| What is RSS? | intendance

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What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a way of keeping your visitors up to date with the latest news and events on your website. The great advantage of RSS is that favoured content from a number of sites can be aggregated together, then delivered to your desktop or any other platform in a bundle. If you have a mobile telephone that has access to the internet you may be able to connect using the “web feeds” facility in your internet area. A pop up can also appear when you are on the website alerting you that that website has an RSS feed.

If you are using Internet explorer 7.0 (this can be found by clicking Help > About Internet Explorer in your toolbars area, internet explorer version 6 does not have RSS feed reader available)

Then the RSS feed icon will highlight by having a star on it – like the diagram above. This is different for all browsers:

Mozilla

Mozilla alert can be found in the URL box next to the star used for adding favourites

Safari

Safari alert can be found in the URL box

Opera

Opera alert can be found in the URL box

What now?

Once clicking on the RSS feed button, news will automatically be delivered to the RSS reader without you having to visit the website again to learn about the latest news and events. This is useful as you can install many RSS feeds from many different interesting sites and have everything organised in one area, which saves considerable time.

Would this benefit my website?

If you regularly update content on your website, then installing RSS is a cost-effective way making information easily available to users. This can make your website more attractive to users, encouraging repeat traffic.

RSS is becoming ever more popular on the Internet and is being found on many different websites. For this reason, it is always a good idea to have one on your site to keep your users informed.

Are people only using a PC to access your website (this can be checked in your user statistics)?

The internet is becoming widely used on mobiles. As RSS is a free resource it is a great way of keeping your users up to date “on the go!”

How else will this benefit my site?

Creating an RSS feed gives your website fresh content for a user to continually check and see what’s going on in your organisation. Giving your users news articles and then a link (entrance) deeper into your site will invite them to go further into your site. On top of looking after your users, search engines know what content is new and where that content is so that they can easily update their database with your website’s latest news articles. This may help your online rankings.