Building a Content Rich Website - Part 6


by Byron Stuart - Date: 2006-12-16 - Word Count: 1020 Share This!

Tips and hints about some of the software available to help you with building a website.

Just to be different I thought I would discuss the many different kinds of internet marketing software out there from a purely software developer's point of view. There are quite a number of different aspects to automation that many developer's have tackled. Amongst the aspects are:

* SEO optimization
* content scraping
* automated content through RSS
* article altering (through synonyms and the like)
* dynamic content using PHP or Java

It's confusing just looking at that list isn't it?

Let's look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to start with. This is something that lends itself rather well to automation. The reason being is that many of the SEO strategies can be expressed as a formula and anything that can be expressed like this is fairly easy to turn into computer code. So things like keyword density, headlines, meta tags, and hyperlinks can be analyzed for any given page. This analysis is able to determine whether each of these things are done in a way that is optimum and recommend changes where necessary. Alternatively if the software is fully automatic it will create pages that have content that is optmized according to these formulas. Keyword density is based around the number of words on the page and what is deemed to be the optimum ratio of keywords to content word count.

It should be noted that the search engines do not publish the SEO values that they use so any values used in software are at best educated guesses based on test results. It is ironic that it is possible to create SEO pages that will read very badly to a human reader even though they satisfy the search engine rules so you should pay particular care to checking whether your pages are easy to read. In summary it is technically feasible for software to perform high quality SEO and if you want such a tool make sure you do your due diligence before buying anything.

Content scraping is a method whereby the software will automatically take content from certain sites and give it to you in a format such that you can easily reuse it. The only way that I am aware of that software can do this is to search for specific HTML tags that will signal the start and end of various blocks of content and take the text that is between them. This method can work very well but the main limitation is that the software can only work with sites that it already knows about. This is because the HTML formatting of different sites does not usually follow any particular standard in terms of the way that the content is layed out. Therefore pretty much every site that such software scrapes content from must be "programmed" into the software. So once you've bought such a product be aware that it will contain a finite set of sites that it can scrape from and it will not do any more for you unless the software is updated.

There have been many products spring up in the last 12 months particularly that claim to provide automated content through the reading of RSS Feeds. Whilst it is true that this is technically feasible let's examine the different options for utilising RSS (or XML) content. The most obvious way is that you can take an RSS Feed exactly as is, this is certainly easy to do. It is good to the extent that it provides fresh content to your site both for human visitors and the search engines. However there are most likely many other sites out there using that exact same feed as you so your content is hardly unique which lessens it's value. Another option is to mix and match several RSS Feeds together, leaving aside the issue of whether this is infringing copyright you also would need to be very sure that this results in content that a human reader will get value from. If a tool is able to solve the technical issues of readability, uniqueness and copyright then it would be a very valuable thing to have for producing automated content, the next best thing to having a subject expert write the content exclusively for you.

Article altering is the fairly simple procedure of taking content that has already been written and altering words and multi-word phrases with different sets of words of as similar meaning as possible. Such software is usually applied to Private Label Rights (PLR) content that is content that you are entitled to use in any way you choose. To some extent this whole process is a bit of a game because you're not actually providing better content as far as any human reader is concerned you're simply trying to fool the search engine algorithms into thinking your content is unique. But whilst the rules of the game are as they are it is still a worthwhile thing to do as potentially your site ranking can be higher if your content is judged to be unique. All in all if you are using PLR articles such software is a useful thing to have.

You can use PHP or Java to share content around your site. This is useful for any topics where you have multiple content pieces. You could for instance randomly show a snippet from one article on the page of an article from the same topic. This has the freshness factor about it because if the same visitor comes back to your site they will most likely get slightly different content presented from the last time they were there. You can also do things like display content from other sites, such as quotes, jokes or whatever else tickles your fancy, there are literally thousands of sites that have content available for you to use in this manner. Note that you are nearly always better off to use PHP code as the search engines when they visit will cause the PHP code to execute so they only see the same end result that a human visitor would see, whereas the Java code is not evaluated.


Related Tags: affiliate internet marketing, internet marketing strategy, internet marketing tool, content rich, ni

Byron is an internet marketer, author and software developer. To find out how to build content rich profitable websites quickly and easily see http://www.ultimatecontentcreator.com/blog

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