Tags

Tags play an important role in improving the usability and findability of your web site. AutoBlogged uses tags a number of ways. First, it can pull the tags that the original author set on the feed itself. Second, it can visit the original URL to find additional tags, and finally you can also use the Yahoo! tagging API to extract additional tags.

Note that tag support in WordPress is fairly new so many older themes do not display a post’s tags. You can fix this by modifying the theme itself or finding a plugin such as Simple Tags that will do this for you.

Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are an excellent way to increase relevant keyword density on every page of your web site. WordPress has a sidebar widget to display a tag cloud for the most popular tags on your site. Also consider the Simple Tags plugin for a much more configurable sidebar widget.

When you first add feeds to AutoBlogged and run the script, you might notice that the tag cloud contains tags that are not relevant to your content. However, as time passes and your site content grows, the more relevant tags will appear more frequently and the off-topic tags will fall off the tag cloud.

Using Categories

Although you do want a large number of tags to help search engine ranking, you should be more selective with your use of categories. Use categories as a simple navigational aid on your web site and try not to create more than fifteen primary categories for your site. Every time AutoBlogged processes feeds, it goes through all blog categories to see if they appear in the feed content so a large number of categories will slow down feed processing.

Subcategories

One helpful use for categories is to use them as subcategories to group content into consistent main categories. For example, under a main category you might want to create subcategories for synonyms or alternate terminology.

…

Tags: clouds feed content findability keyword density navigational aid off topic search engine synonyms tag support usability wordpress yahoo

Contest Announcement

NOTICE: This contest is now over, watch our site for future contest announcements!

Have you built a great-looking site using AutoBlogged or are you using our script in some unique and clever way? We are now scouring the web to find the best AutoBlogged sites out there and are excited to announce our first ever autoblogging contest!

From now until April 30, 2009 we are taking entries for the best autoblog sites out there. One winner and two runners up will receive hundreds of dollars in cash and prizes!

Prizes

First Place – One first place winner will win the prizes below (valued at almost $1000),

	A Visa gift card for USD $200
	A developer’s license for one premium WordPress theme at WooThemes.com ($150 value)
	A license for one premium WordPress theme at Press75.com ($75 value)
	A license for the Movie Automator plugin at GoSCRIPT.net ($15 value)
	A lifetime Developer license of AutoBlogged (includes all future versions) ($395+ value)
	A link to your web site from the home page at www.autoblogged.com ($150 value)

Runners Up – Two runners up will receive the following prizes (valued at almost $350)

	A Visa gift card for USD $50
	A license for the WP Uniquefier plugin at GoSCRIPT.net ($15 value)
	A lifetime Multi-Site license of AutoBlogged (includes all future versions) ($129+ value)
	A link to your web site from the home page at www.autoblogged.com ($120 value)

How We Judge

All winners will be chosen by a panel of judges consisting of one judge from AutoBlogged.com and three independent judges not affiliated with AutoBlogged.com.

The winners of the contest will be decided based on the following criteria:
• Overall creativity, originality, and concept – we want to be amazed.
• Creative and innovative use of AutoBlogged features – we want to show off what AutoBlogged can really do.
• General usefulness and value of the site – we don’t want to fill up the Internet with junk and we want to show that autoblogs aren’t just spam sites.
• Visual presentation, and usability – we want the site to look great and be easy to navigate.

For more information, please see our Contest Rules.

Note that this isn’t a design contest, the emphasis here is on the original and creative use of AutoBlogged, but we want to see sites that we are proud to show off as AutoBlogged example sites. Since this isn’t a design contest you are free to use any WordPress theme you want. Here are some premium WordPress themes we recommend.

Example Sites

To get things started we set up a few autoblogs of our own to show what kind of stuff we are looking for.

http://mspatchwatch.com

http://advertiserguide.us

http://idolz.us

http://windows2008security.com

http://quickgardening.com

We also suggest you visit the FAQ, Knowledge Base, and Tips section of our support forum. We will be adding new tips to that regularly during our contest.

How to Enter

1. The contest ends at 12:00 am MST (GMT -0700) on April 30, 2009.
2. Read the Contest Rules.
3. To enter, please create a new post in this forum

Sponsors

We would like to give a special thank you our contest sponsors!