What made news feeds so popular?
Ever since the search engines began regarding content highly, businesses have sought ways of populating their websites with fresh, relevant material that will appeal to the search engines but also benefit the readers as well.
Content, however, is often not easy to come across. In the beginning, brands would be chomping at the bit to get a few blogs written and some features published. When it comes to the long term aspect, however, these can be somewhat less sustainable, with ideas beginning to dry up quickly once the first batch of blogs has been written.
So, searching for ways of publishing content regularly to a website that could remain fresh indefinitely, brands turned their attention to news.
News feeds provided longevity where blogs and articles could not. In always being available and constantly being revised, news gave businesses a steady stream of material to publish on their websites, thereby appeasing the search engines whilst giving their customers something to read.
As this grew in prominence, more businesses began publishing news on their sites and seeing great results from it.
As far as the search engines are concerned, websites that are up-to-date are worth paying more attention to than those which are not. This all stems from the notion that if you visit a website two or three times and nothing has changed, you will be unlikely to head back again. The search engines noted this and rewarded updated websites with a higher ranking on their results pages.
News provided the sites with a steady stream of updated content, allowing them to regularly publish fresh material without having to change the static web text (such as product descriptions, for example) that they may want to keep unchanged.
News also gave businesses another way for visitors to find their way in to their site. By publishing news feeds, websites create more keyword-rich content on their sites. Then, when someone searches for one of these words or phrases on a search engine, they can be directed in to the news pages of a website, where it’s just one click away from the sales part of the site.
This process can give websites many more keywords, bringing in people from a greater diversity of search terms.
It’s not all about the search engines, however. News feeds give the reader an interesting article about the topic they have searched for. Not only will this help them make an informed decision on their purchase, but it will also endear the source of the news to them. In layman’s terms, if the content is informative and educational, they will respect the site on which they read it much more. With this respect comes a greater likelihood of coming back to the site in question when they make a purchase.
Content marketing is still a relatively new prospect, but with it impacting on both the users and the search engines, there’s little surprise it’s growing so quickly.
About the Author: Pete Handley is an SEO consultant and expert. He writes article and blogs for Vertical Leap UK. For more information on the topic of SEO and related issue, he recommends you to visit http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk website.
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