The most popular content management systems have their passionate advocates, reminiscent of the Quark versus InDesign battles between art directors. Below, Joe Bachana, president and founder of technology agency DPCI, offers his three top choices in Web CMS for publishers who don’t want to go the enterprise route. “I did not include proprietary Web CMS software in my top-3 pick since I don’t think that small publishers can afford these solutions, certainly not in this economy,” says Bachana.

1. Drupal. “Hands down one of the best open-source initiatives for WCMS in history—the core codebase was built lean and the intent was to encourage enhancement by 3rd parties. What Dries Buytaert started 10 years ago is perhaps one of the most successful movements with thousands of developers worldwide contributing modules free of charge. This is by far the best solution for small publishers and the fastest growing WCMS platform today.

2. WordPress. “For rapid deployment of a blog-like site with some CMS capabilities, WordPress is the way to go. I also like that Matt Mullenweg is to WordPress as Dries Buytaert is to Drupal.”

3. Clickability. “Not so much for its functionality/feature set as the fact that small publishers that can’t afford to implement their own WCMS platform will need to go to a hosted solution. We’ve seen a number of small publishers get stuck with smaller SaaS providers that didn’t have a robust infrastructure or a rich enough feature set to assist the publisher with its business. I think Clickability is right in there for hosted WCMS

Top 3 Social Media Platforms

When picking a social media platform that is hosted, make sure you have a legal agreement that ensures you retain ownership and control over the content you upload as well as the user generated content, according to Bachana. “This way, if you decide to port over that content to a different system (internal or hosted), you will have legal rights to that content.”

1. Kickapps. “Comprehensive functionality, good video handling capabilities too so the publisher doesn’t need to integrate with other 3rd party video distribution platforms. Pricing seems to be reasonable for the small publisher and the product already has connectors with some popular WCM solutions such as Drupal.”

2. Lithium. “Similar kind of product and company to Kickapps, we had some good experience working with that solution at an implementation last year.”

3. Drupal Organic Groups module. “Drupal has a number of modules that can make implementation of a social media platform attainable. That in addition to video handling modules make this worth looking at should the small
publisher want to spend a little more money up front to get their own application.”
 

original: here

One of the most important things to change on your blog for seach engine optimisation or SEO is your slug.

Just in case you have been living under a stone like our erstwhile friend the slug and do not kjnow what SEO is, then a quick definition is in order.  Search engine optimisation is the the process of making your blog or website as attrative to Google and it’s chums yahoo and MSN so that when someone type in a phrase, for example wordpress coaching (give it a go and see who is there) you come out on the first page near the top.

What is A Slug

The slug is the bit that follows your domain name and points to your post, for example:

wpdude.com/this-is-a-slug

By default on a WordPress blog, the slug looks something like this:

wpdude.com/?p=22

As far as a search engine is concerned this is not a very useful, it says nothing about the post, there are none of the key phrases people would type in to identify the post, in short, you are going to have a very hard job to drag people in from Google with a slug like that.

Changing Your Slug To Something Useful

All is not lost, you can change the default slug to something far more useful.  From your WordPress blogs’ admin console, scroll down to settings and  click on permalinks.

From there select a custom permalink structure and set it to be /%postname%

What this does is to change the default slug configuration to be the title of your post, for example this post would have the slug:

how-to-change-your-slug-for-seo

The search engine has been fed much more information about what my post is about.

Removing Useless Words

There is a school of thought in SEO circles that you should remove all useless words from your slug and leave only hardcore keywords.  The things to remove are “a, the, it, then” etc etc.

There is a plugin to do this for you, imaginatively called Seo Slugs, download it and activate the plugin.  From that point forward your slugs will be trimmmed down by default. My new slug for this post now becomes:

change-slug-seo

The superflous words are cut down and hopefully Gooogle juice will flow in plenty.

Quick Get The Table Salt It’s Eatin’ The Lettuces

Don’t pour salt on your slug and kill it off, treat is nicely and you will be rewarded with organic search traffic from Google.

Get creative, think what people will type into google to find a post like yours, and match this to your slug.

Original : here

Two reasons.

1. As long as search engines are concerned, on most blogs category pages will carry irrelevant information since category names are likely to be too general to rank for (like my categories WordPress, SEO etc.)
2. Category pages are source of duplicate content

As I already stated before, tags are the real deal for any blog.

I also decided to call upon my plugin skills again and came up with a plugin that will do all this for you automatically.

As an added bonus I included nofollow_the_author_posts_link function, which you can use to replace your the_author_posts_link in theme templates, adding nofollow to author pages.

Download WP-Nofollow-Categories.

original :here