Get The Most From RSS Technology: How RSS Feeds Are Structured #2

We continue taking a deeper look at how RSS feeds are structured and how you can use that to your advantage in your marketing.

C) RSS Content Item Elements

While the RSS feed elements define and describe an RSS feed on the level of the entire feed, individual content item elements describe and carry the actual information you want to deliver to your audiences.

And if there's any question about it, RSS content items are contained within an RSS feed.

Each content item may then contain some or all of the elements that describe that content item and provide information.

1. RSS Content Item Title

The title of the specific content item that is of course displayed in the RSS Reader and everywhere else where your content appears.

Your content item titles are one of the most important things in your RSS feed, determening whether your readers will actually read the rest of the content or whether the search engines will rank it high enough for you.

Just think of the title as an e-mail message subject line and webpage title in one. The e-mail subject line is what makes your recipient decide whether he's going to read the entire message or not. You need to keep it to the point and give just enough information to make it inviting to read on.

The webpage title has much weight with the search engines, helping you get higher rankings for your content for the keywords you're trying to optimize your webpage for.

The RSS content item title performs both of these functions for you at the same time.

2. RSS Content Item Link

The URL pointing to a webpage on your website where the user can read the entire content of the content item, if you're publishing your RSS feeds in summary format. A "read more" type of destination.

If you're publishing your feeds in full-text format the link can serve for archiving purposes, for example if your customers would either want to clickthrough to your site and then bookmark your content in their internet browser.

Of course, if you don't want to provide a backlink to your site, you don't have to, as the link element is optional. This could come useful if you're using your RSS feed meerly as a direct communicational channel to send a quick message to your customers or anyone else, without also providing that content on your website.

But since most RSS users actually expect to be able to clickthrough it's highly recommended that you always provide the link.

3. RSS Content Item Description

This is where the actual body content of the information you're trying to deliver comes in ? the actual story you're trying to tell.

The description element can either be a short summary, or can contain full-text content of the story, with images and almost everything else (there are some restrictions).

Depending on who you ask, some will say that summary feeds are better, while others will vouch their head for full-text feeds. What you decide for actually depends completely on your business model and what you are trying to achieve with RSS. In short, there are no rules.

Also, you might not even need a description.

--> If you just want to deliver headlines of your latest content and have people clickthrough to your site to find out more you could easily do that. This would usually be useful for syndicating your content to other websites, if you didn't want them to publish anything else but your headline.

--> Or the content you are delivering might not even need a description. For example you could create an RSS feed with the latest stock-market updates where the update would be quickly delivered just using the title element. More on this in later chapters. What you do need to know right now is what kind of content can actually be included if you decide for full-text content.

For starters, if you do it right, standard text formating, such as bolding, works just fine in most RSS Readers, although some may even ignore that. Links within the content and images are also not a problem, although again, some RSS Readers might just ignore them.

But still, most of the new ones won't, so adding some flavor to your full-text content should not be a problem.

If you want to go even further, even tables in content should work in most cases, actually enabling you to post a full e-zine issue right inside of a single RSS feed content item.

The worst problem is that different RSS Readers will display this content in different ways, some even not displaying tables at all.

And finally, if you want to syndicate your content to other websites, they might just want a summary instead of full-text content, so you might need to prepare a summary version of the feed as well.