Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
When starting out, many bloggers seek out the cheap and easy route, either choosing to blog on Blogger, WordPress.com, or another free and hosted blogging platform. This approach makes sense, since a person can never know until they’ve started if they even like blogging, let alone whether they’ll be successful.I almost always suggest to beginner bloggers to set up a blog on WordPress.com, but the reason is not because I think this is ideal, but because it is easiest to migrate a blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress.org site, which is ideal (as opposed to migrating from Blogger, which can be a nightmare). One of the reasons it’s so easy is because you can select the same permalink structure as in your original WP.com blog, and just change the main domain name part in a 301 redirect. Also, by using WP.com, you will become familiar with the WordPress system and interface, which is similar in the self-hosted WordPress.org version.
Why am I against WordPress.com?
I am not against WordPress.com. I think it’s a great service, and the quality of the features is unmatched in any of the other free hosted blogging platforms. In addition, people in the SEO industry have told me that due to the strength of the WordPress.com network, blogs that are hosted there do incredibly well in the SERPs. But if a person wants to take up blogging as a serious activity, or finds that their WordPress.com blog is growing, I suggest that they move their blog off of WP.com to their own self-hosted blog. Here is why:
- Limited blog design flexibility - whenever I’ve tried to use a WordPress.com blog, I’ve always found myself stuck at some point because I can’t add certain features. Users are limited on WP.com by the amount of customization they can do to the CSS, even if they pay for extra access to the CSS. They also can’t customize the loop, and the sidebars can only be modified to the extent that widgets allow. Also, WP.com users can’t add WordPress plugins, which is one of the keys to expanding your blog’s features.
- You don’t control your content - as soon as you are using a service that is hosted by someone else, you have lost partial ownership over your content. I’m not talking about what exactly it says in the WP.com terms of service (we’ll get to that soon), but I am talking about the issue of your content sitting on someone else’s servers. I personally prefer to try to keep my content under one roof - my own. As for the WP.com Terms of Service - you are at the mercy of their discretion as to whether your content is appropriate. When hosting your content on someone else’s servers, you are always at risk that someone may decide that your content is inappropriate, and they can easily shut you down.
- Hosting quality issues may haunt you - if the WP.com servers are having trouble, like the recent DoS attack on the WordPress.com servers, you will suffer. Of course, that is the case on all servers, but if you are really unhappy with a service provider, you can call them up, complain, and always change servers if need be. When your blog is on WP.com, it’s not as easy.
- You are at risk of being censored in certain countries - upon finding content that they don’t like on WP.com, certain countries with undemocratic tendencies will simply block the entire system. While it is possible for them to just block the individual WP.com blogs that they find offensive, these countries either don’t care enough to try, or are happy to block an entire blogging universe since blogging is all about free speech, and they are not. Countries that have blocked WordPress.com are Turkey, China and Brazil.
WordPress.com is a great service, and the people providing it are incredibly generous. However, like any other free hosted service, it has its drawbacks which should be taken into account when deciding on which path to take for your blog: free hosted or paid and self-hosted.
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![[del.icio.us]](http://del.icio.us/favicon.ico)
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Posted in Tips | Tags: security, SEO | 19 Comments »
Saturday, August 11th, 2007
This past Thursday, one of my sites reached digg’s home page. As we watched in disbelief, tens of thousands of readers flooded the site (and brought it crashing down in the classic “digg effect”). This was both exciting and frustrating. We learned a lot from this experience, and I would like to share some of these lessons with you.
First, here’s some background: my company, illuminea, started to officially launch a new media site on Thursday. As part of our launch strategy, we began to bookmark articles on the major social media sites, including digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. Within minutes, one of our articles was picked up by diggers and the number of diggs began to rise.
At first we thought the diggs must be coming from friends. But the diggs kept rising, until they began to rise at a furious rate. The article landed on digg’s home page.
Here’s what I learned from this experiene:
- If you want to build traffic to your site, bookmark your articles. By bookmarking your articles on digg, del.icio.us, and other community sites, you will make people aware of your article. Once they are aware, others may start bookmarking it too. You never know which of your articles will take off, so you might as well do this.
- Have your site on a serious dedicated or virtual private server. My sites are all on shared hosting. That’s ok on a usual day, but it can’t handle the “digg effect.” As soon as our site started rising up the home page, we exceeded our CPU limit and the site went down. That means that at the greatest moment, nobody can see your site. I called our hosting provider and begged them to get it back up - I told them to name their price, just to get it up. They said “Sorry ma’am, there’s nothing we can do. You should consider a dedicated server.” (Which is a service that they don’t even provide!) Of course, they could have borrowed some server juice from someone else for that short time that I was exceeding my CPU, but they wouldn’t budge. Very bad service. So if you want to get to digg’s home page, and reap the benefits, make sure your site is on a server that can handle it and has decent service.
- Have a killer title. It seems that articles that make it to digg’s home page are those that are dugg by a community of digg devotees. These are people who invest a lot of time and effort in digging articles that they deem worthy, and monitoring certain other key diggers to see what they digg. I think that a large percentage of them don’t even actually read the articles they are digging. They just look at the title, see who else has dugg it, and digg it too.
- digg likes science/tech/geeky articles. Articles on technology, science, and other “geeky” subjects are loved by digg devotees. They also seem to like American politics.
- diggers don’t like blog spam. Blog spam is when you write a short post about someone else’s article or post with the goal of gaining visitors off of the success of the blog/article you are writing about. If diggers suspect that this is what you are doing, you will be shunned. They want original content.
