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.

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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.