Unlimited Free Sources of Web Site Content

Unlimited Free Sources of Content

Are you looking for dynamic, automatically refreshing, sticky content to spice up your website?

If you are a Webmaster, you'll know how difficult it is to create fresh content to attract your subscribers and new visitors to your website. Paying freelance writers can cost you a fortune when you are just starting out and don't have site revenues to fund expenses, and writing the articles yourself takes way too much time and takes you away from other important tasks (like actually running the site and making sales happen).

Luckily, there's a little-known but extremely easy tool that you can use to instantly jazz up your website and provide your traffic with valuable information. In fact, you might have heard of this tool before.

Headline syndication, aggregators, XML format? Sound familiar?
Yes, I'm talking about RSS Feeds. If you haven't heard about RSS Feeds, or what they are, I strongly urge you to print out this article, go to a quiet corner where you won't be disturbed and literally devour every word of the rest of this article. Not only will it probably save your business, but also it will revolutionize the way you think about the Internet.

And if you've come across RSS feeds before or used them, then skim through the next section to refresh your memory (seriously, there is a lot of useful information that you might be missing out on) and then dive into the meat of this article, which will show you how to set up RSS feeds on your website to display dynamic, self-updating content with very little effort.

What Is RSS?

RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary”, although other terms such as “RDF Site Summary” (which emphasizes the file format) and “Really Simple Syndication” (which highlights the main selling point of RSS) are also useful in defining RSS by the book.
However, bookish definitions don't always explain things very well. What really is RSS?
RSS is a platform over which a Webmaster can instantly deliver summarized information about the latest / most important content on his website. This summary is usually a list of headlines and snippets – the headline will instantly inform the reader of what this new article or page contains and the snippet (usually the first few lines of the article) is to further entice the reader into visiting the website, or to simply give the reader more information. RSS has evolved into a commonly accepted XML standard, and many
Websites now use RSS Feeds (XML files containing the summaries) to publish “updates” about themselves.

From the Webster's point of view, an RSS feed is meant to allow visitors and subscribers an easy way to keep themselves abreast of fresh content on their website (without having them visit the website first). Additionally, an RSS Feed also allows the reader to “preview” this fresh content, thus letting them decide immediately if the new article / content is interesting to them or not. All in all, RSS Feeds have the main
purpose of enhancing user experience.

Keep that last point as we go through the rest of this article – it is an underlying mindset to making RSS Feeds work effectively.

Using An RSS Feed

As an Internet entrepreneur, one of your most valuable tools can be an RSS Reader. This is essentially an aggregator – a collection of RSS Feeds (that you can add or remove) from different websites that you are interested in. A typical RSS Reader would include RSS Feeds from news sites, sports sites, and perhaps a few niche sites (such as SEO forums, blogs on SEO, etc.). The main purpose of this software is to keep you informed of the latest news and content on websites that you are interested in.

If you have used My Yahoo! or Bloglines , you've probably used RSS Feeds already. These are online RSS aggregators – you get to choose from numerous websites and within minutes you can have your own launch pad for knowing everything that's happening in your niche, in the world, or in sports.

As a first step to understanding how RSS Feeds work, I'd suggest that you use at least one RSS Aggregator – either an online RSS tool or RSS reading software like SharpReader – and subscribe to a few RSS Feeds to learn how it works from a user's perspective.

Marketing and RSS

Using RSS Feeds, websites can:

Attract more customers / visitors.

Keep subscribers informed of new developments.

Allow subscribers to instantly learn of new articles, content and products on their website.

Reduce the load on the subscriber's inbox by reserving newsletters for important news, special product offers, etc.

As a Webmaster, you can use RSS Feeds to your advantage. Since blogging became insanely popular over two years ago, RSS Feeds have become mainstream. In other words, no matter what your niche, there's a good chance that you'll be able to find a few authority sites that publish RSS Feeds, thus syndicating their latest headlines.

How can you use this?

By providing your visitors relevant, self-refreshing content in the shape of the “latest news” by using RSS feeds from niche-relevant websites.

Now I'm not saying that you should cover your whole website (or even one whole page) with RSS Feeds. Such practice is frowned upon by search engines and will actually get your website banned from every single search engine index! RSS Feeds are meant for headline syndication, not for content scrapping. Instead, you could use headlines from the top 3 forums in the weight loss niche to show the latest discussion threads on one side of the “News” page of your own weight loss website. The rest of the page would, of course, be covered with information (i.e. latest news) about your own website.

