XML Trusted Feeds
Many marketers have never heard of XML trusted feed services. Once it's translated into plain English, XML is a simple concept to understand.
Basically, trusted feeds allow sites of over 500 pages to inject their content directly into some search engines (at this date, Alta Vista, Teoma/Ask Jeeves, Fast and Inktomi have trusted feed services).
You have the freedom of knowing that every single product page will be indexed (which is ideal for catalogue sites). Additionally, pages are recrawled approximately every 48 hours, so if you make a change - or you have a limited-time sale to promote - you can make the necessary tweaks and see almost instant results.
Because Trusted Feeds are trusted and policed, you have the ability to manipulate the content of the XML file. This allows you to serve optimised content and tags to the search engine without changing the page. For instance, you can add the word "home insurance" to the content container of an XML feed when the visible page is focused on "household insurance" - and gain traffic for both keyphrases.
Is it spam? No. You're paying the search engines for the privilege, and they are fully aware of the practice. Is it ethical? Yes - as long as you're not trying to stuff the content container with irrelevant words. In fact, this practice is actually encouraged by the engines as a way for them to serve highly relevant results.
And can it help you? If you have a large site with a massive amount of keyphrases, you can start seeing positions for inner pages previously ignored by spidering search engines.
Affinity i-Marketing has a team of experts who are well-versed with the intricacies of advising on and providing trusted XML feeds for clients with the right kind of sites.
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