These are mostly asked by people blogging on Wordpress, so I hope a simple explanation here may help.  This post is focused on Wordpress, but the logic would still apply for other blogging platforms that offer both tags and categories (or whatever names they give them).

Categories:

Categories are like filing cabinets.  Typically you would set up one or two categories when your blog is new and assign your posts to one or other of them.

As you produce more content you will probably add more categories over time.

As an example, on this blog I have a category called Internet Marketing and all posts that I write about Internet Marketing are assigned to that category.

I have another category called Blog Traffic, and all posts I write about ways to get traffic to your blog go into that category.

If your blog is focused on a specific niche you would probably not have too many categories and, after you’ve been blogging for a while, you probably won’t need to add any more.  If your blog is a general blog, though, covering a wide range of subjects, then clearly you will have more categories.

I do not assign a post to more than one category.  This is because my theme (a magazine style theme) displays on the front page the most recent post in each category.  If I have a post assigned to more than one category it will attempt to display both (or all) categories – which becomes a real mess!

So – categories are like filing cabinets and contain all posts on the same subject.

Tags:

Tags are applied to each post and are like keywords.  They help the search engines find your post when someone enters a search term.

Tags (keywords) need to be focused.  There also needs to be consistency between the tags you’re using, the wording of your post headline and the opening paragraph of your posts.

For example, ‘tags’ and ‘categories’ are two of the tags I’ve used on this post and those words appear in both the post title and the opening paragraph.

You can assign multiple tags to a post, although assigning too many of them is counter productive.  I try to assign between 4 and 10 tags per post.  Some prefer more, others prefer less.

But assigning 30 or 40 tags is counter productive and may be seen as spam by the search engines.

What do they do?

Tags and categories are a means of organising the articles in your blog and, therefore, help both your readers and the search engines to find relevant content.  So you need to use both.

If you think this information might be helpful to others please ‘Share This’ through the link below and leave us a comment with your thoughts, corrections or questions!

It’s actually not a simple case one or the other – because they both have their strengths and weaknesses.

I maintain blogs on Blogger, Wordpress.com and my own self-hosted Wordpress site, and here’s my take on it.

Both Blogger and Wordpress.com blogs are free, easy to set up and get indexed quickly by the search engines.

With Wordpress.com, however, you cannot use Adsense and you cannot use it to drive traffic to an affiliate site or a landing page.  If you do they’ll suspend your blog, as I discovered to my cost some time ago.

Blogger doesn’t have those restrictions.

With both Blogger and Wordpress.com you’re at risk of losing your data if something happens to the servers they’re running on, although with Wordpress.com you can export your blog to your PC in an xml file.  This effectively enables you to back it up.

The themes available in Blogger are much nicer now than they were a while ago, but you still have that bar across the top of the page (with Blogger hosted blogs) which I really dislike.

Wordpress.com offers quite a wide choice of themes and there’s no obvious Wordpress branding (like the Blogger bar across the top), so I generally prefer the look of a Wordpress.com blog.

The most flexible of these platforms, though, is self-hosted Wordpress.

With self-hosted Wordpress you don’t have any of these restrictions.  You can use it as you like and you can publish what you like.

Although a large and increasing number of hosting providers now offer 1-click installation for Wordpress, you do still need to know how to use FTP for uploading new themes or plugins.  You also, of course, need to pay for a domain name and hosting!

However, you can customize your self-hosted Wordpress blog almost infinitely with the huge range of plugins (mostly free but some paid) that are available.  You can even configure it to act as a static site if you want to.

And you have total control over your data – as long as you carry out regular back ups!  If something happens to the server you’re on you can be back up and running within an hour or so.

Self-hosted Wordpress blogs are not as attractive to the search engines as Wordpress.com or Blogger blogs are when you first set them up.

This is because they’re sitting on your domain, and your domain needs to establish its credibility with the search engines – unless, of course, your domain already has the pulling power of Wordpress.com..!

But there are loads of SEO related plugins you can use to make your self-hosted Wordpress blog stand out more for the search engines.  As your blog becomes established, you’ll find that your new posts are indexed very quickly.  My new posts are consistently indexed on Google now, within 4 – 6 hours of being published.

And, for a brand new domain, you’ll find that it will start to rank in the search engines more quickly if you’re using Wordpress (with the proper plugins) than it would if you were just building the site with a site builder – unless you’re a demon SEO expert!

So which is the best?

Well - I use self-hosted Wordpress for this blog, and I have both Blogger and Wordpress.com blogs as satellites, pointing towards it.  This helps to give it more search engine love by creating a larger online footprint and a few more inbound links.

