I got back from a short Holiday a few days ago.

You might have the same problem I had to get started again with work and business, and getting through ton’s of E-Mail.
Not even all off them where spam.. but there where some nice ones that made it OK.

One of the Things I did on my vacation was to read a book.. yes I do sometimes, especially if you have NO Internet connection on you holiday address.

But was it relaxing, yes and no, the reading first was somewhat hard to get into the subject, but once the basics were done, the good stuff showed up.
And now I have to work on the subjects and insights I gained… so should you!

It was an eye opener and pleasing to read as well, this book will definitely by my site if I am going to evaluate my sites and that of my customers.

But there where also some chapters that luckily confirmed my ideas and give not only insight in how to make a site more usable for the visitors, but also for search engine spiders!.

What book? Well of course the book that does make you think!

Tags

Joomla Seo, Optimization, Search Engine, SEO, Webdesign

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I like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Typo3, all Open Source Content Management Systems.
But which ones are Search Engine Friendly? Or are they Search Engine Optimized?

To be honest, Joomla in the latest version 1.0.12 is not Search Engine Friendly, the new Beta 1.5 version is much more Friendly from a Search Engine Point of view.
For the current version you have a lot of work to do before its Friendly enough.
Drupal and Typo3 are already more SEF, and WordPress is the easiest to work with if it comes to creating and using a Search Engine Friendly system.

So Joomla is the worst at the moment, but I love it because its so easy to work with from a content creation point of view.
Besides that, there are a lot of free components, modules and Plugins that can help you in making it SEF.

Search Engine Friendly and Search Engine Optimized 

Did you notice, I never said any of them being Search Engine Optimized…
That is because I totally agree with Joost van der Valk in his post on Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

Also the post that inspired him by Joe Dolson is a great read on the topic of SEO versus SEF, which in turn was written as a reply to a post by Stony de Gruyter.

Then Gary of Phoenixrealm wrote a Post on Content Management Systems and SEF and SEO to point to the make sure that your CMS of choice should be Search Engine Friendly.

But just a Search Engine Friendly Content Management System doesn´t mean its Optimized!
Some Buro´s think just making your site SEF is enough to make it Optimized… no way..
As Joost pointed out, Optimization takes a lot more effort then just making a website completely search engine friendly.
Optimization is in the details, in the little things and learning from tracking and evaluating your changes and there effects.

Search Engine Optimization is delicate work and you need a lot of knowledge to get the job done.
Its also not a static one-time effort, it takes a lot more than just that to get good ranking and stay on top with your results.
So why waste the SEO´s time to make a site Friendly?

Educate the designers and Site builders

Just make sure that your site builders and designers have a basic knowledge about Search Engine Optimization to get the best results if your have to hire an Professional Search Engine Optimizer!

The basics are not that difficult to learn, like the comment op the post of Joost by Ruben Timmerman mentioning that a web developer should know that the title tag of each page should be into the H1 tag.
It should be basic knownledge of your designer on how to work these things into there designs.

There are companies out on the web promoting there SEO Services who don’t have a clue what SEO really is.
I have seen some websites from “Search Engine Optimization” firms that are so NOT optimized that I would never give them that part of business..

But the main thing is, looking at those content management systems that they all use templates.
Templates designed by Professional designers, who have no clue about Search Engine Optimization.

So its not just the developer that needs to be educated, please focus on the designers as well!
They are the ones that can make the efforts of your Optimizer much easier, by already creating Templates that need little to no work the make the site Search Engine Friendly.

Not only for Joomla, Drupal and Typo3 websites, but also for WordPress, as there are some Themes that need to be worked at to make them Search Engine Optimized…
And as Joost pointed out, those are just the simple mistakes that need to be corrected to make you website Optimized for Search Engines.

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, Search Engine, SEF, SEO, SEO Optimization, Webdesign, WordPress

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This morning I was reeding some feeds on my Netvibes pages.
One of my favorites on Joomla is the Feed from Amy Stephens.. who was planning a Move some time ago.

And now she has moved, and oh boy what a Great Building she now lives in…

Check out the OpenSourceCommunity.org where you can read, write and communicate about Open-Source software like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Typo3, Plone and Tools like Open Office.

For now not all topics are covered yet, but I think they soon will.

Member schip is free and easy and most certainly worth subscribing, as well as the Feed of course
There are not a lot of members at the moment, but I bet we can change that…

I know that Amy works with Joomla, WordPress and has now been introduced to Drupal :-)
Some busy Lady she is, and what a great crew at the Open Source Community

Read Amy’s opening Blog entry welcome-opensourcecommunity-org

Tags

Joomla, Webdesign, WordPress

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As You might be working on your customers new website, checking the Coding and Colours to fit, you sometimes need some fast update for your knowledge.