Or you could put a news ticker on your politics blog to not only give your blog a look of “being updated” but to also provide your readers with relevant, useful information.
If you sell sports goods and own an online store, you could run a “sports news” feed on your main page to attract the attention of your visitors and give your website a more authentic look and feel.

There are many different ways you can use RSS Feeds to add value to your website. Make sure though, that you are merely using these Feeds as “icing on the cake”, and not as the whole cake itself.

Finding RSS Feeds

Finding RSS Feeds is easy; there are several RSS-specific directories and niche search engines for you to browse through. However, the surge of blogging in the last two years has meant that any RSS search tool is inundated with blog spam. This makes it a bit harder to find RSS Feeds that you can actually use.

I've listed a few resources below that can help you get started in your search for finding relevant RSS Feeds.

Bloglines
BlogPulse
Daypop
Feedster
Findory Blogory
Gigablast Blog Search
IceRocket Blog Search
PubSub
Technorati

Once you've found the RSS Feeds of your choice, it's time to find out how to set them up on your website.

Setting up an RSS Feed to Display on your Website

Internet Marketers are a particular breed; we're always looking for an “easier” or “quicker” way of doing things; not necessarily shortcuts, but just ways to work smarter. It's the same with RSS. When I first came across it, I immediately went to Google and not only picked out a tool that could help me syndicate my own website (so I wouldn't have to spend time learning XML), but I also found several tools that I could use to display RSS Feeds from other websites onto mine! These tools are ridiculously simple, and I'd fully suggest that you try them before venturing into learning how to display RSS Feeds on your web pages through code.

If your website is in PHP, you can use the following software: CaRP.
This software also has a free version, which displays a simple ad in the middle of the news display saying something like “these news headlines brought to you by CaRP”. Try it out; it's easy to use, and will teach a lot about managing RSS Feeds.

There are JavaScript alternatives available as well (in case your website uses plain HTML).

I personally use the RSS Infuser tool which does all the work for me. Just one click and you are finished. I highly recommend this software which is part of the AdSense Gold download.

Jawfish
Like CaRP, Jawfish also has a free trial, which is once again easy to setup if you can follow step-by-step instructions.

FeedRoll
Another JavaScript alternative is FeedRoll – this is perhaps the easiest to use of the three mentioned here, but it offers less flexibility and choice of feeds compared to the others.
Of course, if you want more options (or have ASP or something on your website), go to your search engine of choice and type in “How to display RSS Feeds on my website” to get a quick listing of articles, tutorials and more tools to help you out.

More RSS

RSS is an amazingly versatile platform that can be used from anything as simple as running a news ticker to something as topical and time-sensitive as providing weather alerts to affected areas. In fact, any information that is:
regularly updated
time sensitive
new
can be a good candidate for an RSS Feed. The key here is to remember that there are always new uses for information and technology... it's just a matter of pinning them down.

You can view more Internet Marketing Articles here.

Tips For Top Search Engine Rankings

Tips For Top Search Engine Rankings

In this article I show you how to improve your search engine rankings using 27 quick search engine optimization tips.

1. Increase your site's link popularity by increasing your internal and incoming links.
• Internal links - Cross link all your sites and important pages within each site. This will maximize the Page Rank of all your pages within each web site.
• Incoming links that you control - Create several small web sites related to your main site. Each site should only consist of a few pages. Then cross link them all together using the most important keywords. Don't forget to include links back to the main site.
• Incoming links that you don't control:
• Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors' domain name.
  
  For example:

link:www.yourcompetitor.com

• Exchange links with sites listed in the same category as yours in the major web directories, such as the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory.
• Find sites that accept site submissions. Visit your favorite search engine and search for:

"add url" "your keywords"

Also try searching for the actual submission page using its page name.

For example:

addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, etc.

2. Include a TITLE tag as the first META tag, directly after the HEAD tag.
   

3. Try to avoid stop words in your TITLE tag. Stop words (a, an, and, but, he, her, his, i, in, it, of, on, or, she, the, etc.) are common words and characters ignored by some search engines to enhance the speed and relevancy of their search results.
4. Include a META DESCRIPTION tag, directly after the TITLE tag. Include the most important keyword phrase for the web page as close to the beginning of the description as possible.
   

5. If you use a META REFRESH tag, make sure it is set to refresh after 30 seconds.

Some search engines consider pages that refresh in less than 30 seconds as spam. I recommend using a JavaScript redirect tag, if you require a quicker page refresh.