- digg comments are a culture unto themselves. People can comment under every link that is dugg. This becomes a whole conversation unto itself, but what’s even more amazing is that the commenters can digg other comments up or down! This is like a rating system for the comments, and if a comment gets dugg up, it means people liked it, and if it gets dugg down, it means people think it sucks.
- To make money from ads, you need to monetize your site smartly. My site is monetized with Google Adsense. Although thousands of people clicked, I made something like $2. I made almost as much from two clicks on my other blog, WordPressGarage.com. I don’t know why the click rates were so cheap, but that really sucks. Your visitors will click on ads - just try to make sure you’re making money from those clicks. How? If I knew, I’d have made more than $2.
The site is still getting traffic from digg, and the number of feed subscribers that shot up during the digg effect is now coming down. Therefore, I have yet to see whether this traffic can be maintained in some way, or if all those readers will disappear as quickly as they came.
Anyone have any other words of wisdom for those who aspire to achieve digg stardom?
Posted in Tips | Tags: digg, SEO | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
Quick Online Tips explains that beyond installing a sitemap on your site, you can help search engines find your sitemap more efficiently:
Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! have announced support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.
This step is very useful as webmasters can easily submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers. The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important and search users get more fresh content.
Complete details as to how to modify your robots.txt file in order to implement this feature is in the post.
Add Sitemaps Autodiscovery in Robots.txt File>>
Posted in Tips | Tags: Google, SEO, sitemaps, Yahoo | No Comments »
Saturday, March 24th, 2007
I was using Jerome’s Keywords for tagging posts, and all was working fine until I finally upgraded from 2.1.1 to 2.1.2 (yes, I know, I should have done it a long time ago, but upgrades scare me).
The upgrade went fine, but I noticed that when you clicked on a tag, it takes you to a 404 error page. I searched the web to find out what was going on, and it seems that Jerome’s Keywords has a bug that makes it problematic with WP 2.1. He’s released a beta of this plugin that is compatible with WP 2.1, but I definitely don’t want to work anything unstable after this tagging fiasco. Ultimate Tag Warrior is also not an option, since it seems that the tagging breaks if you approve a comment. Yikes.
Addendum: Since I wrote this post, Chris from Solo Technology wrote a comment saying that Ultimate Tag Warrior works fine with WP 2.1. This is good to know since there are a lot of plugins for WordPress that are based on Ultimate Tag Warrior and add extra functionality to your blog. In the meantime, I’m still using Simple Tagging.
I found the solution: the Simple Tagging plugin. This is a brilliant plugin that does more than just tag, and has many great features that Jerome’s Keywords does not. Once you’ve activated the plugin, it creates a new toolbar called Tags, under which you have a few options: Tag Options, Manage Tags, Not Tagged Articles, and Import Tags. There are so many options on these pages, such as batch changing, adding, or deleting tags, feed options, meta options, tag cloud options, identifying articles that haven’t been tagged, and importing tags from Jerome’s Keywords or the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugins.
Features:
First of all, this plugin displays the tags you’ve already used in Write>Post so that you can easily select tags for a post. It also auto-completes for you if you start typing a tag. You can set it up to add tags to the meta data on a page, and have related posts based on tags appear. This removes the need for two separate plugins for meta data and related posts.
It has an import function for importing tags from Jerome’s Keywords which works smoothly, and you can create a tag cloud.
How I installed it and tweaks I needed to make:
First I imported my tags from Jerome’s Keywords. This went smoothly, but I was still getting 404 error pages when I clicked on a tag. I fixed this by going to Tags>Tag Options, and under General Options changing the Tag search base from “tag” to “keywords” and then back to “tag” again. For some reason, this resolved the issue.
Then I pasted the code for displaying the tags in my home, index, search and archive page templates. I also pasted the code for displaying related posts. This worked fine.
Finally, I pasted the code for the tag cloud in my sidebar. This didn’t work quite so well, and needed some tweaking. First of all, if you want to style your tag cloud, make sure to paste the following into your template page:
<?php if (class_exists('SimpleTagging')) : ?>
<ul id ="tagcloud"><?php STP_Tagcloud(); ?></ul><?php endif; ?>
Then, you need to add styles to your stylesheet. There is available CSS on the Tag Cloud page of the plugin, which I used, but it created a list of tags rather than a cloud. So first I went into the WordPress administration, and went to Tags>Tag Options, and under Tag Cloud I changed the “Cloud tag link format” to
<a class="t%scale%" title="%tagname% (%count%)" href="%fulltaglink%">%tagname%</a> so that it wouldn’t be based on <li>. Then I changed the CSS to the following:
ul#tagcloud { padding:0; margin:0; text-align:center; list-style:none; }
ul#tagcloud { display:inline; color:#FF6600; background: none; padding: 0;}
ul#tagcloud a, ul#tagcloud a:link { text-decoration:none; }
ul#tagcloud a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }
ul#tagcloud a.t1 { font-size: 80%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t2 { font-size: 110%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t3 { font-size: 150%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t4 { font-size: 180%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t5 { font-size: 200%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t6 { font-size: 220%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t7 { font-size: 250%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t8 { font-size: 280%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t9 { font-size: 310%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t10 { font-size: 330%; }
These styles did the following: it made sure the text was the same orange as on this blog; and I changed the percentages so that they were more in line with what looked ok to me. Finally, to center the whole thing, I went into my sidebar template and wrapped the whole thing in a centered div, so that the code there looked as follows:
<h2>Tags</h2>
<div align="center">
<?php if (class_exists('SimpleTagging')) : ?>
<ul id ="tagcloud">
<?php STP_Tagcloud(); ?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>
This is a really handy plugin, and I recommend checking it out.
Simple Tagging plugin>>
Posted in Plugins | Tags: keywords, SEO, tags, Technorati | 18 Comments »
