Once you have embarked on getting your business on the Internet, the possibilities of growing it with a much smaller budget are huge. On the other hand, one of the most important aspects of having a clean and reputable online business is to watch out for reputation management.

When it comes to the online environment, there are hundreds of websites where you company could be damaged by unsatisfied customers or even by competition trying to ruin your reputation. Searching for negative reviews, articles or complaints should be done on a regular basis, but what are the top places where your online reputation can be hurt?

1.      Review websites

Probably the worst places for getting negative reviews. Review websites are extremely popular nowadays and hold a lot of authority in the search engines, thus ranking immediately for a term such as “company name review” or “company name problems”. A single negative review could make the potential customers choosing other companies that are selling the very same services but that in the same time have a clean reputation.

2.      Community forums

There are hundreds of niche forums available for each and anyone willing to share his experience with a certain company. Most of them have thousands of registered members and again, if 2-3 folks complain about your business your reputation will suffer a lot, thus reducing the numbers of potential clients.

3.      Personal blogs

Whether we are talking about a customer or someone that “heard a story about your company”, negative blog posts about your company could be a big reputation-destroyer. As there are many popular blogs out there with thousands of readers you should definitely watch out for co

The best phrase to start this article with is taken from GoogleWebmasterCentral blog, in 2008:

“I still hear a lot of webmasters worrying about whether they may have a “duplicate content penalty.”

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.”

OK, can we start and end this article with that phrase? Not at all folks, while having duplicate content on a site can affect its performance and rankings, there are no penalties involved. WordPress is a great CMS for both blogs and commercial websites, however it comes with some built-in problems like not handling with the duplicate content so well.

So where can duplicate content be found in your powered by WordPress website? Well, lots of places: from category pages to archives, on the home page if excerpts are not added, on “previous entries”, on trackback URLs and on meta-description. So now that we found where duplicate content can be founded how can we prevent this happening on our website?

- First and foremost, editing your .htaccess file to perform 301 redirects should be a nice step forward. Google treats site.com differently then www.site.com therefore you should redirect the first one to the second one, or the second one to the first one, it really does not matter.

- Second, you should use “excerpts” for new posts. With these your post would look like “Click here to read more” though only showing a few lines from your entire post. This is easy to be changed: in index.php, archive.php and category.php find <?php the_content(); ?> and simply replace it with <?php the_excerpt(); ?> .

- Each post should have a unique meta description tag.

- Edit your robots.txt file so that you prevent spiders indexing your feeds and other pages.

Then of course, everybody does this in their own way, however one thing is sure: whatever method you will choose to implement on your website it would be a great step forward for dealing with the duplicate content problem. Maybe in the future, with new WordPress versions to be launched, this CMS will handle those by itself but until then just add a little extra work and solve the problem by yourself. It is not as difficult as it might sound.

Keep following our web design blog, we have more interesting posts coming up daily!

With hundreds of thousands of personal and corporate blogs ( and other thousands raising daily ), it has become a difficult mission for each blogger to get their posts noticed, get regular readers and receive “online quality votes”. Although nowadays setting up a blog can be done in a matter of minutes, it is the content that will be added that counts the most.
This article will reveal some tips on how to create more than decent blog posts, attractive and quality content that deserves a reading.

1. It all starts with a headline

This is the most important part of a blog. The headline must be attractive and must make people click on it to read more. A great headline must raise curiosity, must raise a question, be provocative or ask for people comments. There are literally hundreds of ideas on how to create a compelling title, from “how to” ones to “top x ways to make a decent living” and so on. Title is the best way to increase a blog post’s CTR.

1. Write with passion

Even if you have no loyal readers at the beginning, try to put the best you can in your posts. Always show your expertise, be careful with grammar errors, base your posts on experience and not on what you’ve heard from others.

1. Readability

Always make your post easy to read. Do not use long and complex phrases or a simple block of text that readers are supposed to read. Use numbers, bullets, h tags and bold words to showcase the most important parts of your content.

