Send Your RSS Feed Back to School
How are your RSS feeds' grades? RSS has become
a very popular, very useful tool to help manage the incredible amount
of content available on the Internet today. RSS has been used to
condense headlines and articles into brief snippets that allows
the reader to quickly scan through many headlines or articles for
the content that they are most interested in. The 'pull' of RSS
versus the 'push' of e-mail allows the user to get just the information
they want and has made RSS very successful. And in the success of
RSS also lies the problem. There are so many RSS Feeds available
that finding high quality RSS feeds has become difficult. To help
solve this issue you need to have your RSS feed graded and certified.
A standardized grading system helps to recognize the best attributes
across feeds and allows readers to better use and understand the
grading system. One such grading system is offered Free from Feedage.com.
The grading system looks at many different aspects of the RSS feed
and grades them against historical data that shows what attributes
are critical to having readers subscribe to your RSS feed.
Benefit to content providers:
By having your RSS Feeds graded and certified content
providers can improve the probability that readers will subscribe
to their RSS Feed. Like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), RSS grading
helps you to identify what qualities readers are looking for and
helps to supply RSS Feeds that meet that criteria. Readers are very
finicky. Too many words and you might lose them, too few and they
might not understand. By having your Feeds graded and optimizing
them to the highest grade you are optimizing your chances of having
your RSS Feed and the content behind it read and subscribed to.
By having your Feed certified you are giving the readers of your
Feeds a standardized, easy-to-understand system to show how your
Feed is of the highest quality.
Benefit to content
readers:
Graded and certified Feeds are higher quality Feeds,
meeting the many factors that are critical to you, the reader. Factors
like how recent was the Feed published, how many words and items
are in the Feed. Using a standardized grading system allows users
to identify and subscribe to Feeds from across the Internet. Grading
helps the reader to see through the mounds of RSS Feeds that either
have too much content or too little. Quickly skip out-of-date and
'junk' RSS Feeds and find quality content!
The life expectancy
of a grade:
RSS Feeds are dynamic, changing frequently as the
world around us changes. How can you grade a Feed that will change
in the near future? This does make it more difficult to grade, but
not impossible. Given that most RSS Feeds are created through the
use of dynamic tools, the general constraints of the Feed remains
the same. If a blog outputs the entire body of an article as the
description, it will likely do this every time the Feed is generated.
If you create your RSS Feed with a simple title like "My Blog"
then very likely every time the RSS Feed is generated the title
will not be very useful. On the other hand, if you generate an RSS
Feed that has enough detail to catch the reader but not so much
to overwhelm them, the tool that is creating the RSS Feed is of
high quality and will produce high quality Feeds.
About the author:
Mark Savoca is the owner of Feedage.com.
Feedage is a free, fully categorized RSS directory.
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