RSS feeds can be an easy way for your readers to stay in touch with your updates – a very important tool for online marketing. We see these RSS buttons everywhere, but are you making the most out of your website design by including these important features? This article looks at RSS, content distribution and SEO.

RSS feeds are very simple to use and have really changed the way we search for content, and that means the way we improve our online marketing. If you have a frequently updated website or blog, your users will find them incredibly useful. Let’s take a closer look at what they are.

• What does RSS stand for? RSS actually stands for Rich Site Summary, but is often expanded as Really Simple Syndication. They are a family of webfeed formats normally used to publish online work that is frequently updated. They will keep your blog, video, audio and other content updates in a standard format for those who read your content and want to keep reading it in the future. Instead of having to go back and see if you have updated your information, by subscribing to your RSS feed, your viewers will get notifications when your content is updated.
• Feed Reader. To get these feeds, you will need to get a tool which is called a Feed Reader. It is the tool that goes back to those sites and constantly checks if those sites have been updated. This is normally a plug-in for your browser. You will have the choice to auto-detect where there is a RSS feed available on the site, and where to view it. This can save you a lot of time if you are using time each day looking at sites to see whether content has been updated. Other feed readers come in the form of a standalone package.
• How do I put RSS feed on my site. Unless you know a little about coding a website you will need to code a RSS file for your site. The advantage of many website builders and particularly blogging sites like WordPress is, they will actually do all of this for you.
• Advantages. There are obvious advantages to having an RSS feed on your site. Those who have become interested in your blog will be automatically advised when you have uploaded a new entry.
• Disadvantages. RSS feeds do have some disadvantages for users. They can really eat up bandwidth in the background; you can lose some history because if you miss an update it might be replaced by the latest feed and some feed readers only show a cryptic snippet of the content, which may not lend itself well in getting your readers to go and read your site.

Make it Easy to Find. As always, you want to get the most out of your online marketing efforts, and your RSS feeds with expert help from those who really know search engine optimisation. For those just starting you will find them easy to use and adapt to a blog, but for those with e-commerce sites and more complicated issues, you might need some professional help.