The next item in your channel (remember the channel has a header that describes the RSS feed itself) we are going to discuss is the description.
The description is a required item for your feed to be valid. It’s as simple as the title. It basically provides a summary of the feed – describing or generalizing what the content in the feed is about.
An example from Drew’s Marketing Minute:
<description>Random musings, ideas, and tips about marketing in the world today.</description>
Once again these must adhere to proper character encoding in order to be valid. The description in the wordpress world is called a tagline. Descriptions are important because they help machines and people understand the content of the feed.
I don’t think I’d be too far off in saying future blog search engines will initially use the description element to help index blogs – just like search engines used to rely heavily on meta tags to index web sites.
What’s in your RSS feed? (series)
The Title
Tags: RSS, Description, Help, Tutorial
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Thanks a lot. This helps me decide whther I should have longer description fields or not.
thanks