No more Content Aggregation – let’s do Content Curation to bring value to readers along with search engine position

Content Aggregation (which is just a fancy term for the automated gathering of links and content from the web) can be viewed on sites like Google News and several other news kind of websites. Generally, this kind of aggregation may be seen being a good thing for content creators and content publishers and uptill recently, it was upto the technology to do this – meaning – automated scripts or bots – that could help fill up content from different sources. The part of content creation was and has generally been a very human effort.

But all this is now changing with Content Curation — what is content curation? – It is the act of human editors adding their work to the computer programs that gather, collate, organize and filter content.

An wonderful blog post about “content curation” is found on Robin Good’s weblog –  . You absolutely need to read this. It’s a guest post by Rohit Bhargava, the author of an brilliant book called “Personality Not Included”.

Here’s a part from Robin’s blog

“A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

“Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But this is far more than just a human-powered filter – like a Wikipedia or related human based content aggregation service. “Curation comes up when people realize that the world is no longer only about information seeking, it is also (now) about synchronizing communities together.”

One of the reasons that human curation is so very critical is simply because of the vast amount of people who’re now making and sharing media. “Everyone today is a media outlet”, says Shirky. “The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complex – rather it’s quite simple. It means that we can all put things out in the public view now.”

So who are these content curators? What can they gather and re-publish? Do they have the right to get paid for curation? If so, who’s adding the real value, the content makers or the curators/publishers?

According to Dr. Peter Spaepen,

“If you are a blogger and want to put good content out there for your readers – your job should be to be the “content curator” – nothing more. You don’t have to write your own opinion and you don’t have to put a lot of time in writing a post. It’s not supposed to win a Pulitzer Price. Your only goal is to get the “market news” on your blog and get it indexed by Google.”

These questions are still being answered by the community but for now, let’s deal with how you can use 5 great wordpress plugins to bring content curation to your own blogs – these are all wordpress plugins and all of them are free so there is no reason not to try them – if you try one or more of these, leave me a comment and let me know what you think of these tools.

1. Insights

Insights is one of those This is an uber-cool, useful and timesaving wordpress plug-in.

Let’s say you’ve written a post about “green houses”. Insights will pull in results from other (related) blogs that talk about green houses. You also have the ability to add Flickr photos, YouTube videos and Wikipedia results. This plug-in acts as a “Content Enhancer” and will make your post stand out by including as much relevant information about your topic as possible.

Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time quality of your posts.

Insights performs following functions in real-time:

Interlink your posts

Insert Flickr images

Insert Youtube videos

Search Wikipedia

Search Google

Search Google News

Google Blog Search

Google Book Search

Insert a Google Map

2. Zemanta

Zemanta is similar to the Insights plug-in mentioned above. It pulls in similar information but also pulls in relevant tags, images from other sources as well as Amazon results. If it’s similar to Insights, then why use it? Simple – every time I use Zemanta (which is literally every time I write a post), it pulls in additional and/or different results then Insights. So, both of these plug-ins make “each other” better by using them in combination. If you see, some of the posts on this website have “Related links from Zemanta” – that’s what it’s all about.

Zemanta brings you:

Links: Wikipedia, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon, CrunchBase, MusicBrainz, Snooth wines, Wikinvest

Videos: YouTube, 5min

Images: Getty, Flickr, Wikipedia

Widgets: Google Maps, Last.fm, Slideshare, Wikinvest

Articles: Major news sources like BBC and CNN and over 10,000 blogs

Social Networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, MyBlogLog

A simple point and click interface allows you to add only recommendations that you like. Recommended content is blogger friendly with clearly marked licenses (Creative Commons or similar).

Not having to search for related content saves you time and increases the efficiency of your editorial process. You can specify your own blog(s) and Zemanta will recommend links to your related posts!

Amazon affiliate support allows you to quickly link to books, music CD’s and DVD’s and earn money in the process.

3. Apture

Apture helps you add multimedia to your blog with one click. It’s used by popular sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, but we are giving it to you for FREE. With Apture, you can keep readers on your site and create more content in less time. Ever wanted to add Searches from Twitter or maybe link to that specific episode on Hulu of your favorite show? Well with Apture you can. Did we also mention it’s Free

Benefits

Decreased Bounce Rate for your blog. See here

Increased Time On Site. Your readers are going to be engaging with all of the content Apture adds to your blog right on your site.

