He released the plugin earlier this week and I’ve been messing with it the past few days. I bothered Nick at least once a week, asking about the release of the plugin, and it is finally here. So far I’m more than satisified. The plugin isn’t over the top and is easy to integrate. But what I really love about this plugin is the easy content generation. I’m building a bunch of local review sites (hotels, bars, restaurants, etc.). With the help of a scraper and Review Plugin for Wordpress I’ll be able to populate my sites with at least 2000 records at a time, and then randomly generate ratings for each post.

The plugin doesn’t require any code modifications, and this simple implementation allows for easy customization of generated posts.

This plugin will play a vital role in the domination of my local SERPS. In my next post, I’ll explain how I’m using this plugin  and other tools to quickly create a bunch of local content and valuable information for my visitors.

Support

There were a few bugs I had to deal with when I first installed Review Plugin for Wordpress. Nick or Ryan the developer were there to answer all my questions in the forums. They even released a few patches in the few days that the plugin has been available.

Possible Uses

There are many uses for such a plugin. I’ll be using the plugin to review local business for the most part, but there’s far more you can do with it.

Just a few:

• Product Reviews: Music, electronics, books, movies, etc – You could build a review oriented site, or just use it from time to time to add to your own reviews.
• Massive Product Review Creation: If an affiliate program allows you to download a CSV of their product catalog you could easily generate thousands of product focused pages.
• Directories: Local businesses, national, niche service directory – Endless possibilites. With a scraper, these sites can be built really fast.
• Landing Pages: If you’re a fan of review landers, this plugin should be able to speed the process up for you.

What I’d like to see in the future…

Google Maps
I still haven’t found an easy way to add maps to my posts, but I’m sure Ryan or someone else from the forums will come up with a solution soon.

Code Examples
I’d like to see some creatives uses of this plugin. So far I haven’t found a way to display my “top rated [whatevers]” in my sidebar for example. I don’t even know if this is possible yet with this plugin.

Open Source
I’m sure Nick wants to protect his investment, but at this point you have to rely on Nick and Ryan for support and improvements. This isn’t really a big deal since they are quick to respond to support questions, but I could do without the ioncube encoding.

The goal is to become a local topix editor this will give you freedom to publish whatever the hell you want, but of course we will be posting our own links. There is a small catch though, you need to be approved. My guess is that larger cities will be a little more difficult to get approved as an editor for. But you never know till you give it a try. I’m going to be venturing into a larger city for my local projects soon, and hopefully I get approved.

The traffic however, isn’t so great, at least not in smaller cities. I’ve posted 2 local stories in the last couple days and I’ve got only a small handful of visitors. But better than nothing I suppose. Again, bigger cities will probably give you better results.

I’ll also be posting an update to the Local SEO series in coming days.