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RSS is an acronym that stands for, well, depending on who you ask, Really Simple Syndication, or Remote Site Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, and there are others. The name is not important, what's significant is that using an RSS feed is an easy way to distribute your news with the added bonus of increasing traffic to your website.

Without getting too technical, RSS is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for your site. Originating in 1997, RSS has evolved into a popular means of sharing content between sites. Displaying headlines and other reverse-chronologically ordered information from other websites provides additional content to your readers.

But, it's not just for news. Nearly anything that can be broken down into distinct items can be syndicated via RSS: currency exchange rates; current stock market updates; blogs or journal type sites; forums; even the revision history of a book. Once you have data in a standardized format, new forms of content distribution channels are only limited by your imagination.

Recently, Pop Art has added an RSS feed to yourselffitness.com's website. This channel displays the site's most current forum headlines on the homepage. When users respond to the various fitness forums, the homepage is automatically updated with a link to the latest, approved message. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

Using RSS-aware programs, called news aggregators or newsreaders, sites can get headlines and summaries that link to the web pages where the stories or data originate. News aggregators are very popular in the weblogging community, as they allow users to be able to keep up with their favorite weblogs by checking the RSS feeds and displaying the new items.

Want more traffic?

Thousands of websites today use RSS to drive traffic to their sites. As Search Engine Positioning analytics dictate, the sites with the most back links (a backlink is a link back to the page or one of the pages that currently link to the page you're using) win, and those with the freshest content also win. RSS creates a win-win situation by keeping your content fresh with new information getting published to your site daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, even second-by-second. Not only does the site content remain fresh on its own but, RSS feeds create summary links that redirect viewers to the full content of the item; coupled together, fresh content with back links creates the best recipe for traffic bulge.

If you have questions about or are interested in adding an RSS component to your website, please call Pop Art sales at (503) 242-4292 ext. 111.