A blogger in Oregon did her own “investigation” on an attorney and was sued for defamation and lost. She claimed she didn’t have to prove her allegations and was protected because she was a journalist, part of the media. Reuters states:

“Media organizations and others are often protected by the “actual malice” legal standard established in a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which holds that under the First Amendment, journalists to be liable for defamation must know or have warning signs their inflammatory statements against a public figure are false.”

The blogger was not deemed a “journalist” or part of the “media” by the judge, and therefore her writings were not protected.

I found this part of the Reuters article astounding:

“Attorneys for Padrick presented as evidence a Jan. 19 email from Cox, sent days after she was sued for defamation by Padrick and Obsidian, in which she offered the firm her services “to protect online reputations and promote businesses” for $2,500 a month. Cox denied she was trying to extort money.”

Wow. Let me say it again. Wow. I was curious, so I checked out the blogger’s blog, and indeed, she has “reputation manager” as one of her service offerings. Wow.

Regardless of her motivation, this blogging defamation lawsuit will have a chilling effect on bloggers – it’s what Reuters thinks, and frankly I agree with that. Note the blogger is in Montana and the person defamed was in Oregon. In the Reuters article, it says that Cox (the blogger) plans to appeal the decision.

Is blogging journalism? There are surely journalists who write blogs, but all bloggers aren’t journalists.

Here’s another take on the lawsuit by Forbes: “Why An Investment Firm Was Awarded $2.5 Million After Being Defamed By Blogger“. It offers another perspective stating:

“The facts in the case are far more complicated, and after hearing them, most journalists will not want to include Cox in their camp.”

I read this Forbes article, and granted, I can’t imagine a journalist taking out a domain like “thisparticularcompanynamesucks.com” – maybe it’s defamation, maybe it’s whistleblowing, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like journalism. But certainly there are many blog articles that should be considered journalism – I don’t know what the legal definition of journalism is.

Here’s another thought provoking article on this lawsuit: Debate about Crystal Cox blogging case misses a key legal point. Angelotti says that it doesn’t matter whether she was found to be a “journalist” or not, because even if she was, the “shield law” might have not allowed her to make claims without proof:

“My advice to bloggers operating in the state of Oregon is lobby to get your shield law improved so bloggers are covered,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the AP. “But do not expect the shield law to provide you a defense in a libel case where you want to rely on an anonymous source for that information.”

And if you’re a blogger in Washington State, like me, here’s another article by the Seattle Weekly: Crystal Cox, Oregon Blogger, Isn’t a Journalist, Concludes U.S. Court–Imposes $2.5 Million Judgement on Her. This articles has links to other related articles for bloggers in Washington State: Unlike Oregon, Bloggers Are Journalists in Washington State, Do Qualify for Legal Protections.

The Seattle Weekly concludes:

“But it’s also important to note that even if Cox had been awarded shield-law protections in the lawsuit, she still most likely would have lost her case, because she was never able to prove her accusations against Padrick were true, with or without her secret source.

So while Cox’s fate has and should send ripples of concern throughout the blogging and journalism community, the flip side of that coin is that if bloggers are able to post defamatory articles all over the Internet where they will permanently remain, it can have an ill effect on the entire medium of Internet journalism.”

UPDATE: The number came back, magically, by itself. No idea why.

50 Blog Topics for Small Business Owners by Jessica Swanson.

Don’t ignore it, just hit the “Please update now” link and follow the instructions.

WordPress may release updates every month, or every few months, so be sure to log into your blog at least monthly to check for a new version number.

Prevent hacking and viruses – keep your WordPress Blog updated!

He starts out with the most important things to focus on:

• Permalinks (I always do this)
• Titles (yup, this too)
• Descriptions (um, don’t really do this at all for my posts)
• More text (who new you could change this!)
• Image Optimization (those pesky alt tags!)

Enjoy!

Here’s what I saw:

How scary is that?

A few minutes later it changed to this:

A little less scary. But then it changed back to all red. So I send my hosting company, DreamHost, a support ticket to see what’s up. I’m not sure if it’s a hosting issue, or an Akismet issue, but will update this post when I find out.

…sending happy healthy thoughts to the Akismet server…

UPDATE:

DreamHost tech support said that they had some network issues earlier, but it should be resolved now. Sure enough, I went back into Akismet Configuration, rechecked the servers (had to click the button) and they were all green.

