By : Nidhi Gupta

1. RSS / Livebookmarks / Podcasting
   • In a traditional filesystem you’d have to update these files by hand, and believe me you can easily forget, and besides who wants to update 2 3 or 4 files everytime you update a page or make a new page for your website.
   • In a CMS based web application tasks like this are automated, “set it and forget it”.
2. Index pages and other aggregation.
   • Who wants to keep 2 or 3 files index pages straight, just setup some rules and bam, it just works.
   • In a flat file system how many edit might be needed for adding a single page?
     1. Add the page
     2. Add the fact that you added it, to your home page
     3. Add it to your rss feed
     4. add it to your Google Sitemap XML document
     5. Add it to any category pages
     6. Add it to a news section
   • Wow almost 6 edits, (maybe 5) what a waste of time.
3. Commenting
   • No brainer here, can you do commenting on a static html website?
   • CMS solutions help with adding a “community” sense to your website,the web can be more than static documents, quite thinking of the web as carbon copy of your printed material, it can be better, social, and interesting.
4. Templating
   • Want to change that design your 10 year old nephew/neice made for you? Even if he/she used good CSS and xhtml mark-up it can still be hard if you want to add whole new features or sections, say advertisements or other “included” content.
   • With a CMS solutions it’s quite easy to have multimpletemplates for your content, sotring all your data in a MySQL DB is the pinacle of seperation of content and presentation, albiet a bit convoluded at times, but they’ll have to pry my database content from my cold dead hands if they want it in flat files.
5. Options
   • There are many great CMS solutions avaliable.
     1. MODx - My personal favorite, it’s more of a framework allowing for rapids application development, heck you can even “bake” your site to flat files (if you do God have mercy).
     2. Drupal - It’s all the rage for features and support, but it can be slow, and has some bloat, but the new 5.0 soom to be an improvement.
     3. Typo3 - Little confusing, but it seems powerful
     4. WordPress - The “bloggers” tool of choice, hence it is great for blogging, but not much else.
     5. Mambo/Joomla - Confusing but again great support and community.
     6. There are plenty more to try for free at opensourcecms.com
   • Or you could roll your own.

Source: Webbake.com

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

By : Nidhi Gupta

Running a blog is harder than it sounds at first. The biggest problem with maintaining a blog use to be finding something to write about on a regular basis.

That’s why there are hundreds of articles about finding content to write about, writing different content etc.

With all of these resources that are available to you, finding something to write about on your blog shouldn’t be that hard. But the main problem with maintaining a blog isn’t about finding something to write about anymore; the problem new bloggers - and probably you - are facing is about writing something unbelievably great.

To write something that is absolutely great for your blog, something nobody will ever forget, you have to know the process of writing incredible content. Fortunately, just like finding something to write about, there are ways.

Draw the line:
The first step to writing an unbelievably great article for your blog is to draw the line that separates “regular” content from “great” content. In order to draw the line between average, bland articles and unbelievably great articles, you have to first determine what your intended audience has already read, and what they would take time out of their day to read.

One way you can do this is to find other blogs in your niche and dig through their archives. Find out what has been covered and what hasn’t. Or, if digging through thousands of articles for topics doesn’t interest you, doing a quick search on Google for a topic can return great results.

It’s not hard to find out what resources are already available for your readers, and what sources aren’t. All you have to do is do a little searching. Then, when you’ve discovered what topics have already been covered and which ones haven’t, you can have an idea of what to write about that would be classified as “great.”

Write from your own experience:
One of the major problems most bloggers face with writing great articles is that they
write about things that they have never experienced or tried. If you’re going to write a post about “how to write great blog article” you have better have tried the techniques for your own blog.

Your readers will, firstly, be able to tell if you’re writing really great content based on your own experience, or if you’re just writing an article to get attention. The best articles in the blog world are articles written by authors who experienced something that their readers could benefit from learning.

Learn from their example - and experiences - and write from your own experience about a topic that is over the line and great.

Don’t write about things you don’t care about:
Writing from your own experiences will benefit your readers, but the real key to writing great articles for your blog is to try.

Too many bloggers go through the motions of writing content without actually putting any heart into what they’re writing. Typing words, putting in tags, publishing posts and marketing what they have published is how 85% of all bloggers blog.

Does it work? Sure it does. But those bloggers aren’t the ones on the top of blog lists and search engines.

The bloggers who determine what is average content and what is great content, who write from their own experiences about topics that have yet to be covered, and who put heart and a lot of effort into their posts, are creating unbelievably great content.

Don’t waste any time starting on writing great content either, get started right now. You’ll notice a change to your writing, as well as your blogs traffic, almost immediately.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

By : Nidhi Gupta

In yesterday’s article, we discussed two most common search engine spam tactics out of three, i.e., hidden text, doorway pages and mirror sites. Here we are discussing about the last tactic, do’s and dont’s and finally a word of caution.

3. Mirror sites
   Mirror sites, at first glance, don’t appear to be a deceitful tactic. A mirror site is simply a duplicate site that uses different keywords and HTML descriptor tags. So, let’s say you sell sporting goods online. You might have one site with football-related keywords, the same site, perhaps with a different web host, with baseball-related keywords and another mirror (duplicate) site with nothing but keywords related to scuba diving. Seems like a reasonable approach to driving traffic with a variety of sports interests.

   Search engines take a very dim view of duplicate content cluttering up their results pages. The reason? Because this would allow any site to have an infinite number of listings on search results pages, simply by changing keywords in site text and HTML tags. And that would most certainly diminish the quality of results pages.

Search engine spam - don’t do it!
You may get away with deceptive practices for a while. Maybe even a month or two. But eventually you’ll be found out and the consequences could be lethal to your online enterprise.
Google, Yahoo! and the other big search engines will ban a site that employs illicit black- or grey-hat tactics. In the case of mirror sites, one of them will certainly be banned from search engine indexing. Perhaps all your mirror sites will be banned.

So, if you use mirror sites, take down all but your main site. If you employ mirror pages within your site, lose them. If you’ve got three doorway pages in front of your site, each employing a different set of keywords, eliminate all of them.

And, if your site is deep in hidden text, written for search engine spiders and not for human consumption, lose the invisible spider text.

A final word of caution
One last word of caution. If you’re new to the world of online and you’re unfamiliar with the dos and don’ts of SEO, visit each search engine and carefully read their statements of acceptable practices. This is essential because what you view as a harmless marketing ploy may be viewed by a search engine as deceitful.

There are plenty of ways to get your site noticed and properly indexed without resorting to SEO spam. If you can do it yourself, perfect. If you aren’t sure of what you’re doing, even a completely innocent mistake can cost you. You’ll drop in page rank, your site will be mis-indexed or under-indexed and you could be banned altogether.

Play it smart and keep your sites search engine spam free.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit