What is RSS Feed

The RSS feed is a decisive element for your blog, even if everyone focuses on other channels to build customer loyalty. Because this is a great truth: you need a united audience, capable of following your ideas over time. The difference between a successful blog and a simple appearance is the audience. In this article, we will give you a complete guide about what RSS feed is.

How to attract people? There are several loyalty channels, and among these, I mention social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn can become the tools to read everything you post on the blog. But in this stream, you can find more information that isn’t necessarily about the blog. The RSS Feed is different; it processes updates dedicated only to publications.

Many bloggers are unaware of the RSS Feed’s power, but longtime authors know the usefulness of this tool. Both to disseminate their content and to organize sources. Here is a guide that will be useful (at least, I hope) to get the most out of RSS Feeds.

What Is RSS Feed?

I take the technical definition from Wikipedia. Content distributors make the Feed available and allow users to subscribe. In other words, the RSS Feed is a signal that updates the user concerning the publication of online content. That is one of the main tools for your inbound marketing activity.

True, users find you through search engines and follow you thanks to your social media marketing activity. However, there is a good percentage of the public who are fond of your work, follow you with passion, and do not want to miss your updates. They are the people who read you, who comment, who share and link your content. In short, they are precious resources. For this, you have to focus on the RSS Feed. This is its usefulness: you can receive the content at your home without bothering to check if something has been published. Just think, following ten blogs is impossible without a feed reader.

What Is RSS Feed Reader: content readers?

RSS feeds need a reader to be followed. I’m talking about programs to sort the different signals that are sent by blogs. There are dozens of alternatives. Many email clients allow you to organize feeds. But I always choose Feedly, a reader designed for those who grind information every day.

Why is Feedly the best RSS Feed reader (in my opinion)? You can organize feeds into folders, add tags, share content on social media without leaving the platform. There are several alternatives to archive, highlight, sort articles. And then Feedly suggests new sources to follow, based on your tastes. Not the best feed reader around?

How to download and follow the Feeds

To follow an RSS Feed, it is possible to use desktop applications, browser plugins, or online programs. I prefer Feedly, which also allows you to share your favorite articles through many social networks. For Firefox users, I recommend Sage or Brief. If you prefer a feed reader to download to your desktop, you can use QuiteRSS, alternatively follow the updates on a mail client. It is possible to receive RSS Feeds on Outlook and Thunderbird.

How to subscribe to RSS Feeds? Once you have clicked on the Feed image, you will find the necessary instructions to add the blog or other updates to your feed reader. You can choose to subscribe to the Feedthrough Feedly, which has taken the legacy of Google Reader, or any reader. Which you can install on a desktop or use online.

How to create the RSS Feed: What is RSS Feed

You do not need to generate it: What Is RSS Feed? It activated with the articles’ publication. Put a post online and start the signal that updates the Feed. To reach it, you must enter the address www.nomedominio.it/feed/. Do you notice anything in particular? It is an incomprehensible page, not very user-friendly, but you can subscribe to Feedburner to make everything more human.

This service belongs to Google, it is in a state of semi-abandonment, but it is the best resource available to optimize the RSS Feed interface. Instead of the code, you have a page with the preview of the posts and a series of buttons to add the signal to the feed readers.

In reality, the universe of the RSS Feed is articulated, WordPress generates different signals. One at random: you can have the RSS Feed of comments from a single post and all blog comments. For what reason? Or when I study the target.

Target refers to a group of potential customers to whom a company wants to sell its products or services. The Target is consequently also …

www.example.com/comments/feed/

www.example.com/post-name/feed/

Different situation. You like a blog, but you don’t want to follow all the sections, only those dedicated to certain topics. So you can do it thanks to the function to extract the RSS Feed of single tags and specific categories. You have many possibilities. You have to choose the ones you prefer. The permalinks of these feeds.

How to improve the RSS Feed

Many see the RSS Feed as a static resource. Not so. There are several solutions to improve the user experience. You can add an icon in the sidebar: here is the RSS Feed, with just one click to subscribe. You can also join the Feedburner mentioned above and use the RSS Feed via email. That’s right, with Feedburner, you can generate a form and ask to leave the email contact. Speaking of reading: is it better to distribute the whole article or just a preview?

This is one of the historical questions. If you leave the entire text in the RSS Feed, you lose a part of the visits because the subscribers do not reach the website. They remain on their program. WordPress allows you to leave only a preview of the RSS Feed, go to the “reading” section of the setting and check the relevant box. But I have always opted for the full version of the post.

How to view RSS Feeds on your site

In most cases, bloggers allow you to read the entire published article, but many authors decide to send only a summary of the contents.

This choice has several reasons: it can be a way to increase clicks to the site, but it can also derive from the author’s need to limit duplicate content that many feed aggregators automatically publish.

Get readers to subscribe and increase visits.

