You may be wondering how to syndicate content on your website. Part of having a really cool website is producing useful information for your viewers. I am sure that you’ve heard the saying, “Content is King” and to be honest, I believe that. I believe that in order for a site to stand above the crowd and win against rival competitors, it needs to have a lot of content on it and things users can do.
That said, If you look at many popular sites online you may notice that much of the content found on these sites are syndicated. Meaning, the content wasn’t originally produced on these sites. Instead it was pulled from other sources and republished. Reflecting back, you may now realize this, and this is something you can do too.
Now, make no mistake, syndicating content doesn’t replace the task of writing your own. In fact, producing your own unique content is vital towards the health and overall success of your site. If you fail to produce your own content, people will not take a long term interest to your site, nor will search engines.
Gaining excellent rankings in search engines is very important. It’s obvious that your site depends on people visiting it. But, what you might not realize is that your site is more likely to be visited by people via search engines. So, if search engines don’t like your site, then people won’t be likely to find your site. Having all that past us, let’s now talk about Yahoo! Pipes.
Yahoo! Pipes is a powerful composition tool used to aggregate, manipluate, and mashup content from around the web. Using this tool, you can combine many feeds into one, sort them, filter them, and even translate the data into a different language. Further, you’re able to geocode your favorite feeds, and even create powerful widgets and badges for your site.
I have been using Yahoo! Pipes for almost two years. Using Yahoo! Pipes doesn’t require any special training or skills. Although, I’ll admit, if you do have prior experience with programming, using Pipes will come much easier. With any program or tool, it’s important to invest time into reading tutorials so that you can get more familiar with it. Also, in my experience, I can say that the more you play around and experiment with Yahoo! Pipes, the better.
All in all, I have made some really interesting pipes in the last two years. And the great news is that there have been multiple improvements made to Yahoo! Pipes since I started using the composition tool. One of the most appealing features is their widgets. Using the widgets and badges, you’re able to syndicate and show off your creations directly on your sites, thus making them more useful and appealing to your visitors.
Once again, it’s all about providing the best resource to your visitors. There is nothing wrong with syndicating content as long as you have a balance of your own content in place. Using Yahoo! Pipes coupled with a blog, Wiki, or a message board will give you a very balanced and well rounded site that will appeal to not only visitors but search engines as well.
After you play around with Yahoo! Pipes, share what you have created in the comments below. Also, if you run into any snags with the tool, I’ll try to help answer some of your questions.