Answer: A trusted feed provider is someone that has partnered with a search engine that allows you to submit your products or content through an XML feed. The benefits are that the price for inclusion is based on a Pay Per Click pricing model. However, you don't get a guarantee for a position. So, based on site content and the way the site is submitted, you could get a great listing on a not so great listing, but you are guaranteed to get listed, and you only pay if you receive traffic.

Many websites, especially larger e-commerce sites built with dynamic pages or a shopping cart that cannot be indexed, find it difficult to get search engine listings for their wide range of content, products and services.

One way to alleviate this is to provide a trusted feed of your content, products and services directly to the search engines. This data is then fed into the search engine's database for inclusion in the natural results listings of the search engine.

When a site is optimized by an SEO professional, listings can take many months to appear in the natural listings. Trusted Feed gets around this problems by allowing site owners to have keyword optimized information on each of their web pages submitted directly into the search engines by way of a trusted data feed, and their listings often appear in as little as 2 days, across some of the world's largest search engines and directories.

Another thing to keep in mind is that trusted feed results show up in the natural results section of a search engine - not the sponsored sections provided by pay per click providers like Overture or Google Adwords or Findwhat. So, it is possible that the visitors who come to your site through the trusted feed results will have a higher propensity to convert into paying customers than the ones who are coming through the listings in the sponsored sections (as people tend to be more suspicious of results that they know are advertisements).

So, the advantages of trusted feeds are that you can get listed in the natural organic results of some of the major search engines in a few days and you only pay for performance. And, if the nature of your site makes it search engine unfriendly, then trusted feeds may be the only way to get listed in the organic search results of the search engines.

The disadvantages of trusted feed programs are that you still need to optimize your feeds so that your site comes up at the top of the search engines. You have no control over exactly where your site appears. And, it may take a considerable amount of time for you to create the trusted feeds in a format that is acceptable to the search engines.

A company that provides trusted feed services is http://www.positiontech.com

Answers by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more advice on search engine placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.net