What are RSS feeds?

Do you know how to use an RSS feed or even what one is? If not, this little tutorial will be quite an eye opener for you. I just love the way these guys did this tutorial on RSS.

If you would like to start using an RSS reader you can sign-up for a free one at Google: http://www.google.com/reader

RSS feeds can also be used on your website to post headines and article from other websites. It is a great way to keep your site fresh and updated without having to write any content.

Almost all of the sites we build provide your users with RSS feeds to follow the changes on your site. We can even include services such as FeedBurner to keep people notified of changes to your site via email.

Benefits of providing visitors an RSS feed on your website:

• Allows other to monitor your site for changes (via a reader or email)
• Allows others to republish headlines or partial articles to help create more backlinks to your site (a form of free advertising)
• Uses ‘pinging’ technology which alerts various websites (Technorati, Webblogs, Bloglines, etc) when changes to your site have been made, and then in turn index the entry on their site thus creating a searchable article and backlink

There are so many great applications and tools out there today, and we are going to start writing about some of these to show you how you can benefit from them.