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Adding RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to your PHP shopping cart has many benefits, including its ability to improve your websites online presence, exposure and organic search engine rankings.

What is RSS?

RSS enables the public, and people interested in your industry, product or service, to keep up to date with your website and any new content (such as articles, news, product updates/ announcements) in an automated manner.

Once RSS is set up on your site you can syndicate your content.  Content syndication enables webmasters or anybody with an interest (possibly potential customers) to subscribe to the RSS feed and receive the content in real time on their PC.  All the recipient needs is a “feed reader” or “aggregator” installed on their PC which can be readily downloaded free of charge.

The Benefits of RSS

Distribute content directly to consumers - Visitors to your website and people generally interested in your industry are likely to find and subscribe to your feed, enabling you to reach your consumers via another medium.

No subscription procedure - RSS is becoming more and more popular, partly because it enables users to receive information without the hassle of subscribing and revealing personal information.

Dynamic - If you change your content, your subscriber will know about it straight away.

Attract new visitors - RSS enables users to review content without having to visit a site.  When a user wants to read a full article they are encouraged to visit the source (your website).  It’s rather like email marketing, but with RSS you can…

Bypass spam filters - RSS is delivered directly to your subscriber’s desktop.

Increase search engine visibility - Search engines love websites that provide fresh content on a regular basis.  By adding content frequently you will encourage the search engines to visit your website more and index your keyword-rich content on a regular basis.   It also helps the search engines to recognise your site as being closely themed, and as a result better match your website to related search queries.

Get more back links - Fresh content in the form of news, helpful articles, tutorials etc. attracts back links from related websites - quality, related backlinks = increased search engine visibility.

Any more benefits? - I’m sure they’ll be lots more benefits for both webmasters and users, but it was these few that sprung to mind.   If you can think of any more add them to the bottom!

Getting Started with RSS

Viart PHP shopping cart has RSS integrated, enabling you to simply activate RSS on your website.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 11:49 am and is filed under Shopping Cart Software, PHP Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.