What You Need To Know Before Landing On The Blog World: Stick To The Topic

As far as blogging is concerned, you are invited to write about anything you wish to. But it is necessary that the contents of items in the blog should all relate to a general theme. The majority of your readers are keen about the contents that relate to a specific defined theme or loosely defined area of interest. So first decide the theme, define it and then stick to it. Once you are satisfied, you have started a hot topic, leave the rest to the other bloggers who are left with but the opportunity to weave interesting threads of contents, which are sure to gain momentum with more number of encouraging bloggers.

While choosing the topic, go for the hot ones which would be of much interest to many. Discussing about affairs which were on the news some months ago may turn down your readers. If you want to keep your blogs alive and expect good response, select a hot topic. Most of the bloggers may not prefer discussing ‘history’ of events considering it a waste of time. This in turn will be questioning the value of your columns.

RSS Could Improve Our Search Engine Rankings

RSS has been documented to bring a great impact on the traditional search engine rankings. Even sites supposedly with low traffic are pushed to first-page sites positions for their key search engine keywords and phrases after switching over to RSS feeds. This is due to the fact that RSS feeds increases the number of inbound links to the site, the specific RSS feed format, and tight RSS feed focus and RSS-specific search engine strategies. These provide the search engines with strong and focused content streams from publisher’s website. RSS publishers get more attention by search engines and directories since RSS contents are still scarce.

RSS Agregator

RSS aggregator or reader is a software that collects content from many websites that publish new content regularly provide a list of headlines of the latest content. In addition to displaying these headlines on their own websites, it is very common for publishers to make them available for syndication, so that other websites or applications can also include their headlines. When a website has an RSS feed, it is said to be “syndicated”.

The RSS aggregators come in many different forms and flavors. The most popular are desktop applications and RSS aggregation web services. In the case of desktop RSS aggregators, end-users have to download them to their computers and install them there. In RSS aggregation web services the users can create their own accounts and then use those websites to view RSS content directly from their Web browsers.

When any new content item is modified or updated in the RSS feed, the user is notified of that through his RSS aggregator. The content is also immediately available to him, without having to face any SPAM filters and other obstacles on the way.

RSS being essentially a pull-content delivery channel. In order to receive content via RSS the end-users need to subscribe to the RSS feeds they desire. Content cannot be delivered to people who have not granted permission to be contacted by you. At the same time, the user who had given permission once can revoke it instantly, taking away your capability of communicating to them.

RSS Feed

With RSS feeds we can deliver the RSS content. RSS stands for either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS files look a lot like HTML code. RSS files (which are also called RSS feeds or channels) simply contain a list of items. Usually, each item contains a title, summary, and a link to a URL.

The main components of a RSS feed are channel (A channel is the total collection of items you wish to highlight in your site. There is exactly one channel per RSS file), item (Item is a single thing you wish to highlight from your site) and RDF (RDF is the mother specification of RSS).
We should provide an RSS feed if we want to distribute our information to a vast and fast-growing community of users, who are more interested in knowing about our topic. In general, people who write articles or publish newsletters benefit the most. Most blog software allows us to offer RSS feed of the blog posts. We can also offer our press releases through an RSS feed. In general, anything that we publish frequently can be offered as an RSS feed.

RSS as A Marketing Tool

RSS can be very useful as a marketing tool. RSS is simple to use as publishing tool for marketers and publishers and has the versatility allowing contents to be delivered to the target users and other “content consumers”. These criteria enhance the marketers and publishers to achieve their business goals. RSS has ability to influence the entire key internet marketing elements, especially content delivery to end-users and improving search engine rankings. RSS is unique in the way it forces marketers to become more relevant and sensitive to the needs of their target audiences.

RSS is already used by the majority of the reputable media sites, by a satisfactory number of corporations and by almost “all” bloggers. RSS is fast becoming the de-facto standard for pull-based information delivery because the user can anonymously subscribe to your feed, judge your content and stay subscribed as long as he wants to. He can unsubscribe at will, without any problems and delays. RSS also eliminates a large part of the external noise and shortcomings of other delivery channels .In addition, RSS content can be delivered to other websites; such as search engines, specialized RSS directories, special content aggregation sites and other site types.

An Introduction About RSS Document

An RSS document is made up of ‘items’, comprising a title, a link to the content and a description of that item. For instance, for a news article, the title will be like a headline, the link will take readers to the news article and the description will summarize the news they’ll find on clicking the link to visit your site. The items are grouped into a ‘channel’ or ‘feed’. This is the name you assign to your ongoing series of RSS documents.

RSS documents are created in XML, or Extensible Markup Language, which is fast becoming the markup language for the Web. HTML tags instruct the browser how to display content (fonts, images or otherwise); XML tags define the nature of the information.

The XML file can be updated manually or by using modules to increase the speed of the process. The feed is prepared by transforming the RSS file into HTML. A scripting command named server-side include is used to place the content on the Web page as a template. Once the module has been developed, it’s really just a matter of sitting back and letting the content stream in.

The files can be accessed from our own Web site or by registering our feed with content aggregators, or sites that list various feeds. Individual RSS readers can subscribe directly to our feeds through these options. Other Web sites can also do the same, bringing more hits to our content. And we, as a content manager, can subscribe to other sites’ or aggregators’ feeds as well. This will provide our site visitors with news and material that we may not have the time to develop.

Briefly About RSS

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a very cost effective method to bring your information to your clients and ‘to-be-clients’. It is a viable alternative to produce effective solutions to your numerous business needs. RSS has a lot of advantages over the other existing methods, to turn it into the most sought-after, powerful, influential tool, which will take over the Internet world very soon, if understood fully and properly. It is basically a ‘push-based’ communication method, which can be published and subscribed to easily. It can be explained as a file containing the latest information and accessed by subscribers who are interested.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It can be simply explained as a file containing the latest headlines, which can be published and subscribed to easily. Major players such as Macromedia, Macromedia, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and IDC have begun going in for RSS, not for just effective communication, but also for augmenting visibility of their websites, thus increasing traffic to their sites.

We can define RSS more technically as a lightweight, topical, metadata and syndication format.

• Lightweight. This is a very important feature looked upon by many users as one of the reasons to prefer RSS tool. RSS is very small, in the sense – it requires less space, usually less than a hundred kilobytes of space. RSS files are XML documents, which can be written using any text editor (Word, notepad, etc) very easily.
• Topical. RSS highlights what you think is important on your page and that would be the contents seen by the other readers. For example, if you are a news organization, you may want to focus on the latest headlines, if you are a businessman you may want to showcase about your products or if you are a publisher you may want to throw light on your latest book releases.
• Metadata. Metadata is the information about your data. You can embed details about your data in your RSS file. For example, who wrote the article you are highlighting or how often your RSS file will be read to see if you have added any information.
• Syndication. As we have already seen that it is to present a snapshot, in a specified formatted file, of what you consider most important about your site at the moment.