6. Remove all other meta tags (author, date, etc.), unless you're sure they are absolutely necessary. The only meta tags I ever use are the META DESCRIPTION and occasionally the META REFRESH tag.
7. Include a site map with links to all your pages. This will help search engines find and index all your pages.
• Limit the number of links on a web page to 50.
• If you have more than 50 links, limit your links to your most important pages.
• Include text on the page as some search engines, such as AltaVista, have been known to kick out links only pages.

8. Use one or more header tags in your main page body and include your most important keyword phrase/s.
• Use large header tags,
  
  
• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to alter the appearance of the header tags to fit the look and feel of your site. For more information read this CSS tutorial.

9. Check the first couple of lines of the first paragraph to see if it's appropriate to be used as a description of your page. Many search engines utilize the first couple of sentences of the body text as the search results description, instead of the contents of the META DESCRIPTION tag.
10. Try to achieve an overall keyword density of 1-2%.
11. Try to achieve a minimum word count of 300 and a maximum of 750 words on each page.
12. Register a domain name with the exact keyword phrase you wish to target, using hyphens to separate the keywords.
    
    For example, if the keyword phrase is "search engine rankings," then register:

search-engine-rankings.com

If the domain you want is unavailable, either try a different extension, such as .NET, .INFO, or .US, or add a keyword to the end (preferential) or beginning of the domain.

13. Name directories after your keyword phrases, using hyphens or underscores to separate the keywords.
    
    For example, if an important keyword phrases is, "search engine rankings," name your directory:

www.yoursite.com/search-engine-rankings/ or...
www.yoursite.com/search_engine_rankings/

14. Name web pages after your most important keyword phrase. Separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores.
    
    For example, if the keyword phrase is "search engine rankings," then name the page:

search-engine-rankings.html or...
search_engine_rankings.html

15. Name your graphic files after keyword phrases. Again, separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores.
    

16. Include an ALT (alternative text) attribute in image tags. Include the most important keyword phrases.
    
    For example:

17. If you use an image map, include HTML links, as some search engines do not follow image map links. Plus image maps do not offer search engines any link text to index. So, try to avoid the use of image maps as they do not help with your search engine optimization efforts.
18. Use the longer or plural version of a keyword, where possible. Word stemming is a concept used by some search engines to return search results that include keywords that extend beyond what you searched for.
    
    For example, a search with the keyword "engine" might return results for, "engines," "engineers," and "engineering." If someone searches for the longer version of a word and your page only uses the short version, then your page will be excluded from the list of possible results.
19. Sprinkle a few uncommon keywords and synonyms in your main body text. Less popular keywords have less competition in the search engines. So your web page is has a greater chance of being listed amongst the top results.
20. Do not repeat keywords or keyword phrases over and over again on a web page, as this would be considered as spam by search engines.
21. Keep your pages as close to the root domain as possible. Do not set up more than 3 directory levels.
    
    For example:

www.yoursite.com/index.html (1st level - excellent)
www.yoursite.com/html/index.html (2nd level - Good)
www.yoursite.com/html/marketing/index.html (3rd level - OK)
www.yoursite.com/html/marketing/search/index.html (Too many levels down - search engines will find it difficult to find and index pages this far down)

22. If you have a persistent (on most or all of your pages) navigation bar at the side of each page, your table is almost certainly set up in such a way that it pushes your page's body text down the HTML document. Search engines give prominence to keywords nearer the beginning of a HTML document. So, design your HTML table so that the navigation bar is placed after your main body text.
    
    
23. Move JavaScript code to a separate file, or the end of the HTML document after your closing BODY or HTML tag. Yes, this technique actually works!
    
    Follow these instructions to move the JavaScript code to a separate file and link to the file from the HTML document. Then place the following code in between the HEAD section:

This procedure also reduces your file size, and therefore your download time. In addition, it allows you to reuse the code on other pages by simply link to the JavaScript file. Both of these techniques will move your important body text nearer to the top of the HTML document.

24. Although not always practical, you may like to try naming your cascading style sheet tags after keywords.
    

25. Use Robots.txt files instead of Robots meta tags, as some search engine robots do not recognize the tag. Visit The Web Robots Pages for more information.
26. Do not use font size one (1) text as the default text size. Many search engines consider tiny text to be spam. It's OK to use some font size one text.
27. Do not participate in link farms or link exchange programs. Search engines consider link farms and link exchange programs as spam, as they have only one purpose - to artificially inflate a site's link popularity, by exchanging links with other participants.
    
    Do not confuse link farms and link exchange programs with reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking is the exchange of links with individual sites, and is certainly an accepted technique for improving your site's link popularity.

Visit my website pages for helpful time and money-saving tips and tools for your
search engine optimization needs.

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