So maybe you have heard about Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and seen the RSS symbol on websites?

Perhaps you have even used it to catch up on your daily news from your favorite websites. Great free resources like the Google Reader makes it a breeze to keep up with the latest happenings on topics of interest to you.

But there is another side to RSS I would like to discuss with you today, and that's RSS syndication also known as RSS submission which is the process of using this technology to get better page rankings in the search engines and increase web traffic to your website.

I am going to suggest to you that this is a vital process for you to understand and start using as the vast majority of your competition (other web sites) are not leveraging this technology. So using feed submission is a great way to assist you in leapfrogging your competition.

But lets take a step back and understand how the process works. Firstly in order to use RSS like this, you need an RSS feed.

Think of an RSS feed as just a description of one or more pages on a website. It's a standard format that can be read by literally millions of programs on the internet.

You see computers being what they are, they cannot understand a particular piece of information unless they understand the structure. Because RSS is a documented format, it means all these programs that use RSS can then understand how to read an RSS feed, and how to process the contents in the file.

Many websites have this technology built in. If you are running a wordpress blog you automatically have this technology built in to every post you make on the website.

And even if your using a static website without RSS feeds, you can invest in an inexpensive RSS script to product RSS feeds for your website.

As I mentioned previously RSS technology has mainly been used to retrieve information for a group of websites (news, new content, etc). It has not really been used to assist you in getting visitors to your website or ranking better in google.

But new exciting software is coming out to leverage the power of RSS to get the word out about your website.

Entire websites are developed and being developed as RSS Aggregators, in other words sites dedicated to receiving information about the content that is on other websites. And guess what? They use RSS technology as well.

Google, the premier search engine itself invested million purchasing a major RSS website called feedburner. Further they then added to their AdSense program a module for RSS Feeds. AdSense is the most widely used technology to put advertisements on websites that we know of today.

I am hoping your starting to see where I am going with this, if entire sites are setting themselves up to use RSS exclusively and Google themselves are heavily investing in RSS technology, then this is something that internet marketers should be looking at.

Google realize that RSS is all about tracking content changes, because anytime a website adds content to their website (if they are using RSS technology) then their RSS feed is updated automatically.

And with RSS aggregator websites actively seeking new content via RSS feeds, almost always allowing website owners to "send" their RSS feed for free, the time is ripe for you to start using this in your internet marketing.

You see any time you submit RSS feed files to these websites, they store the file on their servers and provide a backlink (a link back to your website). And because google love new content, they visit these sites often, and as a result they rank these websites more prominently in the search engines, meaning more visitors find that content.

The end result is your website gets found by more visitors, either indirectly by the link on the RSS aggregator website, or directly in the search engines because your website now ranks better because of the links from the RSS aggregator sites.

In the past it has been rather time consuming to manually submit RSS feeds to these websites. But great software is constantly coming out that will automate this process.

Early versions of the software would require you to create your own RSS feed and to specify which sites to submit to, and it although quicker than a pure manual process would still be a time consuming process.

More recent versions of the software actually create RSS feeds automatically and submit automatically to the RSS aggregator websites every time you post. There are versions of the software that work as a desktop application, or on a server. There are even versions of the software that work with the most popular blog platform on the internet, WordPress.

Still more versions of the software allow you to merge feeds (create a new RSS feed from two or more existing RSS feeds) and to then allow you to submit that for more backlinks and more rankings!

So make sure you take the time to investigate the best RSS submit technology available and take the time to under RSS feeds. Your web site will thank you in the form of extra web traffic and better rankings in Google.

Remember, if Google thinks enough of the technology to be sinking millions into it, it's not a fad, but it's here to stay!