I’d like to discuss building information-rich content sites using a CMS and how to get good quality content automatically. I cover site structure, why choose Wordpress as your CMS, bust a long-running myth, and reveal my source for full-text article content.

To make a good income from information websites you need many sites. How many sites you will need to build is a difficult question to answer. How much money you want to make, your choice of website management software, and how willing you are to build your keyword research skills are chief factors.

I can give this bit of direction, however. The best way to build sites is to narrowly focus on certain aspects of popular topics – that is to say, focus on niches of a popular market – and assign each of these niches to subdirectories.

The base domain can be any name (although it’s best if it can be based on a main keyword, or sounds like it’s related to the main keyword) and the subdirectories are based on the niche-name keywords you want to build content around. In Wordpress, you simply assign these niche names to categories.

Here’s a quick education in site structuring from Gerry Walter.

Wordpress: Top Choice for Building Blogs Websites

Narrow focus on a topic makes it easier for SEs to tell what a website is about and assign rank to the site’s pages. If the base domain in the example above was filled with pages on every topic pertaining to golf, the SEs would certainly be able to tell that the website is about golf, but pages are less likely to rank well because it’s become less clear to which knowledge-domain (by virtue of off-page factors) the page belongs.

Ordinarily, sites can take a lot of time to build, and most of us don’t have the expertise or the time. Wordpress to the rescue. Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) originally developed to make blogging as simple as possible. It’s grown to become much more than that now, as it can be used to publish authoritative online magazines and newsletters, photo galleries and artist portfolios. Tremendous power in a free software that’s easy to use. You can’t beat it with an armpit!

Wordpress’s greatest benefit as a website CMS, in my humble opinion, is it’s ability to announce to the world that you’ve added content to your website. This gives it an enormous advantage over statically built websites (those built with a website generator, and uploaded to your hosting service.)

It’s very rare for a static website to attract visitors these days, even with carefully researched keywords, without a great deal of effort or expense – or both. Long gone are the days where you could generate and upload a static site, beg for or buy some links to your site from a directory or two, and get traffic.

But with Wordpress’s builtin automagic “pinging” function, getting visitors and backlinks quickly is still a reality. After initial setup – and there’s loads of help all over the web to show you how to set it up for maximum effectiveness, such as which plugins to use – all you need to do is perform your keyword research and add content on a regular basis.

So why do people pay $25 (and up) each month to use static website generators when Wordpress is far more powerful – and free? I don’t know!

Dupe content penalty myth busted

There has been a lot of toro-poop about a duplicate content penalty on the web for years. Even in spite of Google’s efforts (and the efforts of many bloggers) to explain what “duplicate penalty” means, marketers with a duplicate content remedy to sell continue to persist the myth.

The myth goes that if you publish content to your site, say a few articles from Ezinearticles.com, and a few other publishers also publish the same articles, you’ll get slapped with a duplicate penalty because the articles are already published.

For your edification, let me set this straight. A penalty on duplicate content was enacted several years ago when people discovered they could attract search engine traffic by republishing copies of a page (with just a few changes, mainly synonym substitution on the content’s key phrases) to their website. People would actually regenerate essentially the same article thousands of times and publish them to a single website. And repeat the procedure on dozens, if not hundreds of websites. The search engines of course, deindex these kinds of sites as soon as they are discovered.

Now apparently, someone noticed that some pages, existing on different domains, containing articles republished from an article directory, were sometimes placed into Google’s “Supplemental Results” on the search results pages, and incorrectly assigned the phrase “duplicate content penalty” to these cases.

But look at this – many sites republishing article content will often appear above the article directory’s own listing in search results. If the people persisting this myth were correct, then how do they explain why sites republishing articles can rank higher in the search results than the site the articles were originally published to?

Publishing substantially similar content to a single website to inflate your page count will almost certainly earn a site owner the duplicate content penalty.

Many sites republishing one reprint of an article will not get hit with the duplicate content penalty. The pages may, however, fall into supplemental results.

Matt Cutts of Google, has a huge page on the topic complete with explanations and recommendations.

But whether you call it “supplemental results” or “duplicate content penalty”, it’s still the same problem, right?

No, fortunately, they’re not the same. If you’re really working hard to be so lazy as to “spin” articles and you get slapped for it, your name may as well be “Baked Dog Poo” as far as Google is concerned. On the other hand, if your pages are falling into supplemental results, there is some stuff you can do about it.

One last word on the duplicate content penalty issue and then I’ll quit – I was reading Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger and was curious if any of his guest bloggers had submitted their articles elsewhere. I copied a sentence and Googled it (by pasting it with quotes.)

I was surprised to see that ProBlogger did not show up in the results at all. Only after clicking “repeat the search with the omitted results included” did his links show up. ProBlogger pages in supplemental results! And yet, apparently, Darren isn’t hurting for income.

Now, the SEO gurus would have us believe that all of your website’s life functions cease if you fall into the “Supplemental Results Graveyard.” I don’t at this time have an explanation. We’ll have to find out what’s up with this apparent contradiction – in a future post.

Here’s a one page mini-course on how to get pages to rank well by Brad Callen.

Benefits of using Free Reprint License content

Guest author Bill Platt enumerates for us the benefits of Free Reprint License content.

Quoting Bill, “…webmasters often use free content to build their keyword ratings in the search engines, thereby improving upon their chances of being located by Internet searchers.”

Now we know that with good SEO treatment, free reprint rights article content index just fine.

This website offers a time saving service that delivers keyword searchable full-text article RSS feeds directly to your Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or other RSS enabled website.

You can use them to build multiple information rich website networks, or stand-alone single topic niche portals.

When you use feed-aggregator plugins such as AutoBlogged or FeedWordpress, it’s as easy as entering the URLs of the RSS feeds to build your websites.

If you’re ready to make it easy, start here.

UltimateVRE.com is the world’s only supplier of Free Reprint License Full-Text Articles via RSS Feeds