Easily create external links increasing your SEO rank in search engines

Add Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps, Royalty Free Pictures, music and more from 50 sources of content with one click

Save yourself money on hosting costs. Apture hosts your pictures, movies, word docs and pdf files for you.

Its free and easy – install and setup only takes a minute

4. Snap Shots

Snap Shots products are used on over 2,000,000 websites and blogs, who appreciate the improved experience we provide their users along with the additional advertising inventory we create. Our Engage products help major content owners add depth to their own offerings and extend their reach across our network to build awareness, traffic and revenue. Together, they comprise a complete solution that’s helping to reaggregate content and users in an increasingly fragmented Internet.

5. Metaweb Topicblocks

Metaweb plugin is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily add Metaweb TopicBlocks to your blog posts directly from within WordPress. You can quickly add TopicBlocks to individual blog posts or have TopicBlocks automatically inserted whenever you use certain tags.

A Freebase icon will appear on your WordPress “Edit Post” page, allowing you to insert TopicBlocks with the click of a button.

You can create a rule that says, “Whenever I tag a blog post with ‘avatar_movie’ insert an Avatar TopicBlock at the bottom of the post.” To create rules like this, click the “Connect Tags to Freebase” button on your WordPress tags page.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Blogging With Zemanta – Content Linking and Tagging Made Easy (codemyownroad.com)
• HiveFire: Content Curation for Marketers | Jamie Beckland (@Beckland) reviews HiveFire (hivefire.com)
• The importance of curation (e1evation.com)
• On Content Curation (vocecommunications.com)
• Content Marketing: Definitions of Curation & Context (toprankblog.com)

Non-English Startpages:

• dodoor.cn: Chinese with drag and drop and a slideshow. [info]

• Ichigo.se: Swedish, Non-profit. No drag and drop. Ichigo means strawberry in Japanese but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with it: the interface is black and white. [blog]

• MyHommy: Israeli. Pastel! Soft blue, light grey stripes with round corners. Does not work in Safari.

• startowy Polish with colorfull blocks. Works in Safari.

• Internet Start: Serious black, blue and grey, no drag and drop. Reminds me of Microsoft.

• StartForce: Japanese Ajax desktop. [info]

• My Potu!: NEW: Chinese. Ressembles dodoor, RSS news, Gmail, weather, support for social photos services

• okrss NEW light bleu and grey for RSS

• Blogcool: Chinese RSS reader startpage

↑ UP

Web OS:

• YouOs: NEW! WebOS like startpage with chat, rich text editor, mail, rss reader, mp3… and even a shell.

• XIN: NEW! Closed beta. Ajax WebOS

• WinLIKE: WebOS for download. See skins and sites.

• WebOS: for download.

• Twinklefish: WebOS. To come.

• Desktop Two: NEW! by Sapotek. Online Flash WebOS.

• FlyakiteOSX: Not a webOs but an online mac Flash desktop also available for local windows.

In all of my years of experience with wordpress plugins, I find the following 20 plugins to be the best for good search engine optimization. Please note that some of them are paid while others are free but I do not get paid for any of them if you buy them (as I feel that will make this review non-objective).

So let’s start with the 20 best SEO plugins for wordpress

#1: SEO Booster Pro

SEO Booster PRO is a really awesome powerful search engine optimization Plugin for WordPress that automates your blog by tracking, analyzing and utilizing the incoming searches from the various search engines. SEO Booster PRO auto-magically tracks your inbound site visitors from Google, researches the current ranking of the keyword, and then starts promoting the best suited keywords, after installation, you don’t need to do anything else. Just install and watch your search positions rise!!

SEO Booster Pro - Top WordPress SEO Plugins

SEO Booster Pro Homepage

#2: SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links offers automated SEO advantages for your site in addition to custom made keyword lists, nofollow plus much more. SEO Smart Links could instantly link keywords and phrases in your blogposts and comments with related posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Additionally SEO Smart linkspermits you to configure and set up keywords and set of matching URLs. Ultimately SEO Smart links enables you to set nofollow attribute and open these links in a new window. Almost everything happens totally transparent, and you could edit the options from your admin console panel. SEO Smart links is ideal for cross linking your content and is an example of how you can do cost effective seo by yourself.