1. Links, links, links

As we know, blog posts are great for developing an internal link structure for search engines. Linking to previous posts that are connected with the one you’re writing help readers understand your article better. Also, link to authority websites when needed, from Wikipedia to research essays etc.

1. Blogging is interaction

Most bloggers omit to encourage their readers to take action. For example, “if you found this article interesting digg it” is something that might make a visitor submit your website to social bookmarking sites, and we all know the importance of being social online. Also, comments create interaction so a good way of encouraging readers to comment is by asking questions at the end of the post.

Here they are, 5 tips to create awesome blog posts. Follow best UK web designers’ blog for more interesting articles.

We all know how WordPress became the most used blogging platform by people all over the world and this is due to it’s unique advantages. Even WebCreationUK uses this awesome platform on it’s website design blog. Among its features, we can enumerate:

-      It is build SEO-friendly and whether the user knows how to properly set it up or not, there are zillions of plugins that might become handy

-      Free templates are created daily and thousands are already available, for free; moreover, on a second search one might find SEO optimized themes to use on your blog

-      Loved by Google! It gets indexed quite fast and the search engine crawls it with regularity, of course, if updated often

Ok, so what are the plugins anyone should use to get the most out of WordPress platform?

1.    All in one SEO plugin

It is a very powerful SEO plugin that takes care of many SEO aspects of the particular blog it is used upon. It optimises the titles for search engines, generates META tags, works with ecommerce sites and best, it really works as an out of the box tool.

2.    Google XML sitemaps

It’s a must! This is a plugin that automatically generates xml sitemaps, a must for each and every blog.

3.    SEO Friendly Images

A lot of rumours about images optimisation are in the blogosphere. The images should be named “engine friendly” and most folks usually forget to use the ALT tags attributes. However, this plugin takes care of everything, from automatically adding ALT and TITLE tags to images.

4.     YARP

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is simply awesome for internal linking. What it does is simply adding related posts to new articles created and displaying the related posts in RSS feeds as well. You can’t go wrong with YARP.

Of course there are many other plugins that should be used, like Akismet for example, however these are awesome for simplifying the SEO work a blogger has to do.

If you want to find out more about how we can improve your website’s SEO, just send us an SEO enquiry, we will hit you back as soon as possible.

Social media, on-line communities and blogs are all great ways to engage visitors and to increase traffic and, therefore, potential customers to your website. But a new study has found that many companies have still not cottoned on to this potential business advantage.

The Engaged Web Study by Episerver looked at 10 companies from various industries and then scored the on a range of engagement criteria.

Here are some of the findings:

•    Just 34% of the companies studied featured a community on their site.
•    Only 44% of companies with a community actually initiated a conversation with visitors (although more did respond to queries).
•    While 40% of the sites had a blog few updated these often enough.
•    Only 34% of the blogs studied were updated on a regular basis
•    Just 19% of brands advertise the blog across the rest of their website.
•    Only 19% of the sites display a link on their home page to their Facebook.
•    Just 15% advertise their Twitter presence
•    34% of sites provide links that allow a visitor to “share” content on a social network, but only 16% allow the visitor to rate and tag content.

In a competitive marketplace, few companies will want to miss a trick. Why not speak to WebCreationUK about updating your site to include a community feature, blog and sharing icons?

A new report has revealed that almost three-quarters (73%) of on-line women are now active social media users. The study by BlogHer and iVillage shows that on average women are engaging weekly or more often with popular social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter.

The American survey also found that women increasingly look at blogs and message boards when seeking advice and recommendations. So it seems that even as the use of social media sites such as Facebook continue to grow, women are still looking to blogs as a reliable resource.

This study underlines the importance of blogs for businesses, and especially for e-commerce companies that might want to target the female buyer market.

Other highlights from the study include:
:

*Among the iVillage community, 73% say they share topics on message boards/forums that they would not share on social networks.

* Of those, relationships (61%), health (45%) and work-related (39%) issues were the main topics they would not share on social networks.