How can I keep content fresh? That is a question I hear often from my clients and others in the business. There are several solutions but they usually cost either time or money. Both can be in short supply.
Since Feb 2007 Yahoo Pipes have offered a fast way to aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services to create content which you can place on your site. While this was cool the content was placed in your page using JavaScript. Since Google and search engines will not see that content it will not improve your organic search rankings.
I recently revisited this issue because a client has a top 42 list of blogs, topical and news sites that they want to link to new content and show it on their web page. Enter Yahoo Pipes and a little .Net programming.
- Build the Pipe, use filtering to limit content,
- Use .Net WebRequest to get the RSS rendered version of the published Pipe (adding &_render=rss to the end of the Pipe's URL).
- Parse the XML from the RSS and output it on your web page with the needed CSS and HTML markup to fir your pages design.
- Voila - instant content.
I expect to keep on adjusting and tweaking this method as I monitor what is placed on my web site.
To see this in action check out the "Web Site Design Articles" area on my sites home page. They are build with a combination of web site and blog RSS or Atoms feeds.
Granted this method has trade offs. On the minus side the Pipe could return a link to a site (or content) that you don't want. On the plus side it is fast and requires less maintenance time than generating your own content (and less money than paying someone else for content) or looking for content to link to. Also on the plus side the content changes fairly frequently.
I think the pluses out weigh the minuses and I like this quick and simple solution to getting relevant and fresh content on a web site.
0 comments:
Post a Comment