I initially was going to make this post part of my last post but thought that it would serve better as its own entity. I want to explain some of the best practices as far as using the WP autoblog plugin goes. In the last post I mentioned about adding lots and lots of feeds well one place I always manage to find lots of feeds is directly from google, yahoo and feedburner.

You can use the addresses below, exchanging the word KEYWORD for a URL safe keyphrase:
http://feeds.technorati.com/search/KEYWORD
http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=KEYWORD&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m&n=100&format=rss
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=KEYWORD&format=rss
http://www.blogdigger.com/search?q=KEYWORD&sortby=date&type=rss
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=KEYWORD&ie=utf-8&num=100&output=rss
http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=KEYWORD&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

If you replace KEYWORD with your keyphrase and then add these feeds to your plugin config page you will have 6 feeds, do this for 10 keywords and you will have 60 feeds right there, very useful if you wanna speed up setup of this script.

Pimp up your blog, leaving your WP installation standard looking and working will leave you open to scrutiny by the SEs so for the sake of a couple of minutes download a new theme, possibly something with ad spaces, and get it uploaded. New themes can give better CTRs and even be better laid out as far as SEO is concerned, if a theme is the difference between 10k pages indexed and 100 pages indexed it is worth changing.

More plugins, have a look around at some SEO plugins, these can really help with your site structure and lead to more optimised SEO and inner linking. Get an auto commenter, this will help to build variety in your inner linking of your blog posts and could also help to keep a visitor on your blog. Mix up your autoblogs with some other sources of posts, maybe use a plugin that auto posts some affiliate feeds or youtube vids, anything you can think of to give some variation and/or more income.

XMLRPC update services

This is so important I thought I would bold it. If you are unaware what this part of your WP admin area is all about it gives you the facility to announce your new posts to lots of blog aggregators that get huge amounts of traffic, think social bookmarking sites but just for blogs. In your “Settings” area under “Writing” in your WP admin area you will see a text area at the bottom of the page labelled “Update Services”. In this box you should add as many XMLRPC update services as you can find, it takes no effort to add these sites once you have a good list so you may as well stick in a huge bunch of them.

What you dont have a list? You dont know where to find them? Ok I will give you my personally list right here, it is what I use on all of my blogs and find that it is a decent list that works fine for me:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

To use this list simply highlight it, copy it and then paste it into your “Update Services” box in your admin and you are good to go. If you have anymore of these update services I will happily add it to my public list after checking it out.

Well I think that is pretty much it for now, I will get a couple more posts out by the end of the week hopefully and see how it goes, I was hoping to get a more recent preview of Rank4 out soon as they have been adding more things and fixing a few bugs so there should be something good to talk about there. Also I will be having an exclusive look at a new open source website engine that is very uncompetitive at the moment, I cant mention much but I think this could be the social bookmarking of 2009.

Take it easy guys

Ok so its been a while but Im kicking off the new reviews with a personal favourite of mine so I will try to be as clear aboout what this tool does and does not do without getting too excitable. Ok for starters what this tool is is a plugin for Wordpress that takes a bunch of RSS feeds and pulls articles, adds to your blog and then sends a trackback to the original blog(extended functionality not available in the original plugin, more on this later).

Now if you are unfamiliar with a trackback it is essentially what some forums and blogs use to announce that they have linked to their site, some of these forums and blogs will in turn publish a link back to your site automatically. Trackbacks have been turned off on a lot more sites recently so this side of the plugin has decreased in effectiveness in the recent year or so, nevertheless it still works to some degree and will result in hundreds of links in most circumstances.

Download WP autoblog

So we know what the tool does lets get into how the plugin is used. As with all WP plugins you will first need to upload to the plugins directory of your WP blog and then login to activate it in your admin section, sounds easy right? Well thats because it is. Once activated you will need to enter in you’re RSS feeds into the text area in the plugin admin section of your WP admin. When setting up this plugin you will want to add A LOT of RSS feeds, this will work with as few as 20 feeds but you should really be looking at 100 at least, maybe even 1000 if you can get that many unique feeds.

Once you have input your feeds simple click the “Run WP-autoblog” plugin button and then walk away from your computer and get yourself a bevvy, you’ve earned it. Now I know what you are thinking, “Is that it?”. Well yes and no, for starters it is never good having a site up with no monetisation so you will either want to be setting up these blogs with the intent of procurring a bunch of links without any effort so that you can redirect, at some point in the future, to send those links to a money site of yours. Alternatively you can add some adsense on there or some related affiliate ads.

I would advise against having these sites up for too long as you run the risk of getting the site delisted from the major SEs and they lose their value, it is better to have them running for a few weeks to a couple of months max and then redirect. One major drawback with these blogs is that they are incredibly server intensive so you will ideally want a VPS or small dedicated server. I recently tried having 1 blog running on some unlimit hostgator hosting and with 40 RSS feeds they will literally block any visitors because the plugin is working overtime.

The plugin described in this post is based off the Elliot Back plugin with some extra functionality.

Roboform  (download here) is not the same as the other applications I will be looking at in this round up of directory submitters, what makes roboform different is the fact that it isnt a directory submitter at all and if im completely honest it isnt useful to me as a directory submitter. So why the hell would I be sat here writing about a program that has nothing to do with the topic of choice and is no good to me as an SEO? The short answer is that its functions suit the purpose of directory submissions and lots of people swear by it so it cant be all bad. Lets look a lil deeper.