You knew there was some code to do that special kind of thing that would work great on the new website.
But what was this again? something like.. or.. no, that’s not it..

What I like to do at those moments, late at night, working on this nice problem, is to get a Glass of Jack Daniels.

And now? Now you have to love Jack Daniels even more …

Please check out this great help he is providing on Cheating with the “Jack Daniels Cheat Sheets“.

And If you are not intressted in coding, you should.., check  online-marketing-for-beginners

P.s. Keep the sheets close at hand, you will need them soon..

Tags

Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

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No, I don’t mean the music of an Opera, although I sometimes like to listen to one or two…, no, I mean The Browser!

Do you use Opera to check your website, how it looks and responds to another browser?
Cool right? And fast to, but there is more to Opera than you see at first Glance.It’s a Great tool for Checking your Search Engine Optimization.

And its now Free as well, back in the “old”days you had to pay for it, but that’s long past.
Download Opera if you don’t already got it and try some of the nice features I will describe here for you.First check the author part dropdown list of what you can do when checking your website.

Check it in a text browser form, it will strip away all eye-candy and exposes what a search engine spider sees.

Check your site for Accesiblity, to make sure everyone can read the site, or have it read by a program!

And there is much more, try all these nice options and see wat works for you and your website.
O yes, where to get it!

Just follow the picture on the right……
Or just go to www.opera.com
Have Fun and Learn

Tags

Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Webdesign

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I recently run into some great tools I would like to share with you.

Maybe you have heard or used them before, so this is a reminder ?

You can use these tools on-line and check several things that can go wrong with your site…
I found several on mine…

First : http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/

Just checking the loading times of each element of your page, images or external links that slow down your page loading time. (Thanks to www.Alledia.com Blog)
This one could bring you to redesign your website layout or, in case of Joomla, finally get an Search Engine Optimized template..

Second: http://www.seoegghead.com/tools/what-is-hosted-on-that-ip.php

To see what other domains are running on your shared web hosting server…
Very interesting finds… to see which high volume traffic site is eating away your download time.

Third: http://www.instantposition.com/seotest.php

Basic check on Server, Title Tag, Meta Keywords Tag and Meta Description Tag…
Nice layout of the score, and with advice if you got some things wrong.

No, I won’t tell you for which website the score below was …

Fourth: http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/

Just to see what the Search Engine Spiders see, so you know that you have lot of work to do on your SEO Copywriting (Read www.copyblogger.com)

Of course there are a lot more out there to play with !
These are just my favorites at the moment….. lets see how fast you can change my mindset on these tools!

If you have any other Free on-line SEO tools, please post them in the comments for us al to learn more about the websites we build.

P.s. With all these tools you have to keep your own mind as the basic guideline to what works best for you and your website.

Tags

Joomla Seo, Optimization, Search Engine, SEO, SEO Optimization, Webdesign

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Now everybody likes images, right…
Sometimes an image can make a better impact on your visitor then just text.
But what on earth have Images to do with SEO?

Images and SEO

Look at the images you use in articles on your website.
How did you put them in there, and what else did you do with it?

Some people don’t think that what I am going to tell you is worth all the trouble…
I think you should work on providing the best content on your site for everybody, and make the most of it to get your site into the search engines.
Both can be accomplished by optimization your images and the use of them.
But first things first.

Naming your Images.

If you incorporated some images into your site, did you just uploaded your pictures from your camera, or what you received from your client?

Or did you rename them from DSC20071302.jpg or IMG_12548.jpg to something more meaning full like Keyword-Included-fits-the-picture.jpg
And please use – instead of _ for your picture names…

If you did the later, you have one point up from the rest of many websites.

The benefit not only goes to getting an extra keyword into your page, but its also much easier for the Search Engines to index your images on keywords searches.

Yes, people are more and more using these image based searches from Live.com, Yahoo and Google.
So you might get some of your visitors from there, although they might not be the real target visitors for your website… unless you have a website with mostly images..

Optimizing you images

If you have images makes sure the have the right size for your website.
That means that, if you have an image that is 1600×1280 pixels you should not squeeze it into an 540×320 box…, yes I know people do this all the time.

The image has to be loaded completely before it is rendered to the size you want it to display.
If you make the images in the actual size you want to use them, you have a much faster loading page then if you let a browser do it.
(A great free tool to do this irfanview, which give great result in maintaining sharpness)

The use of .jpg, .png or .gif depends on what type of image you want to use.
That is mostly a matter of trying several setting.
My choice for pictures is .jpg for icons and stuff its mostly .gif
Ground rule for me is: If there are a lot of different colours in the picture I use .jpg otherwise .gif

Putting in the Image Tags

Now you have come to the fun part….