So the lesson learned is, if you have Akismet protecting your WordPress blog and it suddenly stops working, check the Network Status via the Akismet Configuration, and if it’s red, contact your hosting company to fix it.

1. Make sure domain names are purchased.
I’m assuming that you’ve already purchased your domain names from DreamHost.com.
If you purchased the domain through another domain registrar, you’ll need to modify the 3 DNS (Domain Name Server) settings to point to DreamHost:
ns1.dreamhost.com
ns2.dreamhost.com
ns3.dreamhost.com

2. Host your new domain names at DreamHost.com
Domains -> Manage Domains->Add New Domain
Domain to host: fill in
How do you like the www in your URL: add “www.”
Uncheck Google Apps and Gmail
Leave all other choices at default
Click “Fully host this domain now”

3. Install WordPress
Goodies->One-Click Installs ->Install new website software-Advanced mode
Select WordPress
Install to: select right domain. Can elect to put in subdirectory, which is optional. If the entire website is a blog, don’t put in subdirectory. If website is already there, put in subdirectory (like “blog”).
Create a new database
Make up a database name
Use existing hostname – pick domain
First user: make one up
Password: make one up
Click “install it for me now”
In 10 minutes, you’ll receive email from DreamHost; follow instructions in that email to complete installation process. Make sure you save original admin login password! Yes, you can change it later.

4. Choose a theme
Log in to WordPress admin area.
Click on Appearance.
Choose a theme, see preview.
If you like it, click “activate” in upper right hand corner.
Note, themes are made by other people and there is no guarantee they will function correctly. Be sure to fully test any theme for functionality.

These are the basic steps to setting up a WordPress blog on DreamHost, assuming you have purchased your domain name from DreamHost and already have a hosting account set up with them.

First off, if you are reading this and you are blogging without Akismet, get Akismet. It caches the vast majority of spam. As of the writing of this post, Akismet has caught over 24,000 spams – from my blog alone! So let it do the heavy lifting for you.

For those comments that Akismet misses, you need to determine which are spam, and which are good comments, and which are not spam, but comments that you don’t want to approve. Since marking a comment as spam sends it into the Akismet database, you want to be fairly sure the ones you mark as spam deserve it.

I recently got a comment that fell into this grey category, and I wanted to share with you what I did to make my decision.

Here’s what I got in my email from WordPress:

Notice two things. First it’s from a gmail account, yet the URL is a website to a web design company. I’m always suspicious when there’s a website in the URL field, yet the E-mail field has an unrelated email address. Secondly, notice the generic comment “Thanks for providing such a nice tips”. Not even good english.

So I go and look at my web tracking tool, Web-Stat. I find the visitor by matching the IP address.

Here’s the visit:

Now, the article was on search engine optimization and online stores. So if this is a legitimate comment, I should see those keywords used in the search this person used to find my blog article.

But they used “web design”. Hmmm. And the URL was to a web design company. Now, smart folks know that the most valuable links are from websites that contain keywords that your company uses. So a web design company would love to have a free link from my blog, wouldn’t they?

Based on this, I decide this person has attempted to get a free link to their (or a client’s ) company by posting a fake comment in my blog. I mark it as spam, and send them to Akisment purgatory.

First thing is to pick a blogging application. I highly, highly recommend WordPress. It’s what I use and the only blogging application I install and customize for my clients.

Second thing, is to know the particular technical requirements of your blogging application. For example, you can read about the requirements for WordPress here.

Third thing, is to make sure your hosting company supports those requirement. Don’t worry that you don’t know what they mean. PHP is the language that WordPress is written in, and MySQL is the database part – but just simply ask the hosting company if they support the specific versions – they’ll know what the terms mean.

The fourth thing, is to see if the hosting company has a “one-click-install” feature. You can see this often listed in the long list of web hosting company features. (Here’s an example of the hosting company I use: DreamHost) The one click install is super cool, because it makes installation literally a one-click process, no technical knowledge required.

The fifth thing, is to see if the one-click-install also does one-click-upgrades. WordPress frequently comes out with upgraded versions, and it’s super important to keep your blogging software current. Not only do you get to use the latest and greatest features, but you keep one step ahead of hackers who continually try to figure out ways to hack into your blog. Having a hosting company that supports one-click-upgrades means that whenever a new version of WordPress comes out (and WordPress will automatically notify you of this), you simply go to your hosting company’s control panel and upgrade your blog. Really easy to do – only takes a few minutes.

