Introduction

There are huge advantages to running a datafeed driven website, content is readily available, you can rapidly create huge sites and list a great number of products in your site, however, this all comes at a price.

The content in those datafeeds has also been used by numerous other individuals on their websites, and as such this can be seen by Google as being duplicate content and a datafeed driven website be penalised in the ranking system.

Custom Content and the Datafeed Import Plugin

The Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress is the only datafeed import tool that is Search Engine Friendly allowing you to add your own custom content to posts it creates while maintaining the datafeed data and ensuring it is kept up-to-date.

As from Version 3.0 of the datafeed import plugin for WordPress you can now edit the posts created by the plugin and add your own custom content to each post, while retaining the power of the Datafeed Import Plugin to update any datafeed content.

We achieve this by tagging the datafeed content in the background, these tags are not shown on the public site its self, but they do identify areas of datafeed content and areas of custom content.

As long as you do not add custom content within the datafeed tags, you can write additional content for each post.

How do I add custom content to posts created using the plugin?

The process is very simple. Create your datafeed import as you have always done, create your template using the datafeed template designer.

You now have two options, you can choose to process the file and create all your posts as draft so that you can edit them and publish later or simply process the file as you would normally do, creating live posts. Either way the plugin will process your datafeed file and create posts from each record in that datafeed and either create draft or published posts.

You can then edit those posts using the normal WordPress posts interface. When you edit a post you will see all the datafeed content that has been generated by the Datafeed Import. You will notice that all the datafeed content is wrapped in tags so that the plugin can distinguish between your content and the datafeed content, these tags will look something like:

MULTIFEED_START_1_This is my titleMULTIFEED_END_1_

These tags are not shown on your live site, and you must not edit those tags otherwise they will become normal text and will show.

The plugin updates any content within those tags, so if you edit any of it, it will be deleted when the plguin updates.

You can add your own content to any line in your post that does not contain a tag. You can make new lines and add as much content as you wish, at the top, bottom or in-between the datafeed data. The more content you add, the better your site will perform in Google, and the more value you will add for your customers.

When you have published your post, make sure that you check the live view of that post to ensure that you have achieved the layout you wish.

What sort of content should I add?

There is no short cut to adding real value to your content, writing reviews of products takes time, but that time is very much well spent, any time you invest will add value to your site. Custom content is gold.

Some ideas for adding custom content could be, writing reviews, tutorials for a product, and don’t forget the power of adding additional pictures, video and audio, these all add content and help in your SEO.