If you place images on you website, I also depends on to tools you use to make those pages.
Some of the tools you use on creating webpages, or online wysiwig editors do assist you in putting in the right tags and parameters.
For Joomla you might find the JoomlaFCK editor to be one of the best.

Otherwise you have go into the HTML coding to place them.
Here are the three key parameters for your images:
- Size
- alt tags
- title tag

Always give the size height=” ” and width=” ” tags with your images !!
This way the browser you are using can reserve space for the image while loading it, in the mean time it will bring in the text.
Your visitor can start reading while the image is loaded, so the impression is a fast loading page.

The Alt tag is used for two reasons:
One -  the alt tag is displayed if the user has the image loading function set to off.
Two -  a text based browser will show the alt tag instead if the image itself, just like a “normal” search engine spider would look at the content of your page.

Title tag is what is shown as info tip when you hover over a picture, thus providing also more information to your visitors.

A complete image tag then can read like:
< img title=”title tag” alt=”alt tag” height=”96″ width=”128″ src=”http://www.itmentor.nl/images/stories/articles.jpg” / >

Things not to do with Images and SEO

Here are a few pointers on what not to do if you are optimizing your images for SEO.
- Don’t use meaningless pictures, they should fit your topic.
- Don’t stuff you picture naming full of keywords
- Don’t stuff you “alt” and “title” tags full of keywords !! it will be noticed, provide meaning full descriptions.
- Don’t use large pictures if its not necessary.

Wrapping it up:
Use that littly extra time, just a few seconds to implement this for every image you use.
Make sure spiders can access your image directory by removing the disallow part form your robots.txt file if you have one.

Have fun taking an sharing your pictures !
And if you need inspiration, visit www.flickr.com, tons of great pictures…

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, Search Engines, SEO, SEO Articles, SEO Optimization, Webdesign

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I recently got a great free template for one of my personal Joomla based websites.

If I would just have used it, and without further need of customization, I would have probably never had seen a small feature of this template.

Give Credit where Credit is Due

I like to give credit to anyone who does things for free for the Internet community, and specially if its for Joomla.

But please don’t use some kind of “hidden” stuff via your CSS style sheet.
Google reads these style sheets looking for stuff just like that!

Its called spamming, but you already know that, why would you otherwise read this Blog..

This template was released with a GPL license, but had one line of code pointing to the developer requesting to keep a copyleft in the code.
Which is perfectly fine by me, so I would have left it there but it was embedded into a div class copyleft.
Checking the style sheet, I saw the class was set to hidden.

Google does not like hidden stuff ! period !. It can get you banned, even if its just, wel just..  in the CSS file..

Bring it out into the open

Did I use the template? yes, because it really looks great, but with one alteration to the Copyleft div and the place of the link and description.

I took out the hidden part and placed the link clearly visible in the footer of the site, and send a email to the developer explaining what and why i did this.
I hope he/she will change this for other people who want to use the template.

I don’t think it was really the intent to spam, but just to get recognition for the work without breaking the template… I hope.

My major point here is, if you want to use free templates for your Joomla website, look to the coding!

It brings in two things that provides you with greater insight:
- You learn to read and ultimately write code for templates
- You learn how to find these hidden stuff.

And If you really want to be on the save Site :-) buy a template from a respected Joomla SEO Template building website.
You can find them , I know you can…  just search for “Joomla SEO Templates”, and yes the SEO part IS important, and NO it’s not as expensive as you think!! 

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

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I was going through some Css design related searches for a Joomla websites, as I found a website called http://www.csscollection.com/

And they have some great design examples, but that was not what draw my intrest….
No, there was a little picture and a name next to it, and that has made my day.

Now before I tell you, let me ask you if you also run several domains like I do?
Yes, then you will really like this next bit.
No? why not… no, just kidding, you can also use this nice site I found.

Gathering the Info

If your are into Search Engine Optimization and SEO and stuff, then you might ”always” be checking your sites for Pagerank and Alexa Rankings.

And if you have several domains, this can cost you a fair amount of time.

Now this little picture and the domain name are just what you need.

Now here is your own Domain checker.

The site I am talking about and is a free service for you is http://www.domainlogbook.com/

And its easy, just register, its free, and start putting in the domains you want to see the Pageranks and Alexa Traffic Ranking off, and even the Who Is information.