So that’s the summary of things to look for in a hosting company if you’re going to start a blog and become a blogger.

I’ll miss reading your blog Leroy.

We all hate spam. If you own a WordPress blog, and you have comments enabled (which is recommended), you will get spam in your comments. But there’s good news…there are several easy steps you can take to prevent spam comments in your blog.

First thing, activate Akismet.

Akismet is a fabulous plugin that usually comes pre-installed in the latest versions of WordPress. You’ll need to follow the directions to get an “API Key” – but it’s well worth the effort to do this. As of the writing of this post, Akismet has protected my own blog from over 12,000 (twelve thousand!) spam comments. On all the blogs I develop for my client I activate this automatically – it’s super duper important to insure a pleasant blogging experience.

When you get a new comment, Akismet will scan it and if it thinks it’s spam, it will hold it in the Comments Section under Akismet Spam. From there, you can label it spam, or just let it be deleted on it’s own. I tend to label it as spam to help Akismet do it’s job better and better.

Second thing, watch for patterns in IP addresses.

You may notice that you get a series of spam comments all at once. If this happens, you can add the IP address of the spammer to your blog’s blacklist. Here’s what it looks like:

See how all of the IP addresses are identical. This is the IP address of a blog spammer, a very bad person! So let’s put him/her on a blacklist, so they’re automatically labeled as spam the next time.

Just copy the IP address and paste it here:

This is found under “Settings” and “Discussion”. It feels good to do it, so if someone sends me multiple spam comments, it’s what I do to exact a little revenge.

Block Access To Your Website via .htaccess.

The third thing you can do (and this is only for those of you who know how to create and manipulate a .htaccess file) is to block their IP address from visiting your website. Now, IP addresses do change over time, and so this method might work for a period of time, but the spammers will eventually change their IP addresses and send more spam out. But sometimes you just want to stop them right now. This happened to me one evening when this person kept sending me these super long spam comments one after another (and I get an email when I receive comments) which really started to annoy me. So I added their IP address to my .htaccess file to block access to my website.

Here’s the code:

#Spam Prevention
order allow,deny
deny from 98.197.1.75
allow from all

This .htaccess code works on DreamHost servers…your webhosting configuration may differ and uploading a bad .htaccess file will crash your website – so proceed with caution if you try this yourself. But again, this person kept sending me spam over and over and I needed them to stop!

So for most of you, the important thing to remember is that spam is a part of internet life, and if you’re using a WordPress blog, you’ve got some nice tools at your disposal to limit the amount of spam you receive. Remember to activate Akismet immediately and be diligent about labeling things that are held for moderation as spam so that Akismet gets better and better over time.

Understanding How Websites Work: Servers and Browsers

I’ll start with an explanation of how websites work. Website files live on a machine called a server. If you own a website, you’re paying someone to “host” your website files, and this means you’re paying them for a teeny bit of space on a server (if it’s shared hosting). Somewhere out there, there’s a computer that has your website’s files on them and that computer is your website’s server.

When you get on the internet, and you call up your website, you are viewing it using an application called a browser. Maybe it’s Firefox or Safari or Internet Explorer or another kind of browser. Here’s what’s happening behind the scenes. Your computer’s browser goes and fetches the files from your server and displays them for you. Browsers only read HTML (HyperText Markup Language). So the files need to be in HTML in order for your browser to understand them and display them to you.

So, your website files live on a server. And your computer’s browser fetches the files and displays them for you, depending on which URL you type in.

Databases and Servers

Now, here’s a little twist. Remember I said browsers can only understand HTML? Well, there are a bunch of other languages that only servers can understand. One of these languages is PHP. This is why PHP is known as a “server-side” language. PHP is a cool language because it does much more than HTML can do.

PHP can do logic, solve problems, and put things into and get things out of databases. It can also build HTML code. Now remember, browsers can’t read PHP code, only HTML code. If you are looking at a page in your browser that ends in .php, you’re looking at HTML code, the actual PHP code won’t be visible to you.

