Zemanta: Smart Blogging Tool for enhanced blogging and SEO

Posted by Vivek ||

October 8, 2008 ||

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Is extension the next wave of admin plugins for CMS platforms like Wordpress, Joomla and others. I am sure you might be amazed at what I am talking about. I am not talking about blog editors like scribefire. No doubt that these Firefox extensions are highly useful and have been very popular, but they don’t add to the way you blog. I am talking about extensions that could seriously enhance and make your daily blogging activities easier. And my argument is that because the admin based plugins are only required for the admin area, they can be kept away from being uploaded on your hosting and then every time retrieving them to do a task.

What I am talking about is localize such plugins and make them part of your browser. If you think that it’s not possible then think again. There’s a wonderful Firefox extension that just takes your blogging capabilities to a new level. This extension is called as Zemanta. Zemanta is a such a wonderful piece of utility for a blogger. As your write a post, based on the keywords and your settings it can show you images related to the post and also other blog stories which are related to the post you are writing.

And this is not it, you can insert those images with a single click and add the stories as related stories in your blog post. Zemanta sits comfortably in your wordpress or other blogging platform’s dashboard and provides you with the following features:

1. Related Photos: The photos are shown in the zemanta side bar which sites in your dashboard. All the pictures are very relevant to the blog post that you are writing and best part is that all these images are copyright cleared. That means you don’t have to worry about the copyright. The images can be dragged and dropped or just clicked to get them inserted in your post. You can also filter the available images based on specific keywords.

2. Related Articles: The related articles are from the top 300 odd media sources and hence are very relevant and authentic.

3. Automatic Links: Once you have finished writing a post you might want to link to various important keywords. This can be done pretty easily as well. Just click the links which Zemanta has automatically identified and the links get inserted in your blog corresponding to the keywords. It looks something like this:

4. Automatic Tags: How about some SEO and ways to build traffic. Automatic tags is another smart features which automatically picks up words to create tags for various keywords in your blog post.

Let us now see what platforms are supported by this wonderful tool.

Because Zemanta is semantically so very smart that it even keeps tracks of what you have posted using Zemanta and in future will recommend your post to other bloggers who blog on a similar topic. Another great way to build your back links.

What are the ways to use Zemanta?

Well there are more than one. You can install the Firefox extension which is compatible with Firefox 2 and 3. You can also download the plugin available for Internet Explorer 6 and 7. If this is not enough you can get the platform independent plugins for your CMS (but I don’t think this is the best option as it has to contact your host and work like a normal plugin.