for now you should be aware that not all Wordpress themes will utilize every feed type. Most feed readers can recognize rss, rss2 and atom.

So what exactly is RSS? You’ve probably heard about it, but might not fully understand what it means. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. The word “syndicate” means to publish simultaneously. For example, an author who writes a column might get their column syndicated across several newspapers.

The term you’ll typically come across is “RSS feed”. It’s called a feed because it feeds your content into “feed readers”, similar to syndicating your content across several readers or visitors. But it’s really a document. An RSS document is created in a language called XML - short for Extensible Markup Language. It might sound confusing, but so does the meaning of HTML - Hypertext Markup Language.

The good thing is, you normally don’t need to know how to create an RSS feed or document. Many sites already create this for you. For example, if you have a Wordpress blog, your RSS feed is automatically updated and made available.

If your site provides an RSS feed, your visitors can subscribe to that feed. You can compare this to signing up to someone’s email list to keep updated on their products or services. You subscribe to the email list and this way, emails are delivered to your inbox.

The only difference with RSS feeds is:

• subscribers use a feed reader or online feed aggregator to view your RSS feed items
• you don’t have to do anything extra to update your RSS feed except continue to post content to your website.

You can increase traffic to your website by submitting your RSS feed to several “feed readers”. These sites are typically referred to as feed aggregators. Some common ones include Technorati, FeedSubmitter, FeedRaider, Yahoo! Feeds and Feeds4All. Those are just a few to give you an idea.