HOW TO Improve Your Blog Posts and Save Time with Zemanta

This a guest post from Amanda DiSilvestro, content writer at Resource Nation. More about Amanda at the bottom of the post.

Most bloggers would jump at the chance to let a tool help them create a better blog in less time. As it turns out, an online tool known as Zemanta will do just that. This plugin will actually look at the content you upload for your blog and will then analyze the context.

I’ve had some great results with Zemanta in the past. The tool will use language processing algorithms to “read” the content, and then it will offer a few things to help you enhance the article for readers and search engines alike. This all happens in real time, and the best part: It’s free.

Top 5 Most Beneficial Features of Zemanta

This online tool offers four major features to help improve and speed up the blogging process:

1. Relevant Articles – Every good bloggers know that they should be linking out to authoritative sources. However, it can sometimes be difficult and time consuming to find the right articles to help write the blog post. Zemanta will find a list of articles for you, helping you save time and get what you need to create a solid post. The tool gets these articles from major news sites such as BBC, CNN, and over 30,000 blogs.
2. Related Images – Images are one of the best ways to catch a visitor’s attention. Zemanta will pull these images for you, and you can pick as many of the images as you want to use in your post. You can even specify a specific term to help guide Zemanta in the right direction when it comes time to pull images. This tool gets images from Getty, Flickr, and Wikipedia, all with permission. Below is an example the illustrates how the images work:

1. Tags – Coming up with tags might seem easy, but there is actually quite a bit of thought that goes into the process. You want these tags to be SEO optimized—lots in the content, in the first paragraph, at the beginning of the title, in all of the subheadings—and this isn’t always easy. Zemanta will help give you suggestions about which tags will be best from an SEO perspective.
2. In-Text Links – Creating internal links is important because it will help increase your “time on site” number, or the time visitors spend on your site. It can be very time consuming to run through your past content, try and find related articles, and then try and figure out where you can include a link back to one of these past related articles. Zemanta will do all of this for you. Below is a screenshot of the options you have available when it comes to linking to your past articles:

1. Gain Visitors from Other Sites – Zemanta will actually recommend your post to other Zemanta users if you are writing original content. In other words, you will be a part of the “30,000 blogs” discussed above.

Zemanta also offers a few other features, but these are the four most useful and most popular features available. The tool works great for blog posts, but will also work well if you’re writing a novel, doing any magazine writing, etc. You can therefore focus heavily on the writing and let Zemanta take care of the rest.

How to Get Started with Zemanta

One of the best things about Zemanta is the fact that it is free and easy to install. You can download a plugin just like the many other plugins you likely have for your website or simply download the tool right to your browser. This tool is available on all the major browsers and servers. Click here to download Zemanta and get started.

Have you ever used Zemanta? What was your experience?

About the author:

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to blogging best practices. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including VoIP phone systems to small businesses and entrepreneurs for a lead generation website, Resource Nation.