Z-Blog

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how Zemanta can help you write a great blog about your favorite dish in 4 easy steps.

1. Hyperlinks

We need a piece of sample text to begin with:

An article in the health section of the BBC’s website stated that the popular Indian dish chicken tikka masala with pilau rice typically contains around 47g of fat, while a similar Thai food choice, stir fried chicken with plain steamed rice (phad khing hai) has just 13g of fat of which only 3g is saturated fat. The difference is striking, and the more dishes one compares, the greater the contrast one sees between the two cuisines so far as healthy eating considerations are concerned.

from Thai Food for Health

When we run it through Zemanta, it picks up the most importants the concepts for the text:

For this article, we’ll use:

• chicken tikka masala
• Indian dish
• pilau rice

To apply them to your text and provide your readers in-depth information, if needed, just click on them and they’re going to get automatically hyperlink the words they describe.

Now our text looks like this:

An article in the health section of the BBC’s website stated that the popular Indian dish chicken tikka masala with pilau rice typically contains around 47g of fat, while a similar Thai food choice, stir fried chicken with plain steamed rice (phad khing hai) has just 13g of fat of which only 3g is saturated fat. The difference is striking, and the more dishes one compares, the greater the contrast one sees between the two cuisines so far as healthy eating considerations are concerned.

You might have noticed that we didn’t hyperlink the “phad khing hai” text. That’s because it doesn’t seem to mean much as Googling around for it doesn’t reveal any helpful hints and as such Zemanta can’t recommend anything meaningful to link it to.

2. Images

Zemanta recommendations

Second step in making our blog post nicer to our readers is inclusion of images. Visual elements make it easier for people to decide if the article they’re about to read warrants their attention and if you they should continue with their reading.

Looking at the recommendations we get, there is a number of pictures of chicken tikka masala, allowing us to choose the one we like the most:

Image via Wikipedia

To insert image where we want it in the text, we can just drag and drop it towards the location where we’d like it to be.

3. Related reading from the web

There are two main types of readers your blog will receive:

• regular readers that follow your blog either through feeds or direct visits
• random readers that arrive through various search engines

Both of these audiences can benefit from adding additional reading at the end of your blog post:

• regular readers can learn more and find more in-depth information from other similar blogs. You then become a good source of additional reading in addition to having a good blog in a first place.
• random readers will be able to click-through to the other blogs, if they don’t find something on your blog, but will still be happy as you provided them with something of value. This increases the chance of the returning to your blog and also clicking on search result with your blog it next time they search for something that you’ve covered.

For our example text, I used Filter for “chicken tikka masala” to find more articles dealing with this dish. Two most interesting results are:

Related articles by Zemanta

• The real thing
• Cookalong Live

that talk about how “chicken tikka masala” is becoming UK’s national dish and the experience with cooking it at home.

4. Tags

Tagging your content allows you to better define your own content for later browsing and als gives important meta information about it to different search engines providing an important SEO benefit.

Most of the tags that are recommended are directly useful for this purpose:

We’re leaving out Home as it’s too general and BBC as it’s a byproduct of quote.

5. Conclusion

Applying all these steps gets us a rich blog that should make anyone hungry. All the additional recommendations took seconds to apply as Zemanta automatically found them.

Zemanta on Food blog

There’s no excuse anymore, why your blog can’t have beautiful additional content.