The case for syndication

In “Syndication Made Simple“, Presstime outlines the simplicity and benefits of using syndication techniques, such as RSS for news sites. Most of these same arguments can be applied to any e-business site. As I’ve mentioned several times here recently, weblog (”blog”) software has come to commercial sites big-time. Many of our e-commerce customers have been expressing an interest in integrating this kind of technology in their sites.

Recently I had an opportunity to help one of our largest clients evaluate just how they could adopt and leverage using “personal publishing” technology on their site. The approach I settled on involved embedding a mature, off-the-shelf package (Movable Type) into their site.

The advantage of this approach is that it can be embedded “behind the scenes”, exactly matching the look and feel of their existing site, fit into the existing template structure that their in-house development staff uses, and look totally “seamless” to the users of the site, except that there are now suddenly new “features” — navigation between news articles is simpler, look and feel is more consistent across the site, and user retention time goes up as users are led to similar articles of interest. More technical users are given the option of viewing headlines in news aggregation programs, such as NetNewsWire on the Mac, and Amphetidesk, NewsGator or SharpReader on the PC.

The more substantial advantages, however, are mostly invisible to the users of the site. These include:

1) Lowered cost of content development — their site uses a lot of “single page content” pages, some news, some general information. By using this system as a standard method of generating such pages, they go from having to have a developer create each page to allowing non-technical users to generate pages via fill-in-the-blank web forms, or desktop editors offering spell-checking and “click to publish”. The smart use of categories and various index pages insures that the new content goes into the proper area and is brought to the attention of site visitors automatically.

2) The structure of index and category pages is designed to help increase the site’s overall search engine page ranking by intelligently distributing links through the site. Over time, this should result in a substantial net increase in search engine traffic to the site.

3) Using syndication to bring in new visitors directly increases the traffic on the site. A plan for distributing both generalized and vertical interest RSS feeds to sites such as Syndic8 and NewsIsFree will bring in more visitors via news aggregators, and via RSS headlines being added to other sites. These same feeds are being made available to their more technical site visitors as well, many of whom manage small websites in their vertical market. By encouraging them to add headlines to their sites, traffic is increased directly. Indirectly, search engine link popularity is improved by the same mechanism, again generating steadily increasing search engine traffic.

4) By making it easy to keep adding fresh content to the site, and improving navigation through the articles, visitor revisitation and retention time both increase, giving more opportunities to turn site visitors into customers.

All in all, a very win-win strategy that can be implemented quite cost effectively. This particular client does have an in-house development staff that does the day-to-day updating of the site, but the simple “turn-key” nature of this approach offers even more leverage to small site owners who do everything themselves, or who depend on outside help to keep their site updated.