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Showing posts with label fresh content. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fresh content. Show all posts

Monday, February 11, 2008

10 Reasons to Put RSS on Your Site

RSS and Blogs are the topics of the moment. Seems like
everyone is talking about it. Granted, there is too much
hype about RSS and Blogs.

But where there's hype - there's interest!


And with good reason - RSS is posed to be the break out
technology of 2005. Those who don't take full advantage
of it will be left behind.


If you need convincing - here are 10 reasons why you
should put RSS on your site:


1. It's easy and fast! Not to mention Free! You can use
a free service like eBlogger and publish your Blog and RSS
feed within minutes. You can even place or publish your
Blog/RSS Feed on your own site without knowing 'html' or
'xml'. It's all done for you!


Repeat - it's simple to use and very convenient. Publishing
your blog is only a few clicks away. (If you need help - just
use the link at the end of this article.)


2. Syndicate Your Content. RSS stands for 'really simple
syndication' and it's just another way of passing along your
information. With the popularity of 'MyYahoo' and the 'Firefox'
browser (which has a built-in RSS feed reader) -
syndicating your content has gotten even simpler.


The next version of Windows is reportly scheduled to have an
RSS feature. If this happens - RSS will explode.


3. Get Your Content Indexed. Using blogs to publish your
content is a neat way of side stepping the regular indexing
procedure. It gets your content indexed very quickly in most
of the search engines.


Search Engines are constantly on the lookout for 'fresh
content' - these 'link rich' blogs are a good source of
this content. Because blogs are on specific topics - they
have a concentrated source of good quality informational
material to serve up!


4. Instant Contact. Blogs give you instant contact with
your readers or viewers. We live in an 'instant' society -
we want everything five minutes ago. Blogs provide this
instant gratification. Readers or viewers using MyYahoo
have an instant link to your information or postings.


RSS Feeds will instantly spread your information to all
interested parties - bringing in targeted traffic.


5. Building Your List. People who pick up your RSS feed
or add you to their MyYahoo site - become your subscribers.
You are really building your contact list. Have a popular
blog or RSS Feed and you can build a large targeted
contact list very quickly.


It might not replace your old opt-in email list - but it can
be a lucrative addition to it! Take advantage of all
those targeted contacts.


6. Link Building. Blogs are link heavens! Build your links
thru blogs. All these links will boost your link popularity
and increase your search engine rankings.


Plus, by giving viewers/readers a way of adding your RSS
Feed creates targeted links to your site. This reason alone
is why your site should have RSS!


7. Viewer/Subscriber Feedback. Instant feedback from your
subscribers or viewers is easy with blogs. Creating trust
and credibility is so much easier when there is immediate
communication between the two parties.


8. Keyword Content Building. Blogs are especially good
for building 'keyword targeted content' for your site. All
these links will boost your keyword rankings in the search
engines. Google places a high value on 'anchor text' and blogs
are a good place to put all those links.


You can also start different blogs targeted at specific
related keywords covering the major topics of your site.
Again, search engines love related keyword linking so you
can boost your site's rankings by using blogs.


9. Monetize Your Content. Blogs are an excellent way of
monetizing your content. Blog sites like Eblogger
(owned by Google) even encourages you to use the
'adsense code' in your blogs. If you have a popular
blog - this may bring in extra income.


Plus, publishing your ezine or newsletter in a blog
can bring in revenue for months if not years to come.
All those affiliate links and product promotions get
indexed by the search engines and become accessible
to a wider audience, i.e. market.


10. Because Everyone Else is Doing It! Might sound a
bit 'Jonesish' but you do have to keep up with what
other web sites are doing. To remain competitive -
you must put RSS on your site.


Sites without the 'AddtoMyYahoo' link or the 'xml'
button will be the exception rather than the rule in
just a few years - if not months. It's simply another
way of getting your information 'out there'. It's an
opportunity and advantage that you cannot afford to miss.


Proceed without RSS at your own risk!



Titus Hoskins

---------------
This author's articles on RSS have appeared on such sites as:
Sitepronews, Bonafidereviews, Addme, and Ezinearticles.
To add RSS to your Site within minutes, download this simple RSS and Blogging Guide.
Copyright © 2005 Titus Hoskins www.bizwaremagic.com
This article may be freely distributed if this resource
box stays attached.
---------------

If You Don't Have Fresh Content?

By Victor George

It is said that content is king, but today 'fresh, relevant
content' is the master - or is it?


