Search Engine Marketing Articles
Content Feeds
Content feeds can be a valuable tool to help increase the value of your site.
A content feed is information that belongs to another site which you can use on your own. It feeds to your site (ie is accessed from its home site when the page is opened), so is updated whenever the owner of the feed updates the information.
Static or Dynamic content feeds
It is possible to get either static or dynamic content feeds.
A static content feed could be a tool (eg a currency converter) or an article. These are particularly useful as you know exactly what you are getting and can promote that content elsewhere on your site.
There are many sites out there that offer syndicated articles for redistribution. They allow new authors to publish articles on their site and allow other webmasters to reuse this content.
A dynamic content feed is one that changes as and when the originator of the feed updates the information.
An example of this is news headline content feeds.
You would get say, 10 news headlines that displayed the title, date and summary of the article. These would be displayed on a page on your site and whenever your visitor clicked on the link provided with the headline, the article would open in a new window.
Each day (or hour, or minute) the information would be updated, so the information shown to your users would be current.
Benefits of content feeds
When using dynamic content feeds you have the luxury of being able to sit back and not having to continuously update your site!
You are offering the bee's knees in terms of your websites standing in your market, so it is a major advantage to have up to date, relevant content - especially content that you don't have to update!
It is also an easy way to quickly increase the content and therefore the value of your site. You are adding information that is derived from a different perspective from your own, so it has the effect of creating a good all round website that covers different viewpoints.
You have to be careful though...
If you use a content feed, then the chances are that there are other sites out there using the same feeds as you.
Keeping this in mind, you should not allow content feeds to form the majority of your site. You could run the risk of duplicate content penalties from Search Engines, and at the end of the day, do you really want to offer your users a website that is patched together from bits and pieces of other information?
Your content feeds should account for no more than about 20% of your website's content.
An example of using content feed would be having a news headlines section. If your site is content based, then adding an entirely feed based news section is OK, as you have a large amount other information.
It should be related to your topics though. There's no point in having a sports news headlines content feed on your medical website.
Main points to remember
- Keep content feeds relevant to the rest of the information on your site.
- Only use content feeds to add to your site, not to create it.
- Content feeds usually require a link back to the originators website and sometimes a logo.
- Some content feeds don't allow you to format the text. Your site should be consistently formatted, so stay away from these.
- Always give recognition to the author of any material you use, and in the format that they request. It is the professional thing to do and you could face legal repercussions if you do not.
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