What exactly is roboform if it isnt a directory submitter? In short it is a web browser extension that remembers form details (that you want it to remember) and can auto fill at the click of a button. This is usefull in directory submissions as it will remember all teh usual form field information, URL, title, description etc and fill it in for you at the click of a button. This obviously has many more uses than simple directory submissions but it fits in just nicely with the needs of a directory submitter.

Roboform is a cheap (read free) browser extension with a small footprint and offers lots of features that will come in handy to any SEO given enough time to find uses for it. It is definitely a great time saver when it comes to remembering passwords or filling in form after form, what it isnt good at though is finding directories to submit to. This is where I fell out with roboform, I found that with the amount of submissions I was wanting to do I couldnt be arsed to find the directories to submit to and then manually navigate to the submission page, I know im lazy but meh im also worried about efficiency.

So basically for the cost (free) you would be daft not to at least give it a try, especially if you already have a good list of good web directories (dont forget that the best ones often arent on semi-automated application lists (digixmas and submiteaze) and these give the most benefit) then Roboform is absolutely what you will be looking for. If you are a professional SEO looking for software to semi-automate 100s to 1000s of submissions in the space of a day you are not looking for roboform.

I have to admit something before I go much further about Fast Directory Submitter (Download Here Free), I was unaware of this application before setting out to write this round up of directory submitters. I was under the impression that digixmas was a one of a kind program, the sort that just works as it should and doesnt give you any shit along the way. I have to say when I got the trial of this software I was more than pleasantly surprised, I was simply amazed.

I love digixmas and it would take a mightily good program to pull me away (I have a good working relationship with Tuan who is a dev over at digi) but this software very nearly hooked me. Initial impressions of the interface were very good indeed, it looks good and at the same time is still very functional. It works very similarly to digi in that it has a little section for creating and editing campaigns (your websites to submit) and it also goes through the submission process very similarly.

As a free user you get 150 free submissions to directories ranging from PR0 to PR5 which is very commendable for a free trial (digi only gives 100 PR0-PR1). So this is all great, how does it perform? Well to be honest the setting up of a campaign couldnt be any simpler, it is very intuitive and quick with it, the user interface is the quickest out of all of the stand alone directory submitters. The submission user interface does function very well but leaves a little to be desired, when submitting you will constantly be switching from keyboard to mouse which is annoying, what makes it more annoying is that you cannot rely solely on the keyboard (once you get used to digixmas you will rip through the process). That is not to say that the program will not be usable by most just that to get the absolute best speed of submissions this is sadly not the one.

Ok how many directories are there in the paid version? Fecking loads and loads and loads about 2800 (digi has 1700 free) give or take, this is great apart from there is a mix of reciprocal and free directories in this, I tried to find the number of each but I imagine there will be roughly the same amount of free directories as digi has and the rest will be recip direcories. Recip directories are good in that they generally have a mass of links pointing to them but dont expect to gain a lot from these directories as search engines don’t like reciprocal links.

What about price, how does it stack up against the competition? Well the price per campaign (website to submit) is currently set at £10 GBP or roughly $19 after conversion, this is obviously more expensive than digi and all the other choices in this round up.

If you are looking for a submitter that is very quick to run (like speedy gonzales on speed) this is your only option, it is really very impressive how they get the speed out of it. I do sometimes wonder if all that speed is good for RSI though, you will be the weak link in the chain while using this software, do expect some wear and tear on your joints and musccles.

As good as it is and as quick as it is I personally would not bother with reciprocal directories and find the price a little too prohibitive when DigiXmas is right there with its super easy to use submission process and lower price, it just suits my needs more than Fast Directory Submitter. However if you are looking to wow customers with a huge list of directories that you submit to and need that slight edge in submission speed you wont find a better product than this one.

SubmitEaze is a desktop application that runs similarly to DigiXmas in that you input a set of criteria such as name, URL, titles and descriptions. It also supports all the randomisation you would expect in titles and descriptions so it has plenty of functionality. SubmitEaze has one very distinct advantage over Digixmas in that it is a pay once use forever style program which costs $65 (costs less than the submission price for 4 websites through digixmas) which is quite considerably cheaper if you are looking to submit more than just a couple of websites through the software.

I bought this program a long time ago and was pleasantly surprised with the functionality that it brought with it, it splits the directories into free, paid and reciprocal (free but you must provide a link to the directory from your website before you can submit your site) and the whole package is very easy to use and geared towards the non to middling technically minded people. It isnt the quickest software out there, taking a lot longer to submit to each directory (about 12x slower than digixmas and 15x slower than fast directory submitter). It really comes down to how many sites you are going to be submitting through the software and what level of speed you need.

If you are starting out and you just want to submit to a bunch of sites without getting to know a system inside out or you dont quite fully understand the hows and whys of better directory submission this is a great tool for holding your hand through the earlier stages of learning to do proper SEO. Also if price is a big deciding factor for you you can do a whole lot worse than SubmitEaze.

If you are a professional SEO with little time on your hands to burn then you may want to overlook this offering as the $15 per website of digixmas will save you lots of time and effort. This is not for the professionals out there though it is a great place to start for those with less than a year or two of SEO and web promotions under their belt.