So the answer to the question as to which is better really depends on how you want to use the blog.  My suggestion is to first define clearly what you want to use your blog for, and then select the platform that best meets your specific needs.

And the most effective blogging strategy may be to use all of them in ways that complement each other.

Which platform do you prefer?  Leave us a comment and please ‘Share This’ through the link below if this information may be helpful to others.

Actually – I never upgraded to WP 2.6 last month because of the problems that some people had with that, so I was already a version behind and I’ll be away next week, so I decided to go for it.

And it was probably the wrong thing to do..!

I had 3 problems:

1) After the database upgrade I found that I was not able to log back in to my admin screens.

This was the problem that some people reported from the 2.6 upgrade, and was the reason I didn’t do that one – so maybe it has something to do with the move from 2.5 to 2.6.x. I hope we don’t have the same problems when 2.7 hits the streets!

The Fix: Quite by chance I tried closing everything down and re-booting my PC and it worked. I don’t know why – it shouldn’t have done because WP is a web based application, not client based. But it did.

But the lesson is: be sure to back up everything before you do an upgrade – both your database and your system files!

2) I could not reactivate The Popularity Contest plugin – it caused a fatal error.

I don’t know why this was and, when I checked the author’s site, he said that he didn’t support Popularity Contest and that I’d have to go to the Wordpress Forums for support. Well, I’ve never had too much success with the Wordpress Forums so I decided to see if there was another plugin that did the same thing.

Luckily I found the wPopularity plugin which, by a stroke of good fortune, was based on the Popularity Contest plugin.

The Fix: I installed and activated the wPopularity plugin and everything now works fine again.

3) I use the WP Automatic Upgrade Plugin and it didn’t reactivate the plugins at the end of its process. Again I don’t know why, but it may have been because the Popularity Contest plugin was causing a fatal error.

The Fix: I reactivated the plugins manually and then re-ran the Auto upgrade plugin so that it could complete the process and clean up the files.

And everything is working fine now.

Again – if you’re doing an upgrade be sure to back up your database and files fully before you start..!

Please ‘Share This’ through the link below if you think it will be helpful to others and leave us a comment!

When I started building my first websites I still didn’t know much about HTML and absolutely nothing about CSS.  But, using KompoZer’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) functionality, which requires no HTML knowledge, I was able to build sites with KompoZer, which I did successfully until earlier this year.

By earlier this year, however, I had become much more familiar with HTML and decided that I would learn CSS – so I did.  And I changed the way I used KompoZer.

I stopped using the WYSIWYG interface and started hand coding my sites.  KompoZer is CSS compliant, so I’m able to create a stylesheet from within KompoZer and then do my work in the ‘source’ view.

And that’s when my problems started.

I would create a page in the ‘source’ view, check it, publish it and even update and re-publish it a few times.  Then, for absolutely no apparent reason, I would update some text (not touching any coding or formatting) and it would delete all my META data.  BOOM, gone!

Actually, everything between the <head> and </head> tags – so that included the link to my stylesheet.

This problem occurs totally randomly.  And on some of my sites it hasn’t occurred at all.  Yet!

After trolling around a few forums I’ve come to understand that KompoZer is a great HTML editor.  As long as you use it in the way in which it was intended (i.e. using the WYSIWYG interface) it will create fully compliant HTML code and you’ll have no problems.

However, if you try to do your work in the ‘source’ view, and hand code your pages, there are some bugs.

I’m not fully sure why these bugs occur, but I believe it’s something to do with KompoZer’s function of creating valid HTML code from what you enter into the WYSIWYG interface.

Apparently it also tries to do some validation when you work in the ‘source’ view and if you’ve got something there that it doesn’t like, or understand, you’re in trouble!

Anyway, I tried the Handcoder Extension and found I still had the same problem:

Yesterday morning I wanted to add a short paragraph to one of my pages.  So I called up KompoZer, opened the file, went into ‘source’ view, added the paragraph, saved…  And BAM… everything between the <head> and </head> tags was obliterated!

So – fed up with this apparently un-fixable bug and not wanting to go back to using the WYSIWYG interface, I trolled the web for a new website builder.

And found CoffeeCup.

Now – I only found CoffeeCup yesterday, but I installed it and tried out a few things, including editing some of the pages on which I’d previously had problems with KompoZer.   And, so far, it looks great – everything works perfectly.

CoffeeCup costs $49, but you can download a free trial version to try it out.