It is brought to you by http://www.mubashariqbal.com/blog/view/41 (What’s in a Name) from NY.

You will really like the functionality and the simpel way it works.
And You can not only check your own domain information..

But also that of you customers and… your competition (he,he… evil grin) and set tags to bundle them together.

Just try is, and get this fine site over the 100 users fast…
 

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Search Engine, SEO, Webdesign

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Long time overdue, but I Changed the Header Images and Descriptions of the Blog.
The descriptions are part of the Further ongoing Search Engine Optimization.

Each section now has a header that is more related to my Joomla website http://www.design-cars.com

I hope you like them… please tell me !!

P.s. In Joomla it is also possible to change the images and the description for the different categories, I will write an article about how to do this next year :-) on my website Joomla SEO Search Engine Optimization for Joomla Sites – Pathos

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

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Update! This post will tell you how to use WordPress and Joomla together for better SEO results. If you are looking for some ideas on how to choose between the two, you could read the Page How to choose between WordPress and Joomla!

If you look at these Opensource Content management systems, then people use them for Blogging and Building websites.

Joomla
Now Joomla with al its extensions is great for building a good solid website with all the features you want. And you can bring it to high rankings in the search eninges as well, if you start with the proper technical improvements.

Templates in Joomla make it easy to get a good layout for the site, and you can find lots of good free Joomla templates. For a good business website I suggest you look for a good commercial template based on a Table less design with external css files.

WordPress
For Blogging you cannot beat WordPress, especially if you do the right setup, making the permalinks work right the .htaccess file and set the options to /%postname%/. Creating posts and giving it the special keyword tags is really easy.

Templates for WordPress are also very easy to obtain and to implement. Besides that…Google loves WordPress Blogs

My advice?

Use them both!!
Setup your main site in Joomla! and start working on the content, create good quality content.
In a sub directory, or a subdomain, install WordPress and start blogging, using the keywords you also use for your website.

WordPress with its create SEF functions and categories will bring you traffic, this traffic reflects to your main domain.

And with the content on your main website, you work to keep your visitors captured and make them come back.

Yes, I know there is a great Component to integrate WordPress in Joomla from j-prosolution.com (Site is no longer available, but a great replacement can be Found on http://www.joomlify.com/) and I use it also on my website www.pathos-seo.com And if that is not enough, they even use it for the news via blogs on http://www.joomla.org/ !!

Still I like the separate installation better, because there are more features I can use for Search Engine Marketing and Viral marketing.

In my short experience with combining them that the combination of Joomla and WordPress are a killer combination for getting High Search Engine Ranking!

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign, WordPress

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On rare occasions, you find a sequence in the day, your findings just fit together into the progress of a day.

Okay, that might sound somewhat cryptic..

So here is what happened to make me post:

This morning I got a RSS feed from Copyblogger (one of my favorites), pointing me to this post:
http://www.copyblogger.com/is-it-ok-to-steal-design/

The comments give a very good read, luckily the issue was resolved quickly.

And just a half an hour ago, I got a RSS Feed from Google’s Matt Cutts his Blog (If you don’t know him, check his Blog)

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ie7-promo-page/

This page shows you how close Yahoo watches Google…and how they mimic their fine-tuning.

Now the first topic is clearly about ripping off someon’s design, the other one is just to show and tell.
Addressing these issues in the Blogosphere somehow works.

Tags

SEO, Webdesign

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From the WebProNews site, there is a great Video of a Good Looking Vanessa Fox talking to Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz.org.

Topics discussed are Pagerank and Sitemaps, but also some nice insides on what to work on in your website.

17 Minutes of great information, check it and take you time, listen carefully !

http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/

Tags

Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

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If you think the big three Search Engines cannot work together, just read this post

Google, Yahoo and MSN Team Up for Sitemaps.org 

So I went ahead and checked out http://www.sitemaps.org/
The protocol is just one line of of the Google sitemap, just the definition line is different.

Now I have several sites, including a recent one.
Since that has not much visitors yet, I decided to run a test there :-)

Testing the new Sitemaps protocol.
It is a Joomla based website with the Open-Sef component.
For You who don’t know this component, it has a build in Google Sitemap XML creator.

I generated the file which I now have named sitemap.xml instead of gsitemap.xml.
The generated file has the google definition, so I needed to change that.

Downloaded the file, changed the protocol header to xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 and uploaded the file again.

Via Google’s webmaster central I did a resubmit to see if I got any errors.

Result: No Errors, It worked straight away.

Went over to Yahoo’s site explorer, which already has a backlink to Sitemaps.org !
Put in the path to the sitemap.xml file in the Feed….
It didn’t give me any errors….

