Section 1.3. Why Syndicate Your Content?

1.3. Why Syndicate Your Content?

The advantages of using other people's feeds are obvious, but what about supplying your own? There are at least nine reasons to do so:

• It increases traffic to your site.

• It builds brand awareness for your site.

• It can help with search engine rankings.

• It helps cement relationships within a community of sites.

• It improves the site/user relationship.

• With additional technologies, it allows others to give additional features to your serviceupdate-notification via instant messaging, for example.

• It makes the Internet an altogether richer place, pushing semantic technology along and encouraging reuse. Good things happen when you share your data.

• It gives you a good excuse to play with some cool stuff.

• By reducing the amount of screen-scraping of your site, it saves wasted bandwidth.

There you are: social, spiritual, and mercenary reasons to provide a feed for your site.