RSS feeds and online visibility
RSS is an acronym of Real Site Syndication, these XML based feeds summarize the content of a web page and are widely used in blog scripts. Web feed search engines and news reader type of applications becoming more and more popular RSS feed is the way to go for many search engine marketing professionals.
Obviously RSS feeds can deliver large amount of traffic to a website that would not even stand close to a top ranking on major search engines on a particular subject. The tremendous growth of the web log community popularized XML feed to an extreme so regular news based websites seem to be delivered with a decreasing traffic for the past couple of years.
This is not to mention the large number of website where you can post a link to your blog and therefore obtain a larger overall visibility and even in the long run higher rankings in the search engines result pages.
For those who would like to create their own RSS based feed to improve their online marketing the first step would be either to convert your WebPages into the compliant XML based format using a hand coded solution or preferably a software based solution or use an out of the box type of script working such as a blog and delivering automatically a real site syndication version of your site for you.
As an increased number of content is available now in online major search engines would recognize RSS feed as an XML version of a page and eventually display it as an optional browsing option on their result pages.
However it appears that Google for example would not recognize at all RSS feeds for some reason that probably has more to do with a business model than real technical capabilities. Major search engine Yahoo displays XML content in its result but (as usual: Yahoo so far always had indexing problems) has very hard time indexing extensible markup language based content on very regular basis. Microsoft MSN search is actually preparing its RSS feed based search engine and should disclose it to the public in a few months. Both Yahoo and MSN give the option respectively in My Yahoo and MSN spaces to integrate any XML based content in your personal pages which extends greatly the opportunities for business delivering quality content to develop a close relationship with their targeted audience.
It is for now probably to early to talk about some kind of revolution but RSS definitely redefines ways of communication online and may greatly improve an overall website visibility.