For Live.com I am waiting and reading Live Search Weblog to see how they progress at Microsoft.

Work Sitemap.xml the same way as Robots.txt  

What I would Like most for all of them to do, is working this thing like the robots.txt file!!!!

You Guys and Girls making this a standard, take some of our labour away from saying where and how the file is placed.

Make it a standard crawl !! Instruct your robots to look for a file called sitemap.xml the way they look for robots.txt.

Now that would be really, really Cool.

Robots.txt tells the spider what not to crawl, Sitemap.xml tells them what they should crawl…
Then it would be a real win-win situation and we would even benefit more from this initiative.

Update !! Read Autodiscovery of Sitemap.xml via Robots.txt

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

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Google has brought us webmasters a new and exicting tool !

Google Custom Search Engine, with this option you can promote some websites you think should be better found because of the content they have on a the specific subject of your website.

You think they don’t get enough results on that special search term, but you know there content is of high quality and they should be in the top results……

Well, now you can help those website to get into the top, on your own search engine that is…

The process of creating and implementing the Google Custom Search Engine is pretty simpel, leave it to Google to make it work that way.

I even placed it in my pathos-seo.com Joomla website without any problems
And there is also a Tutorial on How to Integrate Google CSE Custom Search Engine in Joomla

So, a new cool feature..
But what is in it for Google?

1. They get to Us with a new feature we can use, so we give them credit for it , so they create some Goodwill.
2. Google gets an extra platform from us to place their Adwords Adsense promotionel links, that brings (us* and) them more money….
3. We provide them with highly rated websites on specifick keywords….they analyse their database and find there are some websites with authority that people put into the sites section of there custom search eninge…social networking on a new level…
4. The database gives better search results, that benefit us all.

So if your website is stored in the favorites sites section of a Custom Search Engine, does that boost you ranking?
If so, how many links do you need?

How much weight does it get in the long run, and do our Search Engine Optimization technics still bring the same results?

Is it a new factor we should look at as a Blessing, a Tool or a Threat?

* If you have an adsense account and set the right option in your control panel. 

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

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If you are looking for answers to your Joomla Qeustions, you can dig deep into the documentation.

Or post your problem on a Forum…

First action should always be to check the Documentation, because this will bring you much more inside knowledge and sometimes you find a hidden gem that makes you day.

But if you really, really can’t find the answer yourself, post it on a Forum.

Depending on the type of Forum and question you will get a good and fast answer.

For Joomla Questions I use three forums:

• Forum.joomla.org
• DutchJoomla Forum
• Digitalpoints Forum

You probably have your own favourites. The reason for these three are pretty simple..

The reason for these three are pretty simple..The first one is the Official Forum of the Joomla Community
The second one is a Dutch forum…he, I still am Dutch.. and this one is also very good next to the Dutch section on the Official Forum.
The third one is not really focused on Joomla, but is a Huge Forum with lots and lots of very people who really know a lot on there specific niche.

Just try them and make sure you are active in these forums, because people are willing to help people who help people!

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

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Pathos-Seo is about Search Engine Optimization, and more specific on SEO for Joomla!

The website has been up for several weeks now, and with the Google Sitemap it should bring in the index results.
And Boy does it have!

It first I found it scary to “take on” the big boys who I admire for the search term “Joomla Optimization” but I wanted to try. …

The search on this keywords brings about 1,230,000 hits at the time I write this and Guess where my http://www.pathos-seo.com/ is ranked?

Well I am going to let you see for yourself :-)
If you haven’t Clicked the link “Joomla Optimization” yet? Try it now!!….

I must say, when I say it I thought Happy Thoughts and “Oops, I did it again”

Enjoy.

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, Webdesign

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I found the Component OpenWP for Joomla on the website of the old Open-Sef.org

It is now the collection place of three great components, OpenSef, OpenWP en OpenWiki.
All of them for the Joomla Content Management System.

Intergration and Installation of WordPress for Joomla is easy, the component takes care of Everthing.

However, some experience with WordPress as a stand alone Blogging software helps.
You have to work the component just like with WordPress itself, as WP is Wrapped inside the Administrator section.

I am still wokring some stuff out and finetuning some options, but I wull tell you about that next time.

Tags

Joomla, Webdesign

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Well, I have used WordPress before, but it was installed as a CMS and Compared to Joomla it is Not a CMS.

 I should have Known…it is for Blogging.
So lets how this will work out for this new Blog

But I found a great tutorial to start with this WordPress Blogging

Well for the adsense text to get into this page I think I have to put in some extra words of writing

Tags

Webdesign, WordPress

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