Everything Social Networking
STEVEKHART.COM
You’ll find all kinds of stuff posted at my blog, so keep checking back. You’ll find a lot of information related to social networking, Facebook, Twitter, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), just cool internet tools and technologies.
Bio:
Name: Steve Hart
Job: Interactive Development Director for a large media communications company.
Interest: Everything Social Networks, SEO, Blogs, and Media Publishing.
Migrating from Wordpress.com to a Hosted Solution
Well, I finally did it. I kept saying I was going to do it. I’ve moved from Wordpress.com on to a hosted solution with my own implementation of Wordpress.
The migration was fairly easy, but a it time consuming. First thing you need to do is get a hosted service an install Wordpress.
If you had a registered Domain you were using Wordpress.com sites, you’ll need to change your name servers before you can access your new installation. Change the namesservers from pointing to Wordpress to point to you hosting solution. In my case it is Godaddy. It took about 4 – 6 hours for the DNS to propagate before I could access my new installation.
Next, you’ll need to export your blog data from Wordpress.com (admin function unter tools). Log into you hosted version of Wordpress and in the same tools area, import your data. That’s the easy part.
Now the more difficult things:
First, you need to find a theme (plenty of free ones out there) and install it. Installing in requires saving the theme to you local hard drive then FTP-ing the directory to you hosting server space. The entire directory is copied to the themes folder under the WP-Content directory. Once this is complete login into Wordpress and activate you theme under the ‘appearence’ – ‘Themes’ section.
Next you’ll need to select the plug-ins you want to install.
Here are a few of my choices
- Akismet - for spam protection
- All in One SEO Pack - for search engine optimization
- Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - for HTML sitemap generation.
- Google XML Sitemaps - for XML based site maps that can be submitted to Google
- Permalinks Moved Permanently - allows me to use SEO friendly URLs – a must!
- Secure WordPress - a set of tools to help better secure you installation
- Ultimate Google Analytics - requires setting up a google analytics account, but the best way to track our stats
- Youtube Brackets - for embedding youtube videos
- WordPress Database Backup – another must.
- Smart Ads - for serving Google adsense
- Sociable - adds links to posts for bookmarking to social sites (digg, delicious,…)
- Top 10 - Displays top posts, plus dashboard widget.
- WordPress.com Stats - WP stats in your dashboard
Most of these plug-ins require some level of configuration, but they are well worth it.
- Steve Hart
Tags: hosting, SEO, technology, wordoress
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Careful consideration should be given to the total cost of ownership. Blog Hosts
You are correct ‘Blog Hosts’.
For me, Wordpress.com did not provide the level of customization needed to successfully create a blog that is web optimized. Additionally, running multiple blogs off the same hosting solution, brings down the TCO per blog.
Thanks for the comment.
I have a .com blog that i want to move to a self host, but what’s really keeping me from doin it is the page rank. My .com blog is actualy getting regular hits from google, if i migrate .com account to a .org account, will it retain it’s page rank?
Ron, you’re not migrating to wordpress.org, you migrating to the software (wordpress) provided by wordpress.org.
You need a hosting service like Godaddy or BlueHost to host your implementation of the wordpress software.
Is your blog URL something like yourname.wordpress.com or do you have your own domain name? I would highly recommend splurging the $10 a year and get a domain name.
I have 2 blogs, the older one with a higher page rank is with a a myname.wordpress.com url. I am planning to buy my own domain name. so i guess my question is, since the url address will change, will that mean i am going to loose my current page rank?
Here’s what I recommend…get your new domain and purchase ($15 a year) domain mapping feature of wordpress.com (http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/). Use this for 4-6 months on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com will 301 redirect your traffic mapped domain within WP.com.
The 4-6 month period should be enough time for the search engines to recognize you new domain. Ater this period, you should be able to transfer to a hosted WP installation with no impact to your SEO.
Anyone else have suggestions for Ron?
thanks steve
Thanks for the checklist! Very useful!
Thanks for the info. I just purchased hosting thru GoDaddy for Wordpress. Do you know how to import your twitter updates?
You can check out my post on auto-publishing your tweets as a WP post: http://www.stevekhart.com/2009/06/publish-tweets-as-a-wordpress-blog-post/
As far as importing historical tweets as posts, I’m not sure there is a way to do that.
Anyone have a suggestion?
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