Content is King…

by Keith Baxter

Published on this site: July 4th, 2004

In the world of search engine optimization, one thing is clear… content is king.

The more content (and keyword specific content), the more information the search engine spiders have to ‘crawl’. When I say crawl, this is what I mean…

Search engines are machines. They have robots (known as bots), that visit your website and report back to the main search engine directory everything they find. This is a very simple explanation, but for the purposes of this article, this is all you need.

Now, there are several ways to get content.

1. You can create it yourself.
   
   
2. You can have others create it for you.
   
   
3. You can extract data from public domain databases and article directories.
   
   
4. You can use RSS in a way that is friendly for the bots.

For this discussion, I will focus on RSS… as it’s the MOST powerful way to get relevant content that is fresh and fast.

RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. In simple terms, RSS allows person ‘A’ to add content to their site and person ‘B’ to take the content person ‘A’ wrote and add it to their site.

Until now, RSS was limited to the blogging world. In the past several months, we’ve seen major news organizations down to small website owners adding RSS capabilities to their own sites to release their content to a wider audience.

And until recently, you had to use ‘RSS Readers’ to view this content. When you implemented one of these readers on your website, it pulled the RSS Feed via JavaScript. Now, the downside to this is that search engine bots cannot read JavaScript, thus rendering the content streaming from the feeds useless when it came to search engine optimization.

Now, this has all changed.

A new application has been released into the marketplace that allows you to stream RSS Feeds into your site and have this same content searchable by the search engines.

This new application is ‘RSS Equalizer’ and can be found here:

http://www.rssequalizer.com/rp.html

I’ve had a chance to test the application and can tell you it’s simple to use.

Basically, you download the script, extract it to your hard drive, upload it to your server, set permissions for one file, run the install file (now located on your server), enter a few parameters, then copy the code it gives you directly into your website.

Total time from downloading to receiving searchable content… 7 minutes.

I’ve tested this on 2 separate domains and received no problems at all.

As the primary writer for MarketingProductReview.com, I give this my highest recommendation and suggest that if more searchable content is valuable to you, then you owe it to yourself to check this program out.

Here’s the link to RSS Equalizer once again:

http://www.rssequalizer.com/rp.html

To your success,
Keith Baxter.

Keith Baxter is the primary editor for http://www.marketingproductreview.com, the net's most popular unbiased marketing review site.