SEO Hosting Blog

I decided to launch a new site recently to promote computer repair products and services locally within the town I live. I am very comfortable building with WordPress, and it’s a very stable program. Commonly, most people use WordPress as blog publishing software; however, WordPress can also be used as a content management system. And that is how I use WordPress most of the time. In other words, I use WordPress to build and maintain websites. The reason why is simple. WordPress is easy to install, configure, customize, search engine optimize, and use.

That said, I needed to build an online store so that I could promote and sell my products and services. What I wanted was WordPress shopping cart software. Amazingly, this software exists, and more astonishingly, it’s also free. The software is called WP e-Commerce and comes in the form of a WordPress plugin. Dan Milward, Thomas Howard, Chris Beavan, and Allen Han are responsible for the creation of this work of art. It’s a full featured shopping cart program well-suited for selling products, services, and even processing online fees or charges within your WordPress blog. It also integrates seamlessly into your current theme and ties directly into Google Checkout or Paypal. Manual payment processing is available as well.

WP e-Commerce is ideal for anyone who has a blog and has products and services to sell. The creators of this state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform placed a lot of focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Their claim is that WP e-Commerce is both free and priceless at the same time. There may be other options available; however, I am already sold on WP e-Commerce. The software has been downloaded over 300,000 times, it’s very stable, updates are made available frequently, and WordPress integration is stupendously simple and painless.

WP e-Commerce is also marketing and promotional software. To help ensure that your store is a success, WP e-Commerce comes with social networking tools that allow you to import products directly into FaceBook Marketplace and Google Base. Also included is the popular “Share This” plugin which can be used to encourage customers to share your product pages on their blog, by email, in popular social networks such as StumbleUpon and Twitter.

Check out this YouTube video created by Adam from Hungry Dog Media who demonstrates how quickly and easily WP e-Commerce can be installed on HostGator.com.

All in all, if you’re a blogger and you’re looking for complete e-Commerce / shopping cart solutions, then I strongly recommend using WP e-Commerce. It’s easy, effective, secure, and free, and the creators offer exceptional customer service and support.

Google published a post on the Webmaster Central blog today offering some tips on how to recognize and avoid duplicate content on your website. I wanted to offer some specific tips on how to recognize and remove duplicate content on your self-hosted WordPress blog and decided to create a video tutorial.

This video doesn’t cover all of the bases; however, it will help quite a bit towards the prevention as well as the removal of duplicate content from your blog. Keep in mind, there is a fear about duplicate content and often people say that having duplicate content on your blog is bad. I can’t say that it’s a good thing, but I don’t think it’s something that should be considered as being bad. The reason for that is simple. Google understands that many bloggers aren’t very computer savvy. Instead, they are people who simply enjoy writing about their day, or telling the world about their opinions and views, etc. In other words, most bloggers aren’t programmers, nor are they SEO experts.

That said, if duplicate content was really a BAD thing, then it’s very likely that Google would have display duplicate content in the results. Knowing this, I think Google does a really good job at automatically determining source content. And what I mean by that is this. With a WordPress blog, a copy of your post content is found in multiple sections Typically, a copy of a post can be found on the homepage, category page, tag page, and in yearly/monthly/weekly/daily archives; however, source url for a blog is the individual post page.

Overall, Google understands the linking structure of WordPress and other blog platforms and for the most part gets things right. However, there’s many situations when that doesn’t happen. And with that, there’s ways that you can totally control and prevent Google from indexing multiple copies of your blog posts. Take a look at this video to learn how you can prevent and remove duplicate content from getting indexed on your WordPress blog.

The first step is to recognize if your WordPress blog has duplicate content indexed in Google. You can do this by doing a site:query search as shown in these example image below:

The above screen shot illustrates this search: [site:garryconn.com "On SeoHosting.com I wrote an article offering"] or as shown below in this screen shot:

You’ll see that two listings appear in the above example. Google has a reference to my home page and the blog post page. Technically, this is duplicate content. However, this is what I call controllable duplicate content. In other words, even though Google has a record of the same content appearing on the home page as well as the post page, it’s a matter of time before the content will be bumped off the homepage due to the age of the page.

The problem that you may run into is when multiple sections of your blog are referenced to having the same article content such as the category section, archive section, and tag sections. Commonly people think that this is bad and that Google will crack a whip and ban your blog because of this, but really the only concern is that you’re allowing Google to make the decision on determining which version of your content is the source copy.

The easiest solution is to install two WordPress plugins. The first one is called XML-Sitemaps. The second plugin is called the All-In-One SEO Pack. In the video above, I quickly show you how to set these plugins up; however, you may have some questions regarding the configuration, so by all means ask questions if you have them. Drop a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out.

So you would like to know how to learn more about Twitter? Technically speaking, Twitter is a free micro blogging service or social network that allows users to post short messages across their network of followers to read. As boring as this description may seem, Twitter has been fast to grow, attracting even famous people such as the President of The United States. Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites online. So isn’t time that you stop fooling around and learn more about the site, and most importantly, what you can get out of it?

Fortunately, for you, and others who want to make the best of Twitter, there is a blog I just stumbled on while doing some article research that can help you learn everything about Twitter. The blog, ironically, is called TwitterFools.com. I found them the other day while searching the WordPress Plugins Directory. I happen to come across a newly released plugin created by the TwitterFools.com staff called, TwitterFools WordPress Trending Topics Plugin. Now, this plugin is pretty cool. What is does is displays Twitter’s most trending topics on your sidebar and allows your readers easy access to view these topics from your blog. Thus, making your blog more useful than your competitors. (more…)