SEO Smart Links - Top SEO WordPress Plugin

SEO Smart Links Homepage

#3: WP SEO Sniper

With SEO Sniper, you can do the following:

WP SEO Sniper - Top WordPress SEO plugin

WP SEO Sniper Homepage – This plugin has been discontinued for some strange reason but the current plugin can still be downloaded and used without problems.

#4: SEO Title Tag

Important Features of the SEO Title Tag plugin

• You could easily define custom titles for your post, a page, your Categories and Tags or any other URL that you specify like an author archive etc.
• You could set a custom slugs for a post or a page,
• This plugin will automatically put your blog’s name at the end of the title tag (instead of the beginning of the title) hence the most critical keywords are visible earlier
• You could specify your custom post title a  new post or in the edit post admin pages
• You could define a custom title for any of the 404 error pages too
• There is a way to mass edit titles and slugs thereby giving you a page that has good on-page search engine optimization on it

SEO Title Tags - WordPress SEO Plugin

SEO Title Tag Homepage

#5:Platinum SEO

This plugin is a an essential plugin to optimize your post and page titles for search engines – this makes it really easy to do search engine optimization on your pages.

It will generate all SEO relevant META tags automatically and helps you avoid duplicate content

This plugin will also allow you to override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page

This one is compatible with most other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others plugins – but you may have to disable All in One SEO pack

You don’t have to fear changing permalinks. If you are not happy with the current permalink, you can change it through Settings–>Permalinks in your admin panel, and not have to worry about loss of Page rank or the Google penalty. The Platinum SEO plugin takes care of sending out a 301 redirect to the new location. It is a an essential feature and is not present in All in one SEO

The plugin also helps you add meta description and meta keywords tags to the  Categories and Tag pages.

Add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post/page.These options are not available in All in one SEO Pack.

Platinum SEO Pack - Top WordPress SEO plugin

Platinum SEO Homepage

#6:XML Sitemaps

The XML Sitemaps plugin is a really great plugin that  generates a special XML sitemap that will help search engines like Google,  Yahoo, Bing etc to better index your blog and go further in creating a search engine optimized page. With this kind of a sitemap on your blog, it is  easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site instantly and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports most kinds of wordpress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. There is no question that this helps a lot with google search engine optimization

XML Sitemap Generator - Top wordpress SEO plugin

XML Sitemaps Homepage

#7: Redirection

For a range of factors you occasionally need to be able to move a page from one location on your weblog to another, however you are in danger of dropping that web page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects and captures a log of the 404 errors so that you can then work on correcting them – it also sets up an RSS feed for these errors and much more.

301 redirects are mainly used to permanently move a site to a new location. Search engines do not apply penalties to 301 redirects the way they apply them to many other types of redirects. Generally whenever we do a 301 redirect, we need to create a .htaccess file and add the rules inside this file. This plugin simplifies the process and allows us to define these rule very easily without any knowledge of .htaccess.

It is a really important plugin that will help with google search engine optimization – especially so for small business seo – where sometimes companies buy other companies and you don’t want your users to get lots of 404 errors when the sites of these two companies are merged.

Redirection wordpress plugin for SEO

Redirection Homepage

#8 SEO Friendly Images

Images can easily be an excellent source of traffic since visitors search for images of various topics. This plugin will help you to ensure that you have “ALT” and “TITLE” tags on all your images so that the search engines can index them correctly.

If these images do not have the ALT and TITLE tags set already, SEO Friendly Images can add them in accordance with the options that you define. Furthermore this makes the post XHTML valid. Adding the ALT tag is a very important part of the search engine optimization process. It describes your image to the search engines and whenever a user is searching for a certain image this tag is the key determining factor for a whether a match is found or not. TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image. A nice addition to your effective seo campagin

SEO Friendly Images for WordPress

SEO Friendly Images Homepage

#9 Google Positioner

It is critical to know your keywords phrases. This plugin will allow you to track the keywords that are bringing you  searches. It is really worthless to select  a few keywords, then write content for those keywords and hope that all goes well. Search Engine Optimization is not just being optimistic but is more about being proactive and tracing what  works and what does not work.

