Zemanta Review: SEO Link Building With The Zemanta Plugin

If you are a blogger you may have heard of the Zemanta plugin available for various blogging platforms such as WordPress, MoveableType, Drupal and Joomla. The plugin can also be installed on your Firefox, Chrome or IE web browser. If you haven’t used The Zemanta plugin I would highly recommend it for many different reasons, one of which is to help you build links. Zemanta is essentially a blogging coach, helping improve your writing in many different ways. As you start to write a new post, it suggests related content already on the web similar to yours to link to. It will also show you complementary pictures to embed in to your posts and will recommend popular keywords to include in your copy.  By implementing these suggestions, you should receive more traffic because you’re using popular keywords and your posts will be more engaging with good pictures so your visitors will stay on your site longer.

Zemanta as a Link Building Tool

Most SEO professionals perform their own keyword research before starting to write a new post and probably already have an idea for images, but if you don’t this is a great tool. My favorite use for the Zemanta plugin is to help me find related sites to acquire links from. I start out by creating a new blog post and pasting a list of keywords I am trying to target. Zemanta scans over the keywords and makes recommendations for similar articles from their network of sites. The articles listed in Zemanta tend to have more traffic and authority, so they make great link targets.

At this point, as I write this post, Zemanta is showing me 5 different articles that are related to my post, not including the articles from zemanta.com. Once I am done with my post, I could visit each one of these sites and reach out to the owner to see if they would be interested in linking to my post, or I could leave a valuable comment on the page and include a link back to my post. Alternatively, these sites could be great guest blogging opportunities or even possible affiliates. These are just a few alternative uses for the Zemanta plugin that I have found valuable. You can actually try out a demo of Zemanta and see what sites it recommends for you. If you have any different uses please let me know in the comments below, I would love to hear about it.