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Other Sources of Syndicated Content
Various other sources of syndicated content are available, usually in the form of
web services
. These are
outside the scope of this book; they are just mentioned for completeness.
Somewhat similar to RSS or Atom feeds in that they deliver data to external sources upon request,
web services provide more complex communication mechanisms. Communication between clients
and web services also occurs in XML-based formats; the most common protocols for web services
communication are SOAP and REST.
Many major web-based companies, such as Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and Alexa offer access
to their vast amount of content through their web services. You can also provide your own web services to
the same end. Numerous books have been written to cover some of these services. For more information
on web services, consider
Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web
Feeds
(Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2006).
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking web sites offer users convenient storage of their bookmarks remotely for access
from any location. Examples of these sites include del.icio.us, digg, Reddit, and so on. These sites usu-
ally allow these bookmarks to be private, but many choose to leave them public. And when a particu-
lar web page is publicly bookmarked by many users, that is a major positive contributing factor in the
ranking algorithm of the search function on a social bookmarking site. Ranking well in these searches
presents another
great
source of organic traffic. Furthermore, if a web page is bookmarked by a large
number of people, it may result in a front page placement on such a site. This usually results in a land-
slide of traffic.
Many blogs present links to streamline the process of bookmarking a page. As is typical with facilitating
any action desired from a web site user, this may increase the number of bookmarks achieved by a page
on your web site. Figure 7-6 shows an example of SEO Egghead with icons for bookmarking a page; high-
lighted (from left to right) are del.icio.us, digg, Furl, and Reddit.
These little icons make it easy for people browsing a web site to do some free marketing for you — in
case they like the content at that particular URL and want to bookmark it. To make adding these icons
easy, you create a class that will work for any web application. We referenced the icons and list of social
bookmarking sites from Sociable, a plugin for (it’s the same plugin used for that purpose
on the SEO Egghead blog) and it’s explored in Chapter 16; kudos to Peter Harkins for putting all those
icons together.
You create the social bookmarking library in the following exercise, where you’ll add those icons to
your catalog page,
catalog.php
. You created this script back in Chapter 3, but if you skipped that
chapter, feel free to use the code download for Chapter 7. The catalog page is accessible through
http://seophp.example.com/catalog.html
.
Note that you wouldn’t normally add social bookmarking items on e-commerce catalog pages — except
perhaps if it’s a very new and exciting product. We’ve chosen this example to keep the implementation
simple for the purposes of the demonstration.
164
Chapter 7: Web Feeds and Social Bookmarking
c07.qxd:c07 10:42 164


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