Static Web Pages

Static web pages are simply files, typically ending in .html, that contain all the content necessary for a browser to display a web page. This might be text or images. Like the files contained in your own home computer, static web pages are actual files…you can open them, edit them, save them, delete them. What you see is exactly what you get. The static web page can “stand alone” because it contains 100% of the information you see – no other files or information are needed.

Dynamic Web Pages

Dynamic web pages are different animals. They don’t actually exist as complete files on your website’s server. They are created, in the split second that someone calls up a page – and their content is often based on what’s in a database. Often they need variable values that guide them to select particular things from a database.

You know how you can be sitting in a room and look out a window and see a tree in your back yard? The tree isn’t really in the room. If you close the window blinds, the tree disappears from view, but it’s still in the back yard. Think of the back yard as a database that holds the tree, and the view from the room as your browser. You can see the tree in the view, but it’s really in the back yard.

In the same way, you can be looking at an item on the page of a shopping cart, say you’re looking at a image of shoes. Now, your browser is showing you the image, but the image of the shoes isn’t really part of the web page file. If you were to open the web page file and look at it, you wouldn’t see code for that particular image. What you would see is code with instructions to fetch an image from a database based on certain criteria. The picture of shoes is really stored in a database – and it being shown to you because you asked for this item. But just like the tree, it’s just a view of what’s in the database, it’s not really part of the web page file.

These pages are called “dynamic” because they appear to change. They change because one time you might want to shop for shoes and another time a book. The actual code on the page stays the same, but because you asked for books versus shoes, the code on the page ran over to the database and got the appropriate information and then constructed a HTML page for you to see in your browser. The PHP on the page remains constant, but the HTML, what you actually see in your browser, changes depending on what variables you send.

An Example:

Let’s look at an example. I realize you might not know any computer code at all, so this will be super simple.

Static:

<img src=”shoes.jpg” />

This code will display an image that is called “shoes.jpg”. This is all it can display.

Dynamic:

<img src=”<PHP echo $itemnumber ?>.jpg” />

Now, which image will this display? It can’t, unless it gets more information. If this page of code receives the value of the variable $itemnumber, it will display the correct image. But without this additional information, it displays nothing. (The PHP part of the code is in red.)

So in order for the page to display correctly, you need to send it the value of the variable $itemnumber. This can be done in many different ways, but suffice to say you tell it you want itemnumber 123 and it will display the image named “123.jpg”. If you send it “234″ , it will display image “234.jpg”.

Here’s a diagram:

Why Does This Matter?

It matters because if you are writing a blog or running an online store or hosting a forum, you’re probably using dynamic pages for much of your content. And it’s important to understand how these pieces work together to create the web pages you see in your browser. You may on occasion have to tinker directly with your database or back up/restore your database. You may also want to make changes to your pages and understanding which content is generated dynamically and which is static, can help you make good decisions and help keep your web designer’s sanity

As I’m writing this, it’s May 11th.

Have I invented a time machine?

Nope! I’m just taking advantage of WordPress’s Scheduling feature, and I’m really loving it.

If you’re like me, you like writing blog articles. But you don’t always have ideas all the time. I keep a little note pad with ideas for future articles. But I don’t always feel like writing, and the bloggers out there say you should blog on a regular basis, like once a week, etc. The scheduling feature of WordPress comes to the rescue!

My personal goal is to write a new article once a week. This is not to overly annoy all those folks who are reading this via email subscription. But sometimes I either don’t have time, or don’t feel passionate about any one topic to write – so there’s a lag. Or other times I find several topics and then want to write about them immediately. Both of these situations conflict with my once-a-week goal.

I now continue to write ideas down on a list, but I write articles whenever I am in the mood. And I use the scheduling feature to publish them in the future. This helps distribute the articles over an even timeframe, instead of being too lumpy. It lets me build up a nice queue of already written articles, and then I’m free to write whenever I want to.

So if you find yourself in a similar situation, give WordPress’s scheduling feature a try. Takes the lumps out of your blog posting schedule

I’ve been finding a few example of my own blog articles appearing in other people’s blogs, and thought I’d share them with you so you can see what this practice looks like.

I have an article about YellowPages.com Click Fraud, written by one of my clients. Here’s a screenshot of a website that “scraped” the content from that article, and put it there. You can click to enlarge it.

You can clearly see they’ve changed the title to “Google Alert – PPC Advertising” but they my original title is displayed as well as the first few lines of content.

