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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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