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 Quickly skip out-of-date and 'junk' RSS Feeds and find quality content!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.

Mark Savoca is the owner of Feedage.com Feedage is a free, fully categorized RSS directory. Feedage offers a FREE RSS Inspector

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