It’s a different beast from KompoZer, because it’s designed more for those who want to hand code their sites.  It does have what it calls a ‘Visual’ editor (equivalent to KompoZer’s WYSIWYG interface) which allows you to create sites without using HTML or CSS.  I haven’t tried the Visual view – so I can’t report back on that.

But my point is this: if you’re new to site building and aren’t familiar with HTML and CSS, then KompoZer is a great site builder (and it’s free).

However, once you want to spread your wings a bit and start doing some hand coding, then you may want to check out something like CoffeeCup.

Or, as I’ve mentioned before, you could go with Wordpress.

By the way, while I was doing my searching yesterday I also came across a neat little application called TopStyle Lite.  This is a CSS editor and it creates your CSS code from selections you make from a menu.  It’s free and, again, it works great (so far!).

Anyway – I’m going to continue with these two tools and I’ll let you know how things work out.

Please ‘Share This’ through the link below if you think it may be helpful to others.  And leave us a comment – what’s your recommended site builder?

But do you ever try to go deeper into the blog to find more?  Because it’s likely that if someone’s written useful information on a subject they’ve written more on it previously.  Particularly if it’s a worthwhile blog.

So the extra information you’re looking for may be right there in the blog you’re reading.

Here’s an excellent post from Jack Humphrey on how to get the best out of a blog.

Enjoy - and let others know through the ‘Share This’ link below.  (And leave us a comment!)

These 3 articles look at different aspects of Wordpress: One recommends a list of plugins (a couple of which look very interesting - I’ll be checking them out later!).

The second covers a few paragraphs from Matt Mullenweg, the Wordpress originator, who talks about what motivated him to develop Wordpress in the first place.

The last one looks at some tips on finding a good host in case you’re thinking of setting up a Wordpress blog as part of your company’s marketing strategy. And It can be a very powerful part of a marketing strategy.

Enjoy:

Wordpress plug-ins That Gives maximum blog benefits

Almost everyone who uses the internet knows Wordpress as the best blogging platform. It is estimated that almost 65% of bloggers use Wordpress for blogging. With such a large community, you will find.

The Benefits of Using WordPress to Publish Your Blog

This is the best explanation I’ve ever read about the benefits of WordPress, from Matt’s Foreward to WordPress for Dummies:. “There used to be a program from Microsoft called FrontPage that was the first visual interface for creating …

How to Host Your Own Blog

… with Wordpress or B2Evolution already installed which is helping to further the popularity of them. This feature removes much of the technical issues that installing the software would cause. This benefits the user by removing these …

If you think this info may be helpful to others please ‘Share This’ through the link below, and leave us a comment with your thoughts on Wordpress.

For the vast majority of people working online Wordpress is the best platform I know of for publishing online.

There are platforms that are more powerful in certain ways – like Drupal and Joomla – but both of those require more technical knowledge than the majority of online publishers have, or want to be bothered with.

Without any technical knowledge (other than the ability to manage your website through FTP) you can customize your Wordpress site almost without limit.

You can run it as a blog or turn it into a static site.  You can add pretty much any functionality you want (and certainly all the functionality that the majority of online marketers need) through the range of plugins that’s available, a huge number of which are free.

There’s a huge range of themes (both free and paid) that you have access to.  Good themes are more Search Engine friendly than many of the free ones.  So selecting the right theme will bring more traffic to your Wordpress site, both from the theme’s SEO features as well as the look and feel it creates.

This is a Wordpress blog and I’m using Wordpress in a conventional way here.  If I was starting out with my online business again, though, I would go straight to Wordpress to build my static sites.  I wouldn’t bother with the site builder I learnt on initially.

Although – I have to admit that what I learnt about HTML, CSS and the other bits and bobs by starting on that site builder has helped me to get even more out of Wordpress than I might otherwise have done.

I’m delighted with the way Wordpress has worked out for me.  In case it’s of interest to you, here’s how I’ve configured Wordpress for this blog:

I use the following plugins:

• Akismet.  Anti-spam
• All-in-one-SEO pack.  Allows me to optimize both the blog and each individual post for the search engines – keywords, page titles, meta descriptions, etc
• Breadcrumb NavXT.  Helps both readers and search engines to find their way around the blog
• Feedburner Feedsmith.  Directs all feeds from my blog through my feedburner account which makes them as widely readable as possible.  Feedburner also gives you great stats on your visitors
• Google Analyticator. Google Analytics plugin for comprehensive reporting
• Google Sitemaps.  Another way of helping the search engines find their way around.  Also pings them every time you update.
• Most Commented.  Lists the posts that have received the most comments – helpful for readers and search engines.
• Popularity contest.  Lists the most popular posts, and you can define the criteria for it to use.  Again – helpful for readers and search engines.
• Redirection.  Automatically applies a 301 redirect on any post on which the URL changes.  This can happen if you change a post title after it’s been published, for example.
• Share This.  Encourages readers to bookmark your posts or submit them to the social sites.
• Subscribe to comments. Allows people to follow the conversation around a post.
• What would Seth Godin do.  Encourages readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

I also use the auto upgrade and database manager plugins, which are excellent administrative aids to help with making proper backups and simplifying the upgrade process.

