The Importance of RSS Feeds

Have you noticed the orange icon above? You might already have seen this icon in many other sites. This icon is the universally recognized standard symbol of RSS feeds. The acronym, RSS, stands for "really simple syndication." RSS feeds allow the contents of sites or blogs to be automatically published in other sites or feed readers without the need for manually posting the contents.



For instance, if your blog is subscribed to MyBlogLog, the contents of your blog are partially displayed on this site. This is made possible by the RSS feeds of your blog site. The RSS feeds are also responsible for allowing your site to be easily indexed by search engines such as Google.



If you are using Blogger/Blogspot services, the default RSS feed of your blog is called "Atom." Try clicking the "Atom" link found at the bottom-most part of the post body of your blog. Clicking the said link will open a new page that displays the contents of your blog, minus the widgets and layout design. This page is known as the RSS feed page. This page is used by other sites and RSS readers to dispaly the contents of your blog. Feed aggregators such as Technorati will not be able to index and display the contents of your blogsite without the RSS feeds.

One way of increasing the web visibiltiy and web traffic of you site is to register your blogsite to different RSS readers. However, this is very inconvenient and time-consuming. The best option would be to simply redirect your feeds to Feed Burner. This site consolidates all other RSS feeds and readers into one convenient feed. To redirect all the feeds of your blog to Feed Burner, you must first register and follow the instructions therein.

After, registering your site, you will get a new RSS feed URL. You have to paste this URL address onto the "site feed box" of your Blogger/Blogspot template. To do this, go to Settings-Site Feed tab and paste the new RSS feed URL of your site to the corresponding box as shown below.



Now you are done. All your feeds will now be redirected to Feed Burner. Try exploring your Feed Burner account to customize the settings and optimize your blog.