• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 20, 2012

Search engine optimization (SEO), in part, relies on a Web site serving up original copy and content, but publishers now have a button similar to the Facebook Like, Google+ or Share It button they can embed, allowing others to syndicate content without getting dinged. It's as easy as embedding a video.

John Pettitt, CEO at Repost.us, said the technology supporting this tool reformats the text in any program running JavaScript to match the destination in a window, from desktop to mobile. The embed code can help publishers bring in a new audience from another site, he said.

Publishers that do a good job linking to articles within other articles can drive traffic back to their site. "We're seeing 5.7% click-through rates," he said. "When the people do click through they read more pages, because they're coming through a linked article rather than some random tweet."

Pettitt said when search engine bots scan the site to index content they identify the embed code that looks to Google or Bing as the title of the article linked back to the original article. He claims the engines don't index the text of the article on the syndicated sites. The embed code includes the title and the first 250 characters. If Google, for example, indexed the embed code, it would receive a canonical link providing instructions to find the original.

The idea for publishers to benefit from syndicating content that can drive Web traffic back to their site from others churns out on average 30% more page views on the syndicated site, compared with the original. "It's like another site is running a giant ad for your content for free," he said, claiming that about 900 sites use the network, including Credit.com, and Enquirer.

The ad in the copy block on the original site comes along with the syndicated content. The publisher provides Repost.Us with a set of ad tags to use with the syndicated content.

Benefits stop at pagination, however. The platform will not paginate the copy on the destination site, which means all copy -- up to 5,000 words -- flows onto one page. Most copy picked up spans between 500 and 1,500 words. Pettitt said.

Pettitt is not a stranger to technologies that step out of the box. He worked at companies such as the art festival Black Rock Rangers at Burning Man, and BitTorrent.