Once you put the right keywords in the right page, it is very important to keep a record of your keyword performance.  And now with this  plugin it is possible to track your website for your keywords in Google search engine. The main focus is on Google due to the fact that it’s  influence is so much greater then all the other search engines put together.

You should be able to track a particular keyword on a specific page, and hope to have a rising curve, which means that your web page has started to rank better for a certain query.

Google Positioner WordPress SEO Plugin

Google Positioner WordPress Plugin

#10  SEO Slugs

Stop words are generally ignore by most search engines. Most of your post titles have them, but they are meaningless to the search engines. So when you have a post title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” you have a permalink like this: ‘/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings’ but what you really want is for your permalink to look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.

Blog post titles usually get an h1-h3 heading, which makes them critical for keyword optimization.  SEOSlug will optimize the blog post titles and improve search engine visibility by making edits to the keyword strings. It will remove conjunctions from titles, (words like “as” and “if”) to allow crawlers to more readily crawl main content keywords as a fluid string. This makes it far easier to rank higher and is another example of a cost effective seo technique that you can use for your website.

SEO Slugs WordPress Plugin

SEO Slugs Homepage

#11 Cross Linker

This wordpress plugin can automatically hyperlink selected words to a pre-defined URL. The hyperlinking process functions in posts and comments which is given as an option. If youupgrade from a previous version, then please don’t deactivate the original installation of this plugin. Awesome search engine optimization plugin.

CrossLinker SEO Plugin

Cross Linker WordPress Plugin

#12 Ultimate Tag Warrior

This is really the best tag system for WordPress. With this plugin you can easily use the categories and tag system on your website. It makes it really easy by searching through all the tags you made for the posts.

The greatest challenge is in really in figuring out what tags to use in your wordpress theme to generate the tags. You have a couple of choices : you can use site search tags or Technorati Tags. You can add one or the other or both.

By default, these tags can be added automatically to the end of your posts by choosing that option in your Tags customization panel. You can choose to add Technorati or site search tags or both to the end of your posts. The problem with this is that the plugin just adds the tags to the end of the post.

The automatic tags are wrapped in a span <span class="localtags">. You can style that span, even adding a clear:both to put the tags on their own line, but I found that this doesn’t always work, depending upon your WordPress Theme layout.

You can turn off the automatic functions and manually add tags to your WordPress Theme template files to generate the tags. This works great and you can wrap them in your own style to control the look and placement of the tags.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress SEO Plugin

#13 Landing Sites

Whenever visitors are referred to your web site from a search engine, they are  looking for something specific and often they just  check the page they land on very briefly and then close the window if they don’t find what they were looking for. This plugin helps them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog thereby giving a greater chance at stickiness and reducing your bounce rate.

Landing Sites WordPress SEO Plugin

Landing Sites WordPress Plugin

#14 WP Backlinks

Everyone who is serious about Search Engine Optimization is interested in getting more links to their blog.

WP Backlinks helps you to collect and manage reciprocal links with other blogs. Bloggers can fill out a form on your blog, add a link to you, and you will then be notified so you can add a reciprocal link. It’s a pretty cool plugin to enhance backlinks to your website.

WP Backlinks

WP Backlinks WordPress Plugin

#15  Broken Link Checker

This plugin checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if it finds any. Link checking intervals can be configured via the plugin options.

When the number of your blog posts increase significantly, the check for  broken link become a very difficult and time consuming  task. Sometimes the URL or website that you are linking is out of service and there are several other reasons. With the help of this great plugin, you can now easily identify these problem and update or remove the links quickly. This is an important plugin to ensure better search engine optimization.

Broken Link Checker WordPress SEO Plugin

Broken Link Checker Homepage

#16 WP Super-Cache

This plug in contributes to your site speed and it helps your blog load faster. Since search engines are giving greater importance to site speed in their ranking algorithms, this has become an even more important plugin.  The number of pages on your blog that a search engine indexes on a daily basis increases with speed.  If the indexing on each page is a quicker exercise for the spiders, more pages will be indexed.

WP-Super-Cache works by creating  a static html version for each of your wordpress blog post so that the webserver will now serve the static files much faster. This will also help protect and strengthen your server when it is receives a high amount of traffic, which can result from all your other great SEO strategies. The reason for this is that WP Super Cache serves a static html page to 99% of your site visitors.

