Syndicate that Content
Content is king. But if people don’t know it’s there, your message might as well be mud. One of the best tools for letting people and search engines know your content has changed is the process of syndication. What does syndication mean in an online world? Basically, it’s the act of sending content from your Web site to people interested in consuming it.
Syndication involves a very simple standard called Really Simple Syndication or RSS. Just like there are HTML pages that hold your content, there is an RSS file on your website. It is in a language called XML and it contains the title, date, URL and sometimes a description of the content. RSS can be used to create podcasts as well.
When someone visits your Web site and likes your news articles or blog entries, they should be able to see an icon for your RSS feed. Most blogs and news services have the ability to create these files automatically for you. If you have a blog or news on your site, you should have RSS. A site visitor can then click on your RSS feed and automatically subscribe. Then when the RSS file changes – when you post a new article or blog entry — the subscriber automatically receives an update that something has changed. The power is that the Web site is proactive and not passive. It is sending information out to interested individuals and parties rather than waiting for people to come and get it.
RSS serves more than just individuals. It can also serve organizations and search engines. Search engines use your RSS feed to quickly identify new content on your site. Additionally, other Web sites may decide to feature your content on their site (don’t worry, they almost always give credit and link back to your content) which helps drive additional traffic to your Web site. There are RSS aggregators that help people find news submitted in RSS feeds. These aggregators take your RSS feed and index it much like search engines do. The users and companies can search through that content and pick up your information. Several of our customers’ blogs are registered in RSS aggregators and big news services often pick up their content for syndication purposes.
The goal of content syndication is to drive more traffic and build name awareness. Because RSS is a subscription service, this is a proactive approach to garnering more traffic to your site without working overtime to do it. One final note on RSS that should capture your attention: the youngest Internet users are visiting Web sites less frequently in favor of RSS. After all, why hunt down the news when it can be delivered to you?