Why would someone do this? Well, notice the little green underlined links? Put your mouse over the word “business” for example…look what happens:

Look at that…it’s a pop-up window with an advertisement for Business Chat Software. Isn’t that clever.

Still confused? Websites need content. Some folks decide that rather than writing their own content, they’ll steal it from other places and use the content to attract search engines and hopefully visitors that will click on the link and follow the pop-up ad. See how it says “Your Ad Here”?

So you ask, what can be done to stop this? I found this very lengthy and detailed article called “What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Blog Content“. It contains some really excellent suggestions. I must confess though, I haven’t tried them yet. As my own blog has grown in popularity, I’m finding more and more examples of scraping and stolen content.

On the one hand it just infuriates me. On the other hand, it’s probably just a sign of the times and technology – and I’ve certainly read articles that say to simply ignore it. For the time being, I’m trying to ignore it, but it sure isn’t easy.

Ever read a blog article that’s complaining about a company an thought, “I’m sure glad they didn’t write that about me”.

How do you know whether other bloggers have written a blog article about you or your company?

It’s easier than you might think if you know how to use a RSS reader. (If you don’t, read my article on how to use an RSS Feed Reader).

This is a great way to keep an eye on what’s being written about you in the so-called “blogosphere”. Bloggers often write articles about people or companies that they encounter. Sometimes the articles are favorable, sometimes they are critical – but either way, you should know who’s writing about you and what they are saying so you can join in the conversation.

Here’s how:

1. Sign up for an RSS Feed Reader.

2. Go to Google Blog Search.

3. Enter the keywords you’re interested in, like “Aldebaran Web Design”.

4. Click “Search Blogs”.

5. See the little orange RSS logo in the upper right hand corner of the browser.

6. Click on the RSS logo.

7. Add to your RSS Reader.

That’s it. Now whenever someone posts a blog with the keywords you’ve entered, Google Blog Search will run a search and send you a RSS feed of the results. Amazing, isn’t it! Another reason to love Google

The short answer: I don’t know. But here’s what I have learned: The more articles you write, the higher the likelihood that one of them will be a hit.

Did I know which articles would be hits before when I wrote them? Nope.  What’s the secret: Keep writing!

I’ve read lots of articles from other bloggers about what goes into writing a great blog article. They say write compelling, interesting, useful content. They say try to help people solve problems. They say use a snappy, eye-catching title. I always try to do these things, yet I have no way of predicting which articles will do well, and which will remain unread, and eventually get covered with cyberdust.

But one thing that the bloggers say, is to keep writing. And I’ve followed this advice. While I always try to write articles that are relevant to small business website owners, my topics vary from things that annoy me to video tutorials to all kinds of web-related advice. But I always try to write about things that small business website owner might find helpful and interesting.

A good example of a blog article whose popularity and subsequent traffic took me completely by surprise, is my Kavam article. You’ve never heard of Kavam? Neither had I, until one day, after watching my website traffic stats, I noticed that I was getting a lot of traffic from this one domain called “Kavam.net”. Over and over, it appeared as if someone from this domain was coming to one page of my site and leaving. Day and night, they came and left.

Since this pattern looked odd, I did some investigating. I discovered it wasn’t a human, but rather a badly behaving search robot called Charlotte that had been hitting my site. I decided to write a short blog article about what I had discovered.

To my surprise, the traffic started pouring in, other people started linking to my article – I was stunned. Apparently many other people were searching for the same solution, how to stop this web bot from crawling their websites. I just happened to be one of the first to post a blog article about it. Since my blog is optimized for search engines, new blog articles get crawled very quickly, usually in under an hour. So my article was available in the Google index quickly and therefore coming up in search results for “Kavam” or other related keywords that I had included in my article.

So the moral of the story is, to keep writing, about all kinds of things related to your blog’s topic, because you never know which one is going to end up being a big hit.

Why consider converting? You know all that wonderful content you’re writting on Blogger? If you have a blogger subdomain (ie. yourname.blogspot.com), and you have your own website, that content is not benefiting your website one bit!

Moving to WordPress that’s fully integrated with your website is a great way to get credit for that content, because the content lives on YOUR domain, not Blogspot. While Blogger does have a FTP publishing capability, in my experience it’s super slow for large blogs, and WordPress is a much more effective solution – easier to customize and jam packed with plugins that make it easy to super-charge your blog.

