All about RSS

What is RSS?
RSS is "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", it’s a method of distributing links to content in your web site that you'd like others to use. In other words RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works for example blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format.
Generally RSS feed is applied to those webpages whose content gets updated frequently, so that whenever there is a change in your website those who have subscribed to your rss feed will get to know.

How to manually create rss feed:
Start with creating a new xml file, now add new item in this file by following this architecture
Title
Description
Link

For example in your website you have an articles webpage which is constantly updated, then you can put rss feed for that page by constructing rss-feed.xml file.
Now in this file suppose you have 10 articles listed, in that the first article is on
Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting
Which is stored at the location
http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/linkbaiting.htm
and whose description is
Linkbating is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you...
In your xml file the first item could be added like this
 < item>
< title >Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting < /title>
< link >http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/linkbaiting.htm < /link>
< description > Linkbaiting is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you... < /description >
< /item >
Similarly the other items of that webpage (other 9 articles with short description and link) could be added as other items. For example if the second article is on search engine optimization, then it could be added as
< item>
< title> Search engine optimization < /title>
< link>http://www.himshilp.com/seo-article/search-engine-optimization.htm< /link>
< description> SEO is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site... < /description>
< /item>
Similarly the other 8 items could be created. Since RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the W3C website. We need to insert this code
< ?xml version="1.0"?>
In any RSS document at the top level, there should be a element, with a mandatory attribute named version which specifies the version of RSS that the document conforms to. Here we are using the version attribute 2.0.
< rss version="2.0">

Subordinate to the element is a single element, that contains information about the channel (metadata) and its contents.
< ?xml version="1.0"?>
< rss version="2.0">
< channel>
< item >
< title>Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting< /title>
< link>http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/linkbaiting.htm< /link>
< description>Linkbating is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you... < /description>
< /item>
< item>
< title> Search engine optimization < /title>
< link>http://www.himshilp.com/seo-article/search-engine-optimization.htm< /link>
< description> SEO is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site... < /description>
< /item>
< /channel>
< /rss>
Notice that we have closed the channel and rss tags in the end.
As indicated before since its an xml file it has to be saved as rss-feed.xml.
After defining all the items i.e. all 10 articles in this case we have to define our webpage as a channel.
The same tags title, description and link of your webpage has to be inserted. Now the complete file will be like this

< ?xml version="1.0"?>
< rss version="2.0">
< channel>
< title>SEO Article, SEO Blog, SEM Tips, PPC Article, Blog, Internet Marketing< /title> < link>http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/seo-articles.htm< /link> < description>Himshilp: Best SEO Company in India. Learn more about ethical search engine optimization techniques from our SEO Article, PPC Blog & Internet Marketing Tips Section. Contact for further details.< /description>

< item>
< title>Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting< /title>
< link>http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/linkbaiting.htm< /link>
< description>Linkbating is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you... < /description>
< /item>
< item>
< title> Search engine optimization < /title>
< link>http://www.himshilp.com/seo-article/search-engine-optimization.htm< /link>
< description> SEO is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly. This dramatically increases the traffic to the web site... < /description>
< /item>
< /channel>
< /rss>
After doing this make hyperlink (rss –feed) articles page and link that hyperlink to the xml file(rss-feed.xml).
Validating The File
Once you are done with this process, it’s the time to check whether your file is valid or not. Either you can use feed validator service or just type the url of this particular feed in the address box, if everything is fine you will get to see the xml file otherwise you have to fix the errors.
Now its time to get Syndicated
Since your file is validated you can now submit your feed to various rss directories to get your feed listed. Which will help you to get more leverage of your articles in this case.
Summary:
RSS Feed is one of the best ways to market the information on a website without putting much effort. So it could also be used as one of the internet marketing strategy. Once the feeds on your website are updated, every subscriber automatically gets the update of new information on the site.
Also with rss you can also circulate your content to your networks of social networking websites. Its works amazingly, as rss helps you generate traffic to your website, which in turn helps you getting good backlinks , which helps in getting good ranking in Search engines, which is the major aspect of SEO.

RSS feed is just a link created on any webpage whose content gets updated frequently, so that whosoever subscribed to your rss feed will get notified whenever there is a change in that particular webpage. So obviously by providing RSS feed in your webpage you are increasing your webpage's visibility among others and in turn traffic of your website which is the key aspect of any SEO program.
This is my take. what is yours feel free to share with us.