by Kai Hendry

Search Engine Optimization ? Advanced Strategies ? Steps To Setting Up An Autoblog For Seo Optimization

For example, a real estate website could automatically pull postings from their local MLS listing service and create effective web posts on a realtors blog about each properly by listing information and pictures for visitors, this type of auto blogging is fairly common in the industry and saves agents countless hours of copy and pasting listing details from other websites.

Let’s take a look at how to run an effective auto blogging package, it takes a little experience and technical knowledge but these may be easily overcome hiring a web professional  for the more complicated parts of the process.

Install WordPress

Step one of course is to install WordPress a great and flexible blogging package that happens to be free.  There is a ‘5 minute’ quick WordPress setup FAQ online.  It is really pretty simple.  However, once you’ve done it a few times you can join me in saying that. You can download WordPress directly and install it on your web host of if you’re less technical you can setup your hosting with a good host provider that handles WordPress on the Linux platform and can push cron jobs and use their automated process to easily install WordPress with a quick click of your mouse.

Install Appropriate Plugins

Plugins are add ons to WordPress, they’re like super powered steroids that make WordPress do extra stuff. In this case, you’ll need to download and install FeedWordPress or your ‘auto posting’ software to make WordPress import RSS feeds from around the Internet.  There are a ton of WordPress Plugins and they really help out immensely if you know which ones to pick (both free and commercial) to assist in your autoblog process.

What’s an RSS feed? Well simply put, its call Real Simple Syndication.  Like a news feed to a newspaper from a main news source. RSS feeds are used to let one computer or software program talk to another, basically it’s a specially formatted file that tells one website about the content of another website.

You’ll need to use it to automatically pull content from one website to display on other.

Now, to make sure you’re really cutting down on your workload, there are a few more Plugins that you’ll need. See, FeedWordPress will fetch thousands of posts … some are duplicated so lets add some WordPress Plugins to make your life a little easier.

WP Auto Tagger will add keywords to each post automatically, this helps cut down the work you’ll have to do to each post if you’re using feed WordPress though others do this automatically.

Delete Duplicate Posts is a quick way to make sure you don’t have duplicate posts in your database if feed WordPress or others are being used that create these posts.  Again, you’ll hear this often, there are some programs that don’t require this plug-in.  If they do, it is only intermittent and it can be ‘shut off’ when not needed.

Setup Your Feeds

Now that you have your blog setup and running, you’ll need to add feeds from popular sources to automatically populate your blog. For example, you may wish to add a feed from Google for blog posts FeedWordPress. Once this is done, your website will scan the blogshere on a schedule, looking for all new posts about the subjects you choose.  This can create duplicate posts, junk posts and a ‘runaway blog’ if you’re not careful.  And it only does RSS feeds.  There are other ways to autoblog, which I’ll cover on the blogs and websites I frequent. You can do the same with Google News, to ensure you always know what’s happening.

Manage Posts

When you setup FeedWordPress it asks if you’d like posts to be held for moderation or posted, it’s best to always hold posts for moderation while you’re getting used to the system and make notes of things you need to delete or edit before they go live.  You really want to edit posts if at all possible when Autoblogging, however, I like to have ‘main categories’ I add my posts to, those that are the main visual categories and I use a lot of ‘long-tail-keywords’ with some auto posting or Autoblogging software that basically forces the feed to provide the most relevant information or nothing at all.  I am still up late going through 5,000 posts as I write this…….

Advanced WordPress users will also be able to build special functions into their websites to automate complex parts of the process. As you’re are reading this, however, technology is in place that eliminates most of need to learn Linux cron.

Approval

The final step of auto blogging and one that I believe is often overlooked is the final approval of an article. Personally, I believe it is critical that people (not machines) do a final scan of each article being posted and ensure it is accurate, maybe this isn’t true auto blogging but it’s impossible for robots to ensure everything is right so a quick scan of the article will ensure that you’re sharing the right information with your target audience.  Again, 5,000 posts……4,999…. 4,998…..

Who is Auto Blogging Right For?

There are a lot of industries that Autoblogging simply wouldn’t work for I do believe that scanning trusted data sources and automatically processing listings for car dealerships, financial reports, real estate, news services, syndicated news etc. is a wonderful use of RSS and auto blogging technology.  There are some reputable blogs you can hit and again some tools allow keywords to strip out unnecessary content.  Overall it works out pretty well.

I use it on all of my sites and other clients sites to get good relevant content, news, research or other information that would be critical to complete a website or blog which could normally take a very long time to complete (even 1 to 2 years of work, relationships, writing, networking, et al.)

So if this sounds like it might be something you’d want for your website, you may want to look at hiring a professional to set this up due to the technicalities and / or finding the best quality software package to simplify the process.