You see, what I'm doing by giving you all these links is trying to syndicate these articles. I'm hoping that you will read this article and like it so much that you will store it and share it with your friends, who will then read it link to it and share it even further.

But this isn't the only way to syndicate your feed. While I highly recommend using these links just like we do, there are other places you should also look.

If you are familiar with blogs, then you already know that they syndicate themselves by pinging different feed engines like Feedster and Bloglines. But even if you aren't using a blog software there are ways to notify these engines of a change.

There's a service called "Pingomatic" which will help you inform many different sites that there's been an update to your site by pinging on your behalf. That way, when you update your site and visit the bookmark that Pingomatic creates for you, these sites will know that there's a new entry. They will then help you syndicate your content by displaying it in their search results.

Using Pingomatic I've found our articles in popular feed engines in as little as 20 minutes after creating it. It usually takes 3 or 4 days to show up in the Google index.

But wait, you can use feeds for so much more. In addition to using feeds to expose the world to your new content, you can also use feeds to display new content on your site.

Take a look at our Google Capsule for example. Here you will see that in addition to all sorts of Google information, we also provide you with the latest Google News. This news is supplied to us through a Google News XML feed and some creative ASP coding.

You see, we use this handy asp script to turn the XML feed of this Google News Search into the HTML output that you see. If you don't use ASP, no problem.

With HTML or PHP pages I've found this program called CaRP (short for Caching RSS Parser) that will allow you to input a feed and output it into a PHP or HTML page.

I use the free version which is a little tricky to figure out but with a little trial and error you too can display feeds on your site.

So what types of feeds can you display? Well, virtually anything that is a feed. While we use the Google News feeds for our engine pages, I've also used them for displaying blog entries on sites, forum entries and even other things like press releases, job listings, events and so on. You could even do a Google News search for yourself, or your business, and display that news on your site. A warning though, not all the news on Google News is good news so you will want to monitor it and address and negative publicity that comes up.

So, as you are planning your content development strategy for 2006 consider using feeds - they are the best way to have consistently fresh content showing up on your site.

Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro :: Full Service Search Engine Marketing


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