The Second Blog

Why do people submit RSS feeds? Surely there must be reasons behind them doing so faithfully. Webmasters submit RSS feeds when they update their website with new web pages or build new websites, while companies do so when new products enter the market. The one sole purpose is to drive traffic, or get visitors to their websites.

Where does the traffic come from? We need to understand how RSS feeds work so as to appreciate the whole mechanism of deriving traffic. RSS is simply put, Really Simple Syndication and in XML format. These are files that need to be parsed or read using aggregators or RSS readers.

Before you get drown in a complex myriad of terminology, I will explain things in simple digestible language. RSS feeds essentially displays news or content that refreshes and updates itself whenever the source is updated. Try to imagine that your website is a TV set, and each TV channel is an RSS feed. Each time the channel changes, we see a different image or content on your TV. The same goes for RSS feeds.

People use feeds to convey messages and bring news about finance, stocks, weather, entertainment, latest product reviews, shopping discounts etc to targeted audience. Webmasters can submit RSS feeds to RSS feed directories for free. Such an activity brings significant benefits:

1. Content Syndication

Webmasters are always hungry for unique content. RSS feeds are useful for content management and because content delivery is instantaneous without the need to dabble with and modify their web pages, it’s the choice content source of many websites today. They essentially find their feeds at RSS feed directories, either in general or niche topics. This is one main reason why it makes perfect sense to deposit or submit RSS feeds to these directories. Envisage the kind of traffic your website would receive if your feed is published on other websites in the same theme as yours.

2. Link Popularity

Did you know that you can build RSS feeds and incorporate your links to your websites? If your feed is displayed on another website, that is an additional backlink for you. This has a positive effect on your link popularity in time to come. Download RSS Builder, a freeware to try building an RSS feed of your web page. Submit RSS feeds after that.

3. Build Credibility

Almost all successful webmasters regularly submit RSS feeds of their websites. Since RSS feeds are popular, invest more time in creating news worthy information on your website before distributing the RSS feeds. This would improve the chances of getting your feeds syndicated on popular and authority websites. You can establish yourself as an expert and build credibility in the long run. Credibility is invaluable in business as people would entrust their money to you, ie purchase your products.

4. Content Delivery and Notifications

Subscribers of RSS feed directories would get occasion notifications about the latest RSS feeds available. Submit RSS feeds from time to time, and be a regular contributor of useful feed content. You would pick up many loyal fans along the way as people start book marking your website as their regular content source.

Expert webmasters understand the power of RSS feeds and more so, the importance of distributing feeds to as many directories as possible for explosive impact. Find out what secret tools they are using to submit RSS feeds to feed directories faster and reach more targeted audience.

This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author’s name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.

Davion W
http://www.articlesbase.com/technology-articles/submit-rss-feeds-for-endless-traffic-103705.html

There has been talk about using WordPress beyond the typical blog set-up, into the realms of a full-fledged content management system or CMS. Yet, most people have no idea how this is even possible.

I have to stress that the default WordPress software is intended to be a blogging tool, so if you’re trying to make it work like a different type of content management tool you’ll have to use the correct plugins (enhancements) and have the a clear idea of what you want to achieve.

While the exact step-by-step method is out of the scope of this article, lets explore some of the ways you can use WordPress, as I have personally done before.

1) WordPress as An Article Directory

To make WordPress work as an article directory, you’ll need a special plugin, and a source for the articles. MyArticleMarketer.com is the perfect tool for this, as the articles there are usually human-approved. They also encourage free distribution of their articles to other article sites.

After you have set-up the WordPress plugin, you need to sign-up for Article Marketer’s distribution list. By filling in their form and specifying the categories (or choose all categories), you automatically qualify to receive all old and new articles that are submitted to MyArticleMarketer.com

However, with WordPress as an article directory, you’ll only be able to receive syndicated articles. Authors won’t be able to sign-up or create an account directly with you. It’s also against MyArticleMarketer.com’s terms or service to encourage authors to sign-up directly with you.

2) WordPress as a Membership Site

You can set-up a free or paid membership site using WordPress. All it takes is a few simple plugins to get the job done. Once you’ve installed the plugins, members will need to login to your site in order to view the content. You can also place a login form in your WordPress theme files to make it easy for users to lo in and out of your membership site.

However, the plugins only create a simple membership system, so if you’re looking to create different membership levels and more advanced features, you’d probably want to sign-up with a professional membership system like AmemberPro.net and use their available plugins to ingrate with WordPress.

At the time of writing, AmemberPro.net has available plugins for a reasonable cost and these will be installed by their support team, so you don’t have to worry about the technical setbacks.

3) WordPress as a Classified Ads System

WordPress can work like any other classifieds website too. Users can sign-up on your site and place classifieds in the form of new blog posts. They can even set expiry dates for their ads and specify listings or “wanted” ads.