Every owner of a commercial web site knows that frequent fresh
content is needed on their pages in order to achieve and
maintain a high listing on search engines which actively seek
fresh content. Google sends out its 'freshbot' spider to gather
and index new material from all the sites which offer it. MSN
Search seeks it too. I've noticed that MSN Search's spider pays
a daily visit to a site of mine which has proper fresh content
every day.


By incorporating fresh content, commercial web sites will remain
competitive, for without it they will certainly fall down the
search engine listings and lose business. Besides, having
something new keeps visitors coming back and attracts potential
customers.


But creating and then manually uploading fresh content onto our
web sites each day is hard, time consuming work, isn't it? What
we want is a way of putting daily fresh content onto our web
sites easily and efficiently. Let's look at the current
techniques available to us to achieve this goal and see which
one offers a global solution to the fresh content problem:


1) Server Side Includes (SSI'): These are HTML statements
written by the webmaster and uploaded onto the server. SSI's
inform the server to include a specific block of text when a
specific page is served to a browser or a search engine spider.


Because these scripts are compiled 'before' they are served,
they remain 'visible' to search engine spiders and therefore
will be seen as fresh content. Unfortunately, not all web hosts
support SSI's; this is because the server must 'read every page'
on the web site as it looks for include statements, a process
which clearly reduces server performance.


How many web site owners have the time to manually upload fresh
HTML content onto their servers every day? Probably very few,
which is why the use of SSI's is not a global solution to the
fresh content problem.


2) Blogging: Google's Freshbot spider is so voracious for fresh
content that it eagerly devours the contents of common weblogs.
But can a daily blog be used to influence the listing of a web
page under specific keywords or phrases?


It can, but for the vast majority of web site owners, blogging is
out of the question. Putting up a daily keyword-rich business
blog onto a web site is hard, time-consuming work, and it
requires the blogger to be a competent writer, too. Few business
owners have time available or the competence to write something
new about their products or services every day.


Blogging is therefore not a global solution to the fresh content
problem.


3) RSS Newsfeeds: Having newsfeeds placed on a web site is
certainly an easy way of getting fresh material to appear each
day. 'Really Simple Syndication' or RSS, is a fast growing
method of content distribution. Newsfeed creation is an
uncomplicated procedure and therefore appears to be an easy
solution to the fresh content problem.


Many owners of commercial web sites believe that by
incorporating newsfeeds on their sites they will improve their
search engine rankings by using the links appearing within those
feeds, which are given relevance by Google. This belief is wrong
because newsfeeds are basically JavaScript or VBScript.


These scripts must be executed by search engine spiders for the
fresh content to be noted, and since the spiders take a
simplistic approach when reading web pages, these scripts will
not be executed at all. These scripts are compiled 'after' they
have been served, and not before.


There are also a couple of growing menaces associated with RSS
newsfeeds:


o Since the popularity of RSS use is growing exponentially, the
idea to monetize syndication with ads is gaining ground. Indeed,
Yahoo has announced that it will begin displaying ads from
Overture's service within RSS feeds. Now who wants other
people's ads on their web site? I don't.


o There are rumors of newsfeeds being used to deliver spam. If
this gets out of control then newsfeeds will quickly become
history. Who wants spam messages appearing on their web site? I
don't. RSS is therefore not a global solution to the fresh
content problem.


4) Newsfeed Scripting Solutions: A software solution can be
rigged up to 'extract' the HTML from newsfeeds. The HTML is then
placed onto web pages so that the fresh content will be seen by
search engine spiders. This however involves the use of PHP and
MySQL, which tends to put many business owners owners off. And if
there's spam or ads in the feed, they will get extracted, too!


Newsfeed scripting solutions are therefore not a global solution
to the fresh content problem.


5) Creating Original Content: As mentioned above under SSI's and
Weblogs, creating and manually uploading your own fresh content
every day is a time-consuming chore. And what if you have a
number of web sites, each of which requires frequent fresh
content in order to remain competitive? Yet we all know that
there is nothing better than our own proper keyword-rich fresh
content.


In summary, getting frequent proper fresh content onto our web
sites is not straightforward at all. HTML extracted from RSS
feeds appears to offer a partial solution, but it is too
complicated for most businesses and is potentially menacing.


The e-commerce industry is clearly in need of a genuine solution
to the fresh content problem. The way to do it is to
automatically have our web pages updated every day with 'our
own' content, not anyone else's. Only then will we be able to
say that fresh content is truly the master!



About the author: Victor George is a "fresh content" crusader
whose web site can be found at: http://www.autopageupdate.com


Marketing Director at Islweb Limited, a UK based software development company.