Since these days search engines are giving  increased importance to site performance, for good search engine optimization, it is a great plugin. It is also a good plugin because you can get very cost effective seo done for free.

Wordpress Supercache Plugin

WP Super-Cache

#17: W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache which uses memcache and APC. This makes load time a lot faster and much more effective for the user and is a better browsing experience.

W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin

W3 Total Cache

#18 HeadSpace2

Because the configuration of meta-data can be a complicated and tiresome process HeadSpace provides several shortcuts to reduce your effort:

* Meta-data nesting – data is collected not only from the page itself, but nested parent pages
* Dynamic data extracted – why repeat yourself when you can extract data from the post itself?
* Full GUI interface – data is entered alongside post content, and with a full auto-suggested AJAX interface for tags and keywords
* Mass-editing – now you can edit meta-data for all pages and posts at one go!

# Page-specific modules:

* Page titles – SEO optimized titles
* Tags and keywords are auto-suggested using a smart algorithm or via Yahoo and work on both posts and pages (pages can also be set to appear in tag archives)
* Page-specific plugins – have plugins that run only on specific pages!
* Theme-specific plugins – change your site theme on specific pages!
* Description – what appears in search engine listing
* More text – change the ‘more text’ for each post
* Anything else you want – HeadSpace allows custom meta-data

# Site-wide modules:

* Configure auto-formatting (wpautop), auto-fancy quotes, auto-clickable links, and disable visual editing
* Tracking codes for Google Analytics (new & old code), Crazy Egg, StatCounter, 103bees, Mint, FeedBurner Stats, Yahoo! Site Explorer, HitTail, Google Webmaster, Piwik, and Apture, with the ability to not track registered users
* Google section targeting
* First Time Visitor – display a special message to visitors when they first visit your site (based upon idea by Seth Godin)
* Disable Widgets
* Change PHP memory limit, timeout, and error reporting level

Due to the number of meta-data plugins available for WordPress, HeadSpace will import data from these plugins:

* UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior)
* SEO Title tags
* All-in-one SEO
* Jerome’s Keywords
* Simple Tagging
* lud.icro.us HeadMeta
* HeadMeta description

Headspace 2 WordPress SEO Plugin

Headspace 2 wordpress plugin Homepage

#19 Broken Links Remover

Broken links Remover wordpress plugin helps you fix bad and broken links and this applies to both text links (anchor tags) and image links (img tags).It blocks the display of such links on your wordpress post/page, until you fix them. These are not made visible to search engine robots as well, until you correct them.

Broken links are bad for your readers and bad for search engine robots.

Whenever a human visitor or a search engine robot requests a post or a page on your website, this plugin will check the status of all links on that post/page and If any of the links is bad or broken the plugin will log this information  and replaces the link with just the anchor text.

Broken Links Remover WordPress Plugin

Broken Links Remover WordPress Plugin Homepage

#20 Scribe SEO

Scribe SEO is plugin that works with WordPress to analyze your posts and gives you feedback about them and makes suggestions about how to improve your post from an Search Engine Optimization perspective. If you use the Thesis, the plugin interfaces without any hitch. It also seems to work well with Hybrid and Headway themes. If you are not using any of these themes the plugin will also work fine as long as you have the All in One SEO plugin.

Once you are done writing your post, this plugin does a check to make sure that you have written a well optimized version of your title in the custom title field. It then does a check to see if you have put a meta description. Despite the fact that  the meta description is not a part of the ranking algorithm of most search engines, your meta description is somewhat important because it appears under your page title in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and putting together a click-enticing meta description is always a good thing. Google uses click tracking data.

And then ultimately, this plugin does a check to see if you have got content for the post. Once all the checks are performed you will see three green arrows like in the screenshot below and then analyze button will “turn on.” Click on this button and the process will start. A really really awesome plugin to get your page with great search engine optimization

Please note that this is a paid plugin service and costs between $17 to $97 per month.

Scribe SEO Plugin

Scribe SEO homepage

That’s it everyone – this is the most exhaustive list of wordpress plugins for SEO that you will find on the internet. If you love this, please submit this to Digg, Stumble Upon and other Social Bookmarking websites.

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