Z-Blog

Zemanta has 4 major types of recommendations:

• images
• articles
• tags
• hyperlinks

Today I’m going to talk about article recommendations. How they work, what are selection criteria and how to get your blog recommended to all Zemanta users.

Lets start with a screen shot, so we all know what I’m describing:

Zemanta related articles

There are a number of different visual elements in it:

• Title of blog post
• Zemanta icon if the blog post was enhanced with Zemanta
• Orange person icon, if the feed is part of your personal feed selection. Here’s our blog post about personalizing Zemanta
• Approximate time of when was article published
• Domain name of blogger, so you have a rough idea who’s linking to
• A (visit) link that will open the blog in new window so you can check the actual post content

Now the big question next to all this – how do I get my feed into Zemanta related articles?

As always, there’s an easy way and a bit complicated way.

The easiest way to get your own feeds into Zemanta for you while you blog is to add them to your personal feed selection. To do that you have to be logged into Zemanta preferences and add your feeds to your selection list.

Here’s a screenshot of how selection looks for my Preferences:

Zemanta related articles

(there are many more as I’ve uploaded my Google Reader OPML file directly)

There’s only one catch with this approach. These feeds will only be available to you and won’t be automatically shared with other users.

Second, a bit more complicated way, is to take a look at our criteria list. In short, your blog has fulfill at least following criteria:

• It has to be in English
• Full text feed
• Has quality content

together with a few other things. Of course using Zemanta to enhance its blog posts is a plus in inclusion process.

Lets finish this post with a few reasons that we’ve heard from our users that are part of Zemanta’s global index:

• More incoming links on quality posts make both Google and Technorati happy
• A whole title gets linked to your blog post, making it a great SEO keyword optimization
• Trackbacks of your blog post help to bring attention to your blog on the same topic and bring together starting points of community
• All of these factors together lead to more traffic and better search engine rankings

Did you find some other uses for Zemanta’s related articles? Let us know in comments, together with your questions on this topic.