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A SEO Strategy Your Competitors May Not Want You to Know
The Internet has dramatically changed society and the manner in which business and individuals communicate. Innovations such as search engines, computer networking, the Web, e-mail, and blogs have transformed business as we know it.
Search engines have become an integral part of daily life and have influenced marketing and technology across the globe.
Take a step into the future: What if live search engine results could be placed directly on any Web site?
Did you know that it is now possible to place MSN search engine result pages directly on any Web site, blog, or forum using one of the newest Internet innovations, RSS (Really Simple Syndication)? RSS is used for distributing Web content and is a format based on XML.
The benefit of RSS technology is that it enables Web sites to add content that is constantly changed or updated by the RSS feed generator. In this case, MSN Search Engine is the feed generator, and they are providing Web sites a direct connection to their search engines results pages. Now Web sites can display live MSN search engine results directly on their Web pages exactly as the results appear on MSN.com.
A spokesman for MSN stated that their RSS technology is still under development and is subject to further experimentation and change.
Yahoo News also recently developed a tool that uses a similar technique to allow users to gain access to Yahoo's news database using RSS. Although users can currently do an RSS search query only on the news section of Yahoo's search engine, this capability is certainly a good start.
Up until this point, no search engine has offered their results in such an open formatted manner. Web sites now have the power of these two search engines at their disposal. Properly integrating these search engine results into a Web site can yield powerful results for both companies and individuals.
How does a Web site gain access to these feeds? It is actually not overly complicated. For example, if you wanted to generate an RSS feed for the term, "Big Screen TV" you would add "&format=rss" to the end of the URL in your MSN search engine query, so the URL would look like this:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=Big+Screen+TV&format=rss
Now let's take a look at Yahoo News. It is slightly more complicated than MSN's method but still involves the same attributes. To add an RSS feed for the keyword "Big Screen TV," you would enter the following code at the end of your Yahoo News search URL:
rss?p=Big+Screen+TV&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt
The URL with the code would look like this:
http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=Big+Screen+TV&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt
After entering these parameters into your browser, MSN and Yahoo will automatically generate an RSS feed for Web site use. Once the Web site has the feed code, it is inserted into the Web site's RSS reader. If you don't already have an RSS reader and you want to use one at no charge, some popular free RSS readers include NetNewsWire, Radio Userland, and AmphetaDesk.
So what about Google? Once this knowledge becomes public, it will only be a matter of time before they implement a similar tool. MSN may take a lot of heat for their highly competitive and aggressive market tactics, but when it breeds innovation like this, everybody wins.
Companies often use search engine marketing firms to help promote Web sites on the Internet. It will be interesting to see how search engine marketing companies will use this new innovation to help promote online marketing and advertising.
Will RSS feeds be one of MSN's new mediums for supplying pay-per-click advertisements across the Web? Market penetration from RSS feeds could easily outdo Google's popular Adsense advertising medium. MSN, Google, and Yahoo had better buckle their seat belts, because the competition is going to get fierce.
So in a nutshell, why is all of this important to you?
RSS feeds provide fresh content to a Web page. The search engines love fresh content, and they'll spider a Web site much faster if they're fed fresh content. Use the power of this discovery to your advantage before your competitors get the jump on you!
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