I’ve set up quite an extensive ping list – and those services are pinged every time I post. I’ve also set it to allow comments, pings and trackbacks, in order to facilitate ‘conversations’ around posts and encourage linking.

My theme is a paid theme, and I like it because it allows me to get a lot of content onto the front page – much more than more conventional blog themes.  Those usually present the most recent post and, if you’ve activated the appropriate widget, the titles of your last few posts.

This theme allows me to present the titles and excerpts from 7 posts (the most recent plus 6 others) as well as a listing of posts ranked by various measures of popularity – all on the front page.  The benefit of this?  It helps to keep readers on the blog for longer because it presents them with more to read.

I do know how to use HTML and CSS, and that has helped me to tweak the theme a bit.

But if I didn’t have that knowledge I would still have been able to set up this blog pretty much as it is today, without any technical knowledge at all.

And that, to me, is the power of Wordpress.

If you think this information may be helpful to others please ‘Share This’ through the link below.  And leave us a comment with your thoughts about Wordpress if you’re a user, or a question if you’re not!

As per what I wrote the other day, I have not yet upgraded because WP 2.6 has been out for less than a week - so I can’t give you any personal feedback.  But the guys at ASC are extremely good and if their advice is to not upgrade just yet that’s good enough for me!

Let’s wait until the bugs are sorted out - I’ll write more as soon as I have more to write about.

But you should upgrade within a couple of weeks of new releases coming out - for security reasons as well as for the new functionality that comes with new upgrades.

I’ll do my upgrade next week and let you know of any issues I find. In the meantime if you want to get on with your upgrade but you’re new to Wordpress you may want to check this out:

Comprehensive, Easy to Follow Wordpress Upgrade Guide

Remember to do full backups before you start!

My belief is that you need your own business. Not only are the rewards so much greater when you’re working for yourself, but you have control.

That means that office politics and mismanagement of the business by others are no longer threats to your financial security. Because they become your responsibility!

But for many people who’ve spent a long time working for an employer, going self employed is a big step. And that’s assuming that you already know what business you want to set up.

Many people would love to set up their own business but struggle to find a business that they a) know enough about and b) would want to invest their time and money in. And without the answers to those two questions you don’t have a business.

I wrote a post here about how to prepare yourself for running a business of your own, and another one on some things you should consider if you’ve been a long time employee preparing yourself to deal with the recession.

Today I’ve scoured the web for articles that offer more advice on different types of businesses you can set up online, and how to avoid some of the common pitfalls that trap people starting out for the first time.

Firstly, this article on Internet Business Ideas explains how online direct sales programs work. It goes into some detail, but read the risks section carefully! The risks referred to there apply to any and all types of business opportunities you may come across.

Here are some other posts on Internet Businesses from around the web - click the links for the full articles:

Avoiding Internet Business Scams

Avoiding internet business scams really is that simple. Good luck, and don’t forget to have fun! Ros Bott. To find lots of legitimate home based business ideas, go to Financial Freedom Online. Or why not start off with a program that …

More Home-Based Biz Ideas

If you are thinking about starting your own home-based business, the available options can be overwhelming. However, there are many tried and true home-based businesses that may be just what you are looking for. …

Free Home Based Internet Business Ideas

Despite what people say, it is possible to start a business without spending any money! While there are jobs that will have a large initial cost, you can start a free home based internet business. Really, anybody can do this. …

INTERNET HOME BUSINESS IDEAS

When most of the homes these days have a computer and internet why not use it to start a home business?! Here are some of the ideas I came across in an article:. Affiliate Marketing What is it? :: Promote other company’s products and …

Finally…

If you’re interested in starting your own internet business but have no clue how to market it here’s a free course on Internet Marketing Basics.

If you have some other ideas or thoughts that would help anyone wanting to start their own online business please leave a comment! And if you think this information may be helpful to others please ‘Share This’ through the link below.