However, you will need to create all the necessary categories and even create a sign-up information page to teach your users how to place ads. The upside of using WordPress as a classifieds site is that you can also use tagging tactics to get traffic from social bookmarking sites and sites like Technorati.com

4) WordPress as an Audio / Video Training Site

Using the membership plugins mentioned above or AmemberPro.net’s WordPress compatibility plugins, you can create a membership site with WordPress. Then, all you need to do is to add the “Podpress” plugin which takes care of all audio and video elements on your website.

You will be able to display and stream MP3 audio or FLV video using their built-in players. The Podpress plugin is really robust and also allows you to specify setting on iTunes, so you can make this commercially and available to the entire iPod / iTunes community.

As you can see by now, there’s a whole lot of possibilities when it comes to using WordPress to the extreme.

I’ve created an entire video training system to help newbies and advanced marketers alike master WordPress. Yet, every day brings new possibilities to using WordPress as a complex CMS instead of the modest blogging tool it was designed to be!

Gobala Krishnan
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/using-wordpress-as-a-content-management-system-or-cms-90620.html

Introduction

Search engines have become the gateway to information in the Internet. Search engines are so important that websites find that they need to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs) in order to get noticed. With the numerous websites vying to get into the coveted position of the top 30 results listed in SERPs more and more website owners are using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve their rankings. People who use SEO know that there are certain factors that can affect your ranking positively and of course negatively. Of the negative factors one of the most well-known is duplicate content.

Search engines are biased against duplicate content. As a matter of fact some sites do not get listed in SERPs because of this factor. This happens when crawlers do not index sites which they have previously determined to be a duplicate site of another site. The crawlers skip the duplicate site to be more efficient and save time. Crawler also do this for another reason – to avoid listing duplicate pages in SERPs and thus point users to different sites containing just the same information. Search engines do not like that to happen because it would be irritating for users who expect to see different sites for the different links they click. For similar sites, search engines also usually just list one of the sites and relegate the others under a link that says See related pages. For those that get manage to be listed in the SERPs the page rank is still usually affected and so affects the sites standing.

Where Search Engines See Duplicate Content

So where do crawlers see this duplicate content. And what are the possible content that they would interpret as duplicate? According to an article by William Slawski on Duplicate Content Issues and Search Engines, search engines see duplicate content from the following kind of web pages:

1. Product descriptions from manufacturers, publishers, and producers reproduced by a number of different distributors in large ecommerce sites.

2. Alternative print pages – This happens when website owners who are user friendly offer copies of the same documents in different formats for a varied printing options. Although helpful to users it might actually indexed by crawlers as duplicate pages.

3. Pages that reproduce syndicated RSS feeds through a server side script.

4. Canonicalization issues, where a search engine may see the same page as different pages with different URLs.

5. Pages that serve session IDs to search engines, so that they try to crawl and index the same page under different URLs.

6. Pages that serve multiple data variables through URLs, so that they crawl and index the same page under different URLs.

7. Pages that share too many common elements, or where those are very similar from one page to another, including title, meta descriptions, headings, navigation, and text that is shared globally. – This is common for company websites that insist on having their logo, description, etc put on every page of their website.

8. Copyright infringement – Plagiarism is of course a good reason for not being indexed. The problem is that crawlers cannot distinguish the original from the duplicate and might mistakenly filter out the original instead.

9. Use of the same or very similar pages on different subdomains or different country top level domains (TLDs).

10. Article syndication – Some writer allow their articles to be published in other websites as long as they are given credit for their work. The problem arises when the crawler sees the original article as the duplicate and opts to index duplicate page or at least give it a higher rating.

11. Mirrored sites – Mirrored sites are used to handle the traffic of a very popular site. Mirror sites have a good chance of being ignored by web crawlers and so won’t be indexed.

How Search Engines See Duplicate Content

There are many methods employed by different search engines to determine pages with duplicate content. The methods in many ways, from the concept, to the algorithms, and of course their effectiveness. Search engines are, however, all finding new ways to improve their methods for searching duplicate content as seen by the patents filed by different search engines companies like AltaVista, Microsoft Corporation, Google, and other bodies like the company Digital Equipment Corporation and even the Regents of the University of California.

The different patents include methods for Detecting query-specific duplicate documents, Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate files, clustering closely resembling data objects, identifying near duplicate pages in a hyperlinked database, indexing duplicate database records using a full-record fingerprint, indexing duplicate records of information of a database, utilizing information redundancy to improve text searches and methods and apparatus for detecting and summarizing document similarity within large document sets, and for finding mirrored hosts by analyzing URLs.

Each method is unique and is interesting in its approach. The methods vary greatly from generating fingerprints for records to using query-relevant information to limit the portion of the documents to be compared. Discussing each method would be interesting and would shed light as to how different search engines approach the problem. The new methods are all innovative and if some of them are used in concert with each other, it would surely improve the search engine’s ability to detect duplicate documents. However, since the patent holders are competing companies, it is unlikely that there would be collaboration between them.

Conclusion

As search engines further refine their methods for detecting duplicate content it would be harder for plagiarists to get away with what they do. However, web pages containing duplicate content for a good reason could suffer as well. Furthermore since none of the published patents tackled the issue of differentiating the original content from the duplicate ones refinement in the search engine’s methods might mean further trouble for the website owners of original content. Because of this search engines ought to find ways and invent new methods for identifying original content from duplicate ones as well as valid duplicate content.

Danny Wirken
http://www.articlesbase.com/communication-articles/how-and-where-search-engines-see-duplicate-content-54149.html

A major element of a Money Magnet website is content. Therefore, as an Internet business entrepreneur you should always be on the look out for new or repurposed content. Do you think that you have to write content by yourself every time? Think again. Content can be found from a slew of sources.

Following are the top ten places you can find new or repurposed content:

Content Source #1: Write the content yourself. Some Internet entrepreneurs love to sit down and write articles. They can write as many articles as they please or have time for.

Content Source #2: Dictate into an audio file. Then have the audio file transcribed. You can outsource the transcription to freelancers. Don’t have dictation software? You can find recommended dictation software at http://www.idictate.com.

Content Source #3: Blog! Have a Blog on your website that asks questions so that people respond. Their responses and comments add content to your website with no extra work on your part.

Content Source #4: Outsource content creation to a ghostwriter. You can employ a ghostwriter to create content for your website, articles, and emails among other copy. You can repurpose this content in a variety of ways by placing articles on your website and your Blog. Most Blog programs allow you to time stamp when the articles are to be published on your Blog. You can set up the whole year of Blogs ahead of time if you want to.

Content Source #5: You can buy content. For example, you head over to eBay for content. Search out eBooks that are for sale. Make sure that you buy the “Master” resell rights and not just the resell rights for the eBook. Master rights enable you to do whatever you wish with the eBook.

Content Source #6: Look in the Public Domain for content. You can find free articles that you can reprint. You can receive content from syndicated RSS feeds. You can also buy private label articles and add your name as the author.

Content Source #7: Find Wiki content. Go to http://www.wikiindex.com. It is the search engine for Wiki. Wiki is user driven (submitted) content.

Content Source #8: Convert existing content. This means that you repurpose content. You can change the angle of the article. You can also use the same content on your website in your article submissions and Blog.

Content Source #9: You can use content from any of your dud or defunct products. Don’t let this content go to waste. Use it again in one way or another.

Content Source #10: Package content you have already created and sell it. For example, you could write in a Blog for a year and then package it as an eBook for sale. You could also package existing articles into an eBook or special report for sale.

Matt Bacak
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-business-articles/top-ten-places-to-find-content-for-your-money-magnet-website-139220.html

I once wrote this great book that could have changed the history of the world as we know it today. Unfortunately it was never published so no one read it. Great works of literature and art would have been lost had it not been for someone appreciative who thought “hey everyone should be witness to this”.

Well this may just be a pipe dream of a silly writer… but to be successful it’s crucial to get published and that your work is available across multiple locations and communities.

The online world is no different. You can be spending hours and days writing and building great content but if it’s not published and promoted correctly across diverse web and user communities, no one would have read it.

Don’t let it become your pipe dream!

Imagine millions of pages of content shouting out to be visible. What can you do to stand out? Assuming you have done your SEO optimization and keyword analysis well, one is to build original, resourceful and informative content around those keywords, and two is to make that content accessible across multiple web and user communities.

Not only will the search engines love you for it, other websites will send you requests to link back to your content, and users/readers will flock to see what new insights you have to offer.

Search engines have two main criteria’s while ranking your page, the quality of your content and link backs to your content. If others (popular sites and user communities) deem your content valuable, and are ready to link back to your content, then search engines deem that content valuable.

So good content focused around your keywords that is well syndicated and promoted will help you please the users and the search engines. So don’t be in a hurry to get your content published…have your content syndication and promotion strategy in place.

So when is the best time to syndicate your content?

How can you make each blog post count?

Generally once I publish my content, either on blog post, or on my site, I immediately start submitting to article sites (top article sites generally take a few hours to few days to publish the content).

Once I am done with article submissions, I use social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Furl, Stumble Upon, Blink List, Yahoo Bookmarks etc to promote my content to the user communities. I make sure I use interesting and catchy headlines to get their attention. I generally follow this cycle for each post or page of content I publish online.

So make each page, each blog post, and each article count.

Developing content can be handled in-house as at the end of the day you are the experts in your domain and understand your business best. In case in-house resources are not possible you can use the services of a good seo content services company or freelancer copywriters and article writers.

Ensure that the person you hire is well versed with writing on various topics (if you can find someone with experience in writing about your domain, its good) and is familiar with SEO editorial guidelines.

Quick Tips:

1. Post your content on article submission sites (it’s not treated as duplicate content)
2. Submit your content to social bookmarking sites to target user communities
3. Submit your content to RSS feeds
4. Build links to your content from diverse web and user communities

So if you are building great content, and syndicating and promoting your content, then you will find many appreciative webiste owners who will think “hey everyone should be witness to this”.

This, my friends is no pipe dream.

Nevil Darukhanawala
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/are-you-leveraging-your-content-674119.html