1. Verify. Login to your Blogger account and double check that it used Gmail. (Older accounts that don’t use Gmail, ie, aren’t Google related, won’t work with this tutorial.)

2. Import. Inside WordPress Admin -> Manage -> Import
Follow the steps for Blogger approval to communicate with WordPress and username choice. Complete the importing process…and marvel at how easy it was. All of your Blogger posts are now inside WordPress.

3. Permalink Matching. Inside WordPress Admin -> Options -> Permalinks
Set WordPress’s custom permalinks to match Blogger’s formatting:
ex: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
Note the addition of .html at the end. Your goal is to set WordPress permalinks to match the permalink syntax of your Blogger blog.

4. Change Blogger Publishing. Inside Blogger: Settings -> Publishing
Switch to “Custom Domain” and point to your own registered domain where you’ve installed WordPress. If you’ve installed WordPress in a subdirectory (like I usually do) you’ll notice it won’t let you put in a subdirectory path, don’t worry, we’ll address this later.

UPDATE 7-29-08: While changing the blogger publishing was a simple task when I originally wrote this article, it’s become more complex. I ran into two issues recently in trying to complete this task. The first issue, was that I received an error that stated “”Another blog is already hosted at this address.” To fix this issue, I relied on the advice given in this blog, The Real Blogger Status. We tried filling out this form to clear the domain error, but it didn’t work. Next, my client had to figure out what his Google Apps account login information was, and send it to me. I was able to log in to his Google Apps account, and follow the steps noted in Real Blogger Status article. Once this was done, the error disappeared.

5. Verify Redirects. Go to Google.com and enter “site:YourOldBlog.blogspot.com” replacing “YourOldBlog.blogspot.com” with the exact URL of your Blogger blog. There are no spaces at all. This will show you all of the indexed pages (in Google) of your blog. This will be useful, because you’re going to click on every one, one at a time, to verify your indexed Blogger articles correctly redirect to your WordPress articles. Yes, I know this is tedious, but it’s important.

UPDATE 7-29-08: This step has also been made more difficult since I first wrote this article. To my surprise, the redirects simply didn’t work. You can read about my struggle to understand the issue with Blogger and Redirects in the Blogger Help Group. The issue regarding the redirects in IE being broken was not resolved. But through using this domain redirection tool, I was able to verify that my method of redirection did indeed work for search engines. Credit for this clever idea goes to David Bradley in his article “Custom Blogger Domain”. So this means, that for search engines, if you follow my method, you’re fine. But if humans try to access the articles directly using Internet Explorer, using the blogspot address, they won’t find them. But since all the blog posts are being reindexed, this is a short term issue. So after a few months, the search engines and humans will both be able to find all articles on the new domain without any issues.

6. Adust .htaccess file. You may need to add a .htaccess file to help the redirection from Blogger to WordPress. If you’ve installed WordPress into a directory (not in the root of your website), then you will need to include statements like this:

redirect 301 /2006/ http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/2006

This statement will redirect all posts from 2006 into the correct subdirectory “blog/2006″.

Similarly, you may need to create a redirect for archives:

redirect 301 /2006_01_01_archive.html http://yourdomain.com/blog/2006/01

Again, it’s important to click on every single indexed link (in step 5) and adjust your .htaccess file if needed to make sure all the redirects work correctly.

This tutorial has been derived from several others I’ve found on the web and modified to include specific .htaccess help. If you find it useful, please leave me a comment.

There are several solutions to this issue according to an article about pasting from Word in the WordPress forum:

1. Always copy and paste content from a plain text editor
2. Use the Advanced Menu feature for pasting
3. Use the code view to manually remove the unwanted HTML tags

I’ll go over each of these options:

1. Always copy and paste content from a plain text editor. A plain text editor strips away everything else but text, hence the name “plain”. Most operating systems come with these editors already installed. On a Mac, it’s called “TextEdit”, and on a PC, its called “WordPad” or “NotePad”. If you want to compose your posts off-line, use one of these plain text editors. If someone has sent you a Word document, simply copy and paste the Word content into a plain text editor, and then copy and paste into WordPress.

