I remember me very well the last website project meetings with customers:

Why is my website so small? There is so much space to right and the left, why is this? Most of the people I know having laptops / computers with wide screens.

Sure, those customers have a point; the average computer equipment becomes still better. They are faster, having modern web browsers and most of all they have faster Internet connections.

But what is the future of the Internet?
A few years ago if someone asked me to use my mobile phone to surf the Internet I answered: ”No, I don’t like to hurt my eyes with this tiny screen”.

Since the last years there are bigger displays for mobile phones and there are PDA’s and handheld PC’s. At least since my wife got her new LG mobile phone I like to surf the net by phone Read the rest of this entry »

This is part 2 in our series on how to optimize your Wordpress blog for Google. In our earlier post we discussed how to avoid the duplicate content penalty when blogging with the Wordpress blogging software; today, we are going to share how to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engine friendliness especially for the Google search engine.

Interlinking your blog posts

Since your blog should be topically related anyway, you should have no problem referencing previous post from time to time in new blog postings. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to edit your older blog postings to include topically related links for new posts. Not only does this help to improve your internal linking structure, it can also help improve keyword relevancy for certain pages if you’re using keyword focused, or descriptive, anchor text for your internal URL’s.

Another approach to boost the link popularity and improve the visibility of your blogs internal pages is to offer a sitemap, one which will benefit users and work to help with search engine spidering. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several PHP scripts and classes to process PayPal payments using their native IPN (Internet payment notification) feature. Because the whole process is based on the data you need to send via a web form to the PayPal payment processor these script look very similar.

The payment / notification process is shown via the following graphic:

Inside the form there are several required values to process a payment. PayPal gives the advice to post them all to get everything working. The following variables get some special attention: Read the rest of this entry »

How to avoid the duplicate content penalty when using a Wordpress blog

There’s no denying it, Google is the powerhouse of the internet; more than capable of showering targeted visitors on your website like a torrential downpour backed by gale-force winds. That is, if you happen to be in Google’s good graces and rank highly for popular keywords.

Bloggers often times find themselves in the position to receive great traffic from Google simply because of the way that blogs work; namely, they allow for quick inclusion into major search engines even when using the default setup. Being the most popular blogging software on the planet, Wordpress blogs are the content management system (CMS) of choice for bloggers due to ease of use and the large community of supporters that help to develop plugins for this open source blogging software.

However, just because Wordpress blogs can help websites to get noticed by the major search engines easily, this doesn’t mean that they are inherently search engine friendly; in fact, the default settings for Wordpress blogs almost guarantee that, if left untouched, your blog will end up suffering from the duplicate content penalty.

The duplicate content penalty and Wordpress blogs

The duplicate content penalty is a term that is used to describe what happens when a web page is removed from the primary search results for a certain keyword phrase due to identical content elsewhere on the internet. In Google, the lower-ranking websites and individual pages that contain the duplicate content are hidden, and this phrase is displayed instead: Read the rest of this entry »