How To Get Your Web Site Content Syndicated
By Kalena Jordan of Web Rank Ltd
and Dan Thies of Canned
Books
{Kalena} Following our successful experiment of setting
up a news feed for my site, search engine marketer Dan
Thies and I have joined forces to write this article to
show other webmasters how they can do the same for
their own sites.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, let me set the
scene...
Being the web-mistress of a resource site about search
engine marketing, I'm always on the lookout for new
ways to promote my site. Like many other web site
owners, I don't have an enormous marketing budget
and must rely on my own resources to spread the word
about my content.
As you would expect, one effective method of
promotion that I utilize is search engine optimization.
This ensures the search engines regularly visit my site
and update my pages in their indexes. Another is the
circulation of a regular newsletter.
But the real secret to attracting more traffic is to add
bucket loads of fresh content. Providing you promote
this new content effectively, it can act like a magnet
on your site, pulling in new visitors every single day and
giving you the opportunity to turn those visitors into
loyal followers or, (if you sell products and services),
paying customers.
Fresh content improves the "stickiness" of your site
too - giving visitors a reason to return to your site on a
regular basis. And of course the search engines reward
popular sites with more link popularity and a higher
search ranking. Adding new site content is one thing,
but just how do you spread the word about this new
content and place it in front of potential visitors?
Well take my site for example. I had recently added a
Web
Log (known on the Internet as a "blog") about the
search engine industry, which I updated daily with
news and articles. I had seen similar sites having their
content syndicated on industry news portals such as
Moreover, ClickZ, ZDNet, etc and I
wanted a piece of the action. Problem was I had no
idea how to go about this.
A fellow moderator in the
ihelpyou search engine forums, (Dan) told me I
required an "RSS Feed" - a special file containing the
content I wanted syndicated - so that the news sites
could grab it from my site instantly. Dan offered to give
me a hand to set up the file and so began our quest! I'll
let Dan take over from here and explain exactly how we
did it and how you can set up your own news feed.
Here's Dan...
{Dan} Thanks Kalena. An RSS news feed provides
information about your site's content that enables
other sites to effectively link to it. There are actually a
few different flavors of RSS - for purposes of this
article, we'll work with RSS version 0.91, which is the
most commonly used on the web today. We'll also focus
on the very basic elements of a news feed, and leave
the advanced stuff for another time.
The RSS file itself is a fairly simple text file. Although it
uses an XML language format, the code will be pretty
familiar to anyone who has worked with HTML to edit
web pages.
Click Here to take a look at a
simplified version of the RSS file we created for Kalena's
site:
An RSS feed consists of one or more "channels." A
single channel will be sufficient for the majority of sites.
Each channel, in turn, contains information about one
or more news articles. A channel consists of the
following required information:
[Title] the name of the channel (in the
above example, Kalena's channel title is called "Search
Engine News Blog")
[Link] the URL for the channel's main
web page (the page on Kalena's site where the news
items are displayed)
[Description] a description of the
channel's purpose and content
The first two lines in our RSS feed example define this
as an RSS feed. The < channel > tag comes next and
contains the required information about this news
channel (as listed above). Optional information follows
these items and includes language, copyright info,
contact email addresses, and an image (logo) that can
be displayed with the channel's headlines. Our code
example contains all these options, but you can leave
these out of your own feed if you prefer.
Continued...
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Greetings Readers!
Well I can't believe the silly season has rolled around
once again. That familiar feeling of panic has settled in
as we try desperately to get all our current projects
finished up in time to allow a few days of turkey
stuffing and cracker pulling.
All in all, it's been a heck of a year for Web Rank. By far
our biggest project was a study of the search engine
compatibility of web sites belonging to Australia's Top
100 Public Companies, which was finally launched this
week. During our research, we were amazed to learn
that 99 percent of Australia's top firms are incompatible
with search engines (see story below).
Our newsletter subscriber base has tripled and we also
achieved global syndication of our
Search
Engine News Blog. In fact, our feature article this
month (which I co-wrote with fellow search engine
marketer Dan Thies) reveals just how the newsfeed
was set up and how you develop your own RSS feed
for syndication of your site content.
Meanwhile, that's it from me for
another year, but may I take this opportunity to thank
all our loyal newsletter subscribers for your support and
wish you and your families a joyous festive season and
a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year...
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- Google Launches Shopping Search
| | |  Just in time for Christmas, Google has launched a BETA
version of their latest invention, Froogle,
a shopping search engine.
Taking its name from a clever combination of "frugle"
and "Google", Froogle acts like an online product
catalog, responding to user searches for particular
products by listing web sites that sell the item, a
product description, approximate prices and a thumbnail
picture of the item in question.Full Story... | | |
| AltaVista Gets a Face Lift
| | |  AltaVista has
been given a new look and a new logo to
reflect the search company's current internal
transformation.Changes at the search veteran include fresher results,
(with the grand claim that 50% of the results are now
refreshed daily), the introduction of their assisted
search tool AltaVista Prisma in more languages,
improvements to AltaVista News and the addition of
AltaVista Shortcuts and AltaVista Shortcut Answers to
help search the "invisible web" (available on the U.S.
site only). Full Story... | | |
| Australia's Top 100 Company Sites Incompatible With Search Engines
| | |  A new report released this week has revealed that 99
percent of Australia's Top 100 Public Companies have
web sites that sabotage their ability to be found by
search engine users.Search
Engine Compatibility and the Top 100 Australian
Public Company Web Sites, published by New
Zealand-based search engine optimization firm Web
Rank, details how nearly every one of the web sites
belonging to Australia's Top 100 Public Companies
contain design elements that in some way negatively
impact their search engine compatibility. As a result,
many of Australia's leading companies are not easily
found in the search results of the most popular U.S.
and Australian search engines. Full Story... | | |
| Lycos Launches New Paid Listings
| | |  It's not just Alta Vista scrambling to attract eyeballs
lately. Lycos are getting
busy expanding their current
paid listings offerings and even moving into the PPC
market with the introduction of their
InSite Ad Buyer pay per click product.
With bids starting at $0.05 and a minimum of $50
required to open an account, the offering sounds pretty
similar to Overture.Full Story... | | |
| Google Defines "Ethical" SEO
| | |  Last month Google made the unprecedented decision to
publish their
definition of "ethical" search engine optimization on
their Webmaster Guidelines page.Professional SEO's around the world are jumping for joy
to see the search engine giant finally clarifying their
stance on the whole subject of search engine
optimization and supporting ethical SEOs instead of
writing them ALL off as sleazy as other search engines
tend to do. Full Story... | | |
| Yahoo Offends Gay Community in UK
| | |  Yahoo has been forced to withdraw a television
commercial broadcasting in the U.K. after the
Independent Television Commission (ITC) received
numerous complaints from the homosexual community.Full Story and more search engine news... | | |
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