http://www.excelguru.ca/blog/2008/10/23/blogging-to-wordpress-from-microsoft-word/
Its possible to set up Wordpress and Word to cooperate, and you can submit articles right from your favorite word processor! I’m definately going to be trying this, I just got a copy of office 2007, and I’ve already fallen in love with OneNote.
Being a new and overwhelmed blog-writer, I’ve been struggling with what seemed like a long delay in getting my spiffy new blog indexed by everyones favorite search engine, Google. I read some on googles pages for webmasters, and the general consensus there seemed to be that waiting was in order. There wasn’t alot of detailed information about how long, wether I was looking at hours, weeks, or even months worth of looking for that first google spider coming to my blog.
Then a websearch brought me to the answer, and I’d like to share it: It might never happen unless I do more than I was expecting to. I added my url and waited, and waited. Aparently though, this only starts one part of a process, that without links from other websites (and not just any old link will do), it may never happen.
I found the answer here, at Smart IT Consulting: Google Sitemaps - The How-To What-Is FAQ
I’d recommend a thorough reading of thier FAQ’s for anyone that’s in my position, wanting to get a site listed on google, or to increase the rankings of a site already there. I sure can’t wait until I’m at that point. Hopefully now that I’m back on the right track, and I know what I can do to make this work, I’ll be there soon.
Working at a web hosting company, I frequently get asked questions about search engine optimization. I’m definately no expert in that arena, infact I’ve offered only the simplest of advice and never gone into detail for a customer that was looking for SEO. What I usually say is to make sure the content is original, and doesn’t look like spam, then use a handful of relevant keywords and a title that describes the page instead of advertising for it.
That has worked surprisingly well for me and for a few of the customers I advised to try it, but its vague. It doesn’t satisfy the people that really need to get into the nuts and bolts of how what they write affects where they appear on the search results pages. I need to get myself more information so that I can be more informative when people ask. Perhaps a bit more informative, but I still feel I’m dabbling in an art that’s more magic than science.
One of the things I’ve been asked, specifically, is about the so-called ‘duplicate content penalty’ from google. As in, multiple pages on your domain that display the same results being penalized. I went in search of, and found quickly and answer for this. It does not happen.
According to Susan Moskwa of Google in a Blog Entry:
Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.
So, all of those cgi applications, e-commerce programs, and on and on, ARE OK. When they see different urls, for example HTTP GET strings with long series of parameters that can appear in different orders, they combine the results of the duplicate pages, and assign the search engines ‘value’ to the combined page, represented by one of the URL’s. So /store/catalog.asp?cat=turban&color=black and /store/catalog.asp?color=black&cat=turban return the same results, and get grouped together and represented by one of the urls, which gets chosen nondeterministically by the crawler.
Its not penalized! But then again, you can’t choose the url that represents your content that way either. Not so good. What do you do if you want or need to do that? The answer is to use a Sitemap (note the capital ‘S’).
So, if that’s not the duplicate content that does get penalized, what is?
Spam sites, and theft, basically. Sites that scrape content from another site without adding meaningful original content, or sites that don’t differ from one another in any significant way. My next door neighbor in one of the houses I used to live in loved to do Multi Level Marketing schemes on the web, and frequently got new ‘cookie-cutter’ web sites from the companies he signed up with, and tried to advertise them (spamvertise, actually, but that’s another story). This is why that never worked. It was just like the other 99 sites above and below him, and the web just doesn’t need another copy of that page.
So for all intents and purposes, unless you’re scraping and republishing content that’s not original, you shouldn’t have to worry about the duplicate content penalty.
I’ve been reading alot about blogging lately, since I’m trying to start one of my own. At first I found it to be disorienting to try to jump right in and start writing, with all of the new web gadgets and gizmos and terms being used and thrown around. I’ve actually been reading atleast ten times more than writing.
One of the most helpful things I’ve done so far has been to de-mystify the terminology surrounding the blogging process. I feel I should share this with others, since it’s being so helpful to me as I get started on my own blog.
First, here’s some of the basic terminology:
Those were the first terms I needed to be familiar with in order to write a bit on my blog. Next, I’m going to go a little bit deeper and look into the publishing options and terms related to that, like trackbacks, rss, and links.
That’s all I’ve figured out so far, I hope this might be helpful to someone that’s starting out in this sometimes confusing enterprise of blogging.
I’ve never blogged before, so this should serve as a warning that I’m not really sure what the commonly accepted stylings are, or what to do. I like to write. I did well with it in school. I really don’t know about all of these new technologies I’m getting dumped into though. A quick glimpse at the ‘add this’ button on a few other blogs that I was reading listed over thirty ways to add something. I’m not even sure what a trackback or a technorati is, so I’m hoping I can just start writing and linking to things, and that it will all fall into place sooner or later. I do like finding out about new things, and there are certainly a ton of new things here.
If anyone with some blogging experience should happen to stumble across this post and feel like sharing some knowledge, please do. I really wish there was a ‘So, you want to blog?’ manual. Maybe there is, buried in the interwebs somewhere. I’ll see if I can’t find it later.
I think that I’m a latecomer to the scene when it comes to this, and that most of the other people that blog successfully have probably been doing it while the technology for doing it evolved into its current state. That puts them at somewhat of an advantage I guess, of having a more innate understanding of the thing. RSS Feeds, Tag Clouds, XFN — XML tags that link sites and show interpersonal relationships at the same time. Its an amazing world of web gadgetry I had no idea about. Its actually a wonderful challenge and I’m looking forward to taking it on.