Today Upskill are bringing you a brief rundown of RSS and what it can do for you.

Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication is a venerable old technology (by internet standards at least) for keeping track of the vast quantity of info on the web. First pitched back in 1995, it has stumbled and stuttered now and then but has rallied each time and seems stronger than ever today. Presumably because the concept is so helpful. The internet is, after all, quite a big place.

So what does it do?

RSS is in essence an aggregating technology: you pick a feed reader (Feedly, Inoreader etc.), subscribe to the sites that interest you and it draws all their updates together in one place for you. No more flicking through your sites individually checking for new content. It’s a wonderful time saver!
In terms of businesses, setting up a stream for yourself is an excellent way to stay up to date on developments in your industry, follow developing news stories that might impact you and, of course, track what the competition are up to.

RSS and your clients

As you can see, it’s clearly a quality of life improvement for yourself and your web browsing habits. But how can you leverage this tech to further your business goals?

Most obviously – it helps build trust in your expertise through frequent contact with your updates and articles. These can’t be missed or slip through the cracks when your content is delivered straight to their feed. With the effort you’re putting into those it’s great to know people are seeing them eh? On top of this guaranteed readership, you have the added bonus of their social media audience. What’s a person’s automatic reaction nowadays on reading something cool, interesting or noteworthy? ‘Share’! A good series of articles can see a dramatic increase in readership. With that in mind it is unsurprising that studies have repeatedly demonstrated a major drop off in site traffic when support for the RSS feed is dropped.

Want some more good news? Setting up an RSS feed for your clients won’t entail any extra work on your part (hooray!). WordPress sites automatically come with an RSS option while the content updates you’ll need to populate a feed should already be in production – the informative, SEO’d articles that are currently being used to boost your organic search rank.

Based on statistics from BuiltWith, almost half of the top 10k websites publish an RSS feed and this proportion has has been climbing steadily over the last 8 years. Certain major companies (news sites typically) have dropped support for RSS in recent years in an effort to keep their walled gardens secure but for SMBs the pros far outweigh the cons. Get out there and aggregate!