An SEO Strategy Your Competitors May Not Want You to Know

by Danny Shepherd

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 (beta) 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 it 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://beta.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 breads 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 feed 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!


Danny Shepherd represents Titan SEO, Inc. an Escondido,
California, based Search Engine Optimization company.

(http://www.titan-seo.com)

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Titan SEO's search engine
marketing technicians are certified by Search Engine Workshops
(http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).