2. Use the “Advanced Menu” feature in WordPress. Inside the WordPress writing a post or page area, at the end of the first line of icons, there’s an icon that when clicked, displays a second row of formatting icons:

See the little icons with the “T” and the “W”, these will bring up windows that let you paste your Word content. I suggest you try out both to see which you prefer. The “T” (for “Text”) will remove all formatting, while the “W” (for “Word”) will leave some in.

If the icon for the Advanced Menu isn’t visible in WordPress, you’ve got a few options. First, try different variations of “control v” and “alt v” and “alt shift v” to see if you can get it to come up. I’ve had clients tell me that depending on their browser and their operating system, this pattern may vary. If you aren’t running the latest version of WordPress, you might consider upgrading because it’s possible that your version doesn’t support this feature.

3. Use the code view to manually remove the unwanted HTML tags. This last method is not for those of you who don’t know HTML. If you do know HTML and you want to clean up the unwanted tags manually, simply click on the Code view and delete all the unwanted tags yourself. Again, unless you know HTML, don’t use this method.

It’s important that the formatting of your blog articles is consistent to ensure that your blog looks as professional as possible – and if you write your blog articles off-line, be sure to use one of the techniques mentioned above to paste nice clean plain text into WordPress.

I presume small business owners know they shouldn’t put content on their websites that they didn’t create themselves, but recently, I realized this was an incorrect assumption. And like I usually do when something surprises me, I write a blog article about it

What is duplicate content? For this post, I use “duplicate content” to mean textual content that is found elsewhere on the internet, either in other pages on your own website, or on the pages of other people’s websites.

What Does Google Say About Duplicate Content? You can read about what Google says about duplicate content here. While there some debate in the online world whether having duplicate content will actually cause search engines, like Google, to penalize your website’s rankings, there is agreement that it’s a bad practice.

Can I use quotations? It’s fine if you comment on other people’s content and include quotations – this happens in blogs all the time. But if you’re copy and pasting (with or without citing) large blocks of content from other people’s websites, this is not only unethical (you might be violating copyright laws), but it also won’t substantially help you get more traffic via search engine rankings – because search engines are smart, and they can tell unique content from duplicate content.

How Would You Feel If Someone Stole Your Content? The practice of using other people’s content for your own website content rather than writing content yourself, is called “scraping“. And there are even companies who now specialize in helping you determine if your website content has been “scraped” or copied verbatim on some else’s website: Check out Copyscape.com.

Create Your Own, Unique Website Content. To avoid being penalized by search engines for duplicate content, or getting into trouble with copyright violation – do the right thing and create your own unique content. If you don’t like to write, you can hire a copywriter to do this for you, but don’t steal content from other websites – it’s a losing game.

To optimize your blog for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO), you should understand how much of an impact individual post titles can have on your post’s rankings, and how to manipulate post slugs. Titles and slugs?!

When first creating a new WordPress post, you enter a title:

If you have the plugin installed called “Optimal Title”, then you’re in luck, because it will make the post title also show up as the page title with your blog title afterward, which is important for SEO. In page titles, positioning matters, and so when you create blog articles, put the most important keywords first. This is critical to the search engine ranking positioning for your blog posts.

Next, take a look at the “Post Slug” field. It looks like this:

Why is it called a “Slug” – I have no idea. If you leave it blank, the “slug” or page name of your blog will be set based on the settings in “Options” -> “Permalinks”. My setting is this: /%postname%/, meaning that if I didn’t set the slug, this post’s URL would look like this:

AldebaranWebDesign.com/blog/Blog-SEO-Using-Post-Titles-and-Post-Slugs/

But that’s a bit long and there’s no sense in having your post URL be overly lengthy, and this is where “Post Slug” comes in handy.

Post Slug will overrule the Permalink setting, so you can make them nice and short, and make sure they only include keywords. So if I use the post slug field like it’s shown above, my post URL will look like this:

AldebaranWebDesign.com/blog/blog-seo-titles-slugs/

Nice and compact and contains only the most important keywords.

Here’s a screenshot of this post in my browser, just to one more time, emphasize the difference between page title and slug.

So three things to remember:
1. Make sure “Optimal Title” or something like it is set up in your blog so that your blog post titles come before your blog name in your browser’s page title.
2. Put your most important keywords in your blog titles first.
3. If you have a long title, use the slug to make it shorter.