SEO Tycoon

**jamestl2** · 06-22-2007, 03:17 PM

I currently have a web site that uses blog-style formatting but it is not technically a blog.

I was told that my site could improve greatly with RSS feeds. I looked on sites such as wikipedia and browsed others, but couldn’t find the answers.

I was just wondering if someone could explain to me, in a nutshell, what exactly RSS does?
Is it just like another form of backlinks or directories, where you just submit it to a bunch of other blogs?
Are you suppose to assign RSS to posts / entries?
How does it help improve sites? Does it affect your power with search engines, ranking in google, etc.?

Thanks alot

**Learning Newbie** · 06-22-2007, 04:54 PM

I think they meant it will improve your site, make it better, make users like it more, instead of improve your site's Google or Alexa rank. A good site tends to naturally rank better because more people use it, and more people create links to it in discussions and blogosphere conversations. That happens slowly, and over time, aka organically.

RSS is Really Simple Syndication. There are different programs that will read RSS feeds to find new things you've published. By my name, notice my "latest blog post" and think about how this web site knows what I did recently on Blogger?

**jamestl2** · 06-22-2007, 05:20 PM

Alright thanks,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

I think they meant it will improve your site, make it better, make users like it more, instead of improve your site's Google or Alexa rank. A good site tends to naturally rank better because more people use it, and more people create links to it in discussions and blogosphere conversations. That happens slowly, and over time, aka organically.?

Are you saying it's added to the user interface, or something like design flow of the site, have it easier for visitors to use, etc.

Is it similar to an internal link that you just place on your blog as if with regular code?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

RSS is Really Simple Syndication. There are different programs that will read RSS feeds to find new things you've published.

So are these "programs" available on the net, like downloaded from various sites, or are they already in a design program (For example, I use wordpress).

And is the RSS itself a program, like something similar to a googlebot that you just give orders to?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

By my name, notice my "latest blog post" and think about how this web site knows what I did recently on Blogger?

Is webmaster-talk like "connected" to yours using an RSS feed, and it just reads your latest blog post?

If so then how does it know what to read, or does it have various functions, which depend on how "you" want other particular sites to read your entries?

Or do those other sites assign what it wants to read from your site (Because this example is a forum entry)?

......If I'm understanding RSS correctly

**Learning Newbie** · 06-22-2007, 05:32 PM

RSS isn't software, it's a particular XML format. I don't think explaining it is going to work, so visit this link and have a look for yourself: http://alexandersarchive.blogspot.co.../posts/default and http://alexandersarchive.blogspot.co...efault?alt=rss really it's the second one you want to check out. I'm not just dropping links to spam you, I think if you look at the XML code it will help you to understand, seeing a visual.

RSS readers are programs. They're online, desktop, available on demand or for download, from Google, from Yahoo, part of FireFox, directly in your email, really all over the place, in all kinds of different formats. Depends on what the user finds most convenient and comfortable. Webmaster-Talk happens to have a custom one that checks my blog feed when I log in here, and automatically knows what the title and URL to my latest post are.

**jamestl2** · 06-22-2007, 06:22 PM

So in those two links, the second one uses the RSS feed and the other doesn't?

Is that all the RSS feed does, just provides a list of post titles (or is this just an example as in your preffered method)?

Also, do site owners such as us "send" out the feed to other sites, or do they come to visit our website and "subscribe" to it (as that is what it offers in the first link)?

If the "subscription" is true, then is the second link essentially what others would "get" on their sites? (as both of those links are from the same site)

......Sorry for all the questions

**Learning Newbie** · 06-22-2007, 06:51 PM

The first is atom, which is an html enabled interface, and the second is raw RSS/XML. But I must have done something wrong, because they're both taking me to what looks like the same page. ****, this was a problem to set up, I couldn't figure it out for months, and now when I need to find the link to the XML version, I can't.

Anyway, this site has two options, one where you can ping the site when you make a new blog post and the other where whenever you log in, it'll go to your RSS URL and parse that to find the latest post. RSS is a very specific type of XML, so all RSS readers know how to parse it, whether the reader is in my email, on this site, on a Office app, or something else. It's a lot like requesting just any web page, except when you do that, it could be marked up in any format, and you need a full blown browser to render the page.

While you can ping out from your site, that's something other than RSS, RSS is about making a very easy way for other places to come and get your content and deliver it in other ways. At this web site, it grabs my latest post title and URL and creates a link to it by my name. In gmail, above my inbox there's a line where it shows a news headline pulled at random from RSS feeds of different sites I go to. Again it shows the title and when I click it takes me there.

Those are all links that will do absolutely nothing for SERPs but bring in more traffic, and help users see content that interests them when they're in the mood for it.

**jamestl2** · 07:15 PM

Thanks for all the information about it, and I have been trying to figure out how exactly to set this up over the past few days.

Should I just have a "subscribe to this site" link on my homepage?

Does RSS have its own special creator, as in how I get this on my site? (I use wordpress, and it mentions RSS in the widget section, but I'm not sure what to do with that.)

Also, does it show only the latest post? Or are there a multitude of settings to choose from when configuring it for others to subscribe to?

And can only other blogs subscribe to it, or anybody?

EDIT: I also wanted to know what page I would have subscribed because my site has different categories on different pages.