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RSS feeds: Motivating people and Mobilizing content


I have every reason to be motivated especially when it has been only a few days since I was part of something extraordinary. Without any further ado the event was the football game last Sunday featuring UBC Packers (MBA soccer team -> whom I always represent but occasionally play for). At the game’s halftime the UBC Packers were all but out trailing their seemingly indefatigable opponents by a whopping 5-1. The break gave time for reflection and spurned a metamorphosis that would have inspired a Hollywood movie. A super charged and motivated packers team took the field after the halftime and scored five goals in rapid succession and created more than half a dozen opportunities in the last few minutes before finally losing by a heartbreaking 7-6 (a perfect script for an Academy award winning film). If only soccer was like tennis with three sets, they beat us 5-1 in the first we beat them 5-2 in the second and given our (then) current form we would have inevitably won the match by snatching the third set. The very fact that I played only two minutes in the match went a long way in ensuring the match was close (if you know what I mean).  Jokes apart the team deserves every bit of credit for carefully analyzing its mistakes, making corrective actions and not giving up until the very end.

Now a similar sort of motivation is required when you are dealing with Website optimization and trying to achieve results through Internet Marketing. Optimizing one’s website content so as to appear at the forefront of SERP (Search engine results page) is a time consuming and iterative process which absorbs a lot of resources.  Website or internet analytics do little to help unless companies that manage the websites take time to reflect and take corrective actions based upon the information reflected in the analytics. 

Majority of the content on the World Wide Web is accessed through search engines which employ search engine spiders or robots or crawlers to add content from the websites to their search engine indexes. Search engine spiders follow the links traversing the web from one page to another and from site to another. Thus having inbound links on multiple external sites could actually make it easy for the search engine spiders to locate the website (without manually submitting the website URL for search engine consideration). 

There are several ways how a website can achieve a high rank on the SERP but one of the easiest ways to get a high page rank is to have as many inbound links (content syndication) as possible from external websites (why? See above). RSS is easily one of the more popular ways that the website could end up having its content published on multiple websites. RSS or Really simple syndication or Rich site summary is an XML based format that gives users the option of having updates (regarding events, deadlines, news headlines etc posted on a website) automatically transmitted to them through their desktops or news aggregators or feed reading applications. In a nutshell RSS allows users to follow the updates on a website (which could be as simple as following the comments on a blog) without having to go through the painstaking process of going to the website every day and searching for the updates. RSS feeds could be read using RSS readers such as Google reader and also can be received as email on the outlook. They could also become a part of the bookmarks as shown in Mozilla’s Live Bookmarks below.

(Bookma, How to create a live bookmark)

As you might have guessed by now RSS feeds are a very important SEO technique. Websites which intend to use SEO in order to appear higher up on the SERP could look at including RSS on their websites to generate more inbound links (Scoble,Web Content Syndication: RSS and SEO Strategy).

RSS also plays a great role in assessing a site’s performance through web analytics. While there are many metrics such as page views and visits which assess the frequency of inbound traffic, metrics such as engagement and conversion rates assess whether the website is holding the attention of incoming visitors and encouraging them to complete a particular task. Engagement rate in particular is very relevant to this article. Websites typically measure engagement through degree of engagement (the number of times a customer returns) as well as depth of engagement (the number of pages user sees when he visits a website). Engagement could also be measured by what one customer does on a site such as subscribing to a newsletter, registering on the site or subscribing for a RSS feed. Thus RSS feeds allow you to assess whether your website has succeeded in capturing the attention of the customers which is of paramount importance in the business world (Kaushik,2010).

In conclusion RSS feeds are easy to set up and the diverse set of applications for which they can be used for make them almost irresistible for any website. However they are by no means the only answer to the success of a website on the World Wide Web. There are many ways that a website can reinvent itself over the WWW and we will endeavour to go through many such techniques in the coming weeks. Until then may you stay motivated.

Yours Marketably,
J.J. Chaitanya

References:

1. Bokma, John. Mozilla Firefox: RSS and Live Bookmarks. Retrieved from 
http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html

2. Scoble,Robert. Web Content Syndication: RSS and SEO Strategy. Retrieved from
http://www.press-feed.com/howitworks/syndicatecontent.php

3. Kaushik,Avinash.(2010). The awesome world of clickstream analysis: metrics. In Web Analytics 2.0 (pp. 35-73).Indianapolis, Indiana:Wiley
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