To show readers your Feed, add an orange icon in the header, sidebar, or footer. You can subscribe to an RSS Feed by clicking on this symbol, leading to the code page or Feedburner.

If you need a good icon for your Feed, you can find several Creative Commons licensed resources online. Or do a specific search with Iconfinder.

WordPress SEO by Yoast: What is RSS Feed

Another way to improve your RSS Feed? You need to install WordPress SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (search engine optimization): the set of strategies and practices to position websites or web pages in the organic results of the engines …

By Yoast, one of the essential plugins. And not just because it allows you to improve your blog’s SEO optimization. You can find the RSS Feed item in the general menu to add a link to the post footer. Or a text string. This solution is perfect for inserting a signature and boycotting RSS Feed aggregators’ stealth work (a real plague).

IFTTT: What is RSS Feed

This tool is a gold mine, an endless resource for turning your What Is RSS Feeds? Into something completely different. The IFTTT recipes are at your disposal. You can fold updates to your will. For example, you can suggest Feedly post any content that goes into favorites on Twitter. Or that they have a certain tag. Here you will find a list of all the combinations that involve the Feed.

Why do you need to curate RSS Feeds?

Big bloggers obsessively optimize their feed readers. The reason is clear: this is the main way to find useful sources. To write great articles, I have to know. I have to be updated and deepen topics related to my work. This is why the RSS Feed becomes indispensable.

How to organize everything? If you deal with a single project, you can divide the feed reader into different directories investigating individual aspects. Otherwise, each folder is dedicated to a project. The sector’s official sources would closely monitor Twitter through the lists and tools like Hoot suite and Tweet deck.

How RSS feeds are used.

The first consideration is resolved by clarifying that to use RSS format. It is necessary to use an ad hoc program called RSS aggregator. By copying with the right mouse button the link (the link, the address) of the RSS page in question and then pasting it into the aggregator program, we can finally see its contents clearly and consistently: a list of news! By clicking on each news, you generally have the opportunity to have a summary and a link to the web page that contains it in its entirety.

Therefore, the RSS feed offers the possibility of having a sort of updated index of contents of a site’s news. Rather than going to that site every time to see if there is any news, open the RSS aggregator, and it will be the same to connect to the site and possibly highlight that there is an article, news, in general, a new content on that site that we could go to consult.

Is this information that we need? If we have decided to paste the address of that RSS feed into our RSS aggregator. So in all probability, the various feeds will be interesting for us because we have decided to want them. If we are not anymore, we can at any time delete the respective Feed from our aggregator.

Simple, isn’t it?

In practice, we can have on our aggregator notification of the news on the various sites of our interest (through their respective RSS feeds) and go to the site only if the news intrigues us and interests us at that moment. Getting used to RSS feeds, we may never open the web browser or do it only on particular and selected news.

Let me tell you, it is a nice advantage and a convenience compared to wandering around the various favorite sites in search of any news compared to the last time we consulted them. These novelties can be represented by articles in a weblog, by news from an online newspaper, by interventions in a web forum, or in general by anything “new” that has intervened in the contents of the site of our interest.

The RSS 2.0 format allows not only simple texts and images to be received on the aggregator, but even videos and sounds (made usable using special aggregators such as Apple’s iTunes), thus giving life to new ways of distributing content for the web, known as Podcasting, vodcasting, picture casting, Vlogging, mp3 blogs, etc. But this is another story, and we will be able to tell it on this same network soon;)

So we have to download and install an aggregator ( RSS feeder ) and start pasting the addresses of the RSS feeds provided by our favorite sites.

How to find feeds to follow.

Usually, all websites provide a What Is RSS Feed? To find your favorite blogs’ feeds, all you have to do is go to their home and look for the usual orange RSS icon.

Usually, the icon is placed in the footer or sidebar of the site, so, probably, you could find it there.

By clicking on the icon, you should be taken to a page, which can be of two types: either a page with instructions for subscribing to the RSS feed or a page with incomprehensible text strings.

In the first case, there will probably be a link on the page. That you can copy and paste into your feed reader.

In the second case, the link to copy and paste will be the URL of the page itself, which is the one you find in the address bar of your browser.

In both cases, the links you copied refer to a page automatically generated by a script. That creates the RSS feed of the website you visited.

Now, to start reading this Feed, all you have to do is paste the link you just copied into a feed reader (or feed reader, very often abbreviated to “feeder”).

Feed readers: What is RSS Feed

An RSS feeder is nothing more than an application or website that takes care of “aggregating” the RSS feeds that a user decides to subscribe to.

In fact, within a feeder, the user can decide to subscribe to hundreds of feeds, the news of which will all be shown on the same page (usually divided into folders, categories, or tags), without therefore having to disturb the user and make it browse hundreds of different websites.

There are many feed readers around the web. I use Feedly, with which I am very comfortable, and which allows, unlike others, to group the various feeds into folders or to discover feeds similar to those we decide to subscribe to, simply through a search bar.