Recommended Affiliate Programs
Using
Feeds to Increase Your Sites Content
By - Rob Sullivan
There are many ways to
increase content on your site, from manually creating it to purchasing software
which will auto generate it for you.
While I highly recommend
you stay away from anything which is automatically generated I also understand
that many people don't feel comfortable writing.
Therefore, in this article
I look at another way to make your site appear as if its changing. That is,
incorporating feeds into your site to improve return visits and build your
brand.
Feeds have been growing in
popularity for some time. In fact, there are people who measure such popularity.
While feeds are not the
sole property of blogs, we can gauge how popular feeds are simply by looking at
the "state of the blogosphere."
According to Technorati,
the blogosphere is doubling every 5 months or so. That means that 5 months from
now there will be twice as many blogs (and feeds) as there are now.
In many cases, the only
way to access that content, aside from regularly visiting a site, is through
their feeds.
But that's not the only
use for feeds. Many services have sprung up which allow you to search and
aggregate those feeds. Services such as Feedster and even Google News allow you
to search for phrases and output an RSS feed which could then be imported into a
feed reader.
In other words, if you
wanted to get the most recent news about Google from Google News you could
search for "Textlinkbrokers" in Google News and then copy the RSS feed
URL into your favorite news reader.
Now I know what you're
thinking: "Well that's great news, but how does that help with my
site?"
Well now that you know how
to auto generate feeds for virtually any topic you want, you can then import the
feeds into your site using various methods.
Inserting Feeds into your
site
Obviously you can't just
link to the feed, or paste the XML output into your pages. It wouldn't be
readable. What you need is some tool to convert the feed into something that is
readable. And there are many out there to do just that.
So let's look at the
easiest - a Javascript from a hosted service like FeedRoll.
Using a service like
FeedRoll you can input the URL of the feed you want, make some basic style
changes and it will provide you with a Javascript you can then install on your
site pages that will display the feed within your page content. One problem I
have with FeedRoll is that you are limited to the list of feeds they provide.
There was a time when you could use any feed URL but they've since changed it.
The only other way to use
FeedRoll with your own feed is to buy their software package which will allow
you to export the feed into HTML code that you can paste on your site.
However, if the feed you
do like is in the list, then you could simply make the style changes you want,
copy the Javascript code onto your page(s) and you are done. Once you've saved
the page, load it in your browser and voila - you have regularly updating news
headlines on the page.
But what if you want
something a little more sophisticated?
Well there are options
here as well including ASP and PHP based code which can take a live feed and
format it on the fly.
Therefore, if you have a
dynamic site and don't mind monkeying around in the code this may be the
solution for you.
Using PHP to display feeds
The benefit of using PHP
to display RSS is that the contents of the feed displayed on the page can be
spidered and indexed by search engines. That means links can be followed. That
also means that if you have your own feed, you can place it on your home page
(for example) to offer crawlers quick and easy access to your latest new
content.
One of my favorite PHP
based converters is called CaRP. There are both free and commercial versions
which allow you to not only display the feed as HTML but also customize it any
way you want with style formatting and even images displayed in feeds (much like
you see on Google News now).
It can be a little tricky
to set up at first as it isn't strictly PHP but once you start playing around
with the values you begin to realize just how flexible it is.
I know I use it on a
personal site to display no only latest industry news but also my most recent
blog posts and forum entries. This way crawlers can get into that new content
quickly through direct links on the home page.
Using ASP to display feeds
Just like the PHP example
above there is also an ASP script which will take an RSS feed and output it as
static HTML.
My favorite is this feed
converter which also allows you some leeway in outputting the feed the way you
see fit.
If you are comfortable
with ASP you will see how easy it is to manipulate the script to suit you. Even
if you aren't an ASP guru you'll find the script fairly easy to implement with
commented prompts throughout the script telling you how to make it work.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are
many ways to display feeds on sites - from hosted services to scripts embedded
in ASP or PHP. Really the only thing limiting you is your ability and
imagination.
I can tell you from
experience that I've used all the above versions and I'm happy with each of
them.
Also, because they will
take any feed, your options for what you want to show are also only limited by
your ability and imagination.
For example, I use the ASP
one on an ASP site to display recent news from Google News. I have pages set up
that pull Google news into a Google page, Yahoo! News into a Yahoo! Page and so
on.
With the PHP (CaRP)
script, I have the most recent blog posts and forum entries displayed on the
home page of my site to help crawlers find the new content quickly.
With clients who have
limited abilities or technical support I've implemented hosted versions, as they
are much easier to do.
So my recommendation to
you is try them out and find the one that best suits you. If you don't like the
ones I've suggested here a simple search on your favorite search engine should
return you lots of different options.
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About the Author:
Rob Sullivan
is a SEO Consultant and Writer for http://www.textlinkbrokers.com. Please do place an
active link when publishing this article.
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