Brush up on the Doctrine of Fair Use before jumping into aggregating and curating content. Doing it right can be extremely valuable to your site for SEO purposes, but doing it wrong can lead to problems with copyright infringement.

If you've never been introduced to RSS feeds, it's definitely time to take notice. If you have, brush up on how they can help you in creating fresh content for your website, or even just keeping up with real estate industry news. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Every blog and many websites have an automated process to release portions or complete articles every time a new one is published. It's a little like a press release, but totally automatic.

You can use it to keep up with the business and your competitors. However, in this article we want to talk about using RSS feeds to gather content from around the web that you find interesting and would like to share with your visitors. You're going to subscribe to feeds at sites you find interesting and deliver snippets of the content you like to your visitors. It's called "aggregation," as you are aggregating several small quotes from multiple sites and publishing them on yours.

An example would be a great article from a major real estate portal site about a resurgence in vacation home buying. If you're in that type of market or it's your niche, you may want to take a small snip of that content that's relevant and link your visitors to the full article. Most feeds provide that snippet for you, so it's easy to just copy/paste it and the link into your article or blog post.

Let's talk about "content curation" now. It's much the same thing, as you're locating content around the web and delivering it to your visitors. Though none of the snippets you're gathering are unique or original in their own right, bringing a half dozen or so of them together in one blog post or article creates a single unique piece of content for SEO. You can do this with RSS news feed items quite easily.

However, there are curation solutions out there, software and online, so you should check them out if they are of interest. One example is CurationSoft.com. It is software that allows you to build custom searches to gather items from blogs, Google News and other sources. It will even create the post/article content for you, so you can copy it out and simply paste it into your site. It allows dragging and dropping content snippets to build your custom article.

A great use for content curation is to gather and publish current major real estate market news. Your value is primarily local market news, but your visitors also have an interest in what's happening in the nation as a whole. From mortgage rates to news about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you can re-publish this curated content which makes your article unique and original content.

If your real estate website is a bit stagnant, these are fast and efficient ways in which to publish fresh and frequent content.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.

Further Reading

• Real Estate Tool of the Month: Feedly
• Refresh Your Email Marketing with Content Curation
• How to Curate Valuable Content and Build Your Brand in 5 Easy Steps