This week I want to discuss and create (hopefully) a simplified discussion on using Word Press with your existing website or integrating Word Press as your content management system in a new website.  It is by far one of the best blogging software on the internet, one being that it is self hosted blogging.  Meaning that you use an independant web host to do your blogging. You can use your own custom domain such as www.domain.com instead of domain.blogspot.com on the blogger.com site.

Over the course of a few weeks, I want to cover the area of theming, where I will go through the steps of integrating Word Press into your current website.  The theme of your blog will look and feel the same as the rest of the website making a seemingly smooth transition with the rest of your site.

The biggest advantage of Word Press is it extremely SEO Friendly.  Search Engines love Word Press because of the self pinging mechanism.  Every time a post is created or updated, Word Press sends a ping to many search engines causing a possible flurry of traffic to your site and even building a steady audience.  The other huge advantage of Word Press (which I Love) is the plugins available.  This is awesome! A user can customize a plugin according to there own requirements which makes Word Press one of the most popular blogging software on the planet.

My main topic here is theming and to integrate a Word Press template into your website.  Stay Tuned!

If you would like to add additional advantages to using Word Press, leave me a comment.

It’s been a busy last few days but I have finally made it talk about the www or to not www. Such is the case where a website could be addressed as http://www.domain.com or http://domain.com.  Search engines view your website as two different websites.  If you have in-bound links with a variation of the 2, your link popularity would be split between the two.  This is where a 301 permanent redirection is necessary.

Here’s what you need to do to get a 301 redirection. You have to know what server you are using, Apache or Microsoft (IIS). For Apache you need to have the Mod_Rewrite turned on. You can check with your host on this.

Next, you need an ftp program and download your .htaccess file from the server. It’s located in your root directory.

You can use notepad to open the file and add this piece of code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Save it and upload it back to the same spot that you downloaded. To be certain that it works, type in your browser’s address bar http://domainname.com and it should automatically add the www to the url.

And that’s it. Congrats!

It’s too bad that sub domains have been given a bad rap, having a prefix before the domain name. Some feel that the search engines ignore sub domains or it all out looks bad.  Let me clear a few things up.  Sub Domains actually rank well compared to main domains names. You could in fact divide your website up into different categories and if it had was an optimized landing page with the correct keywords, it will rank well just as the main domain name.

You can submit a sub domain to the search engines and have the same result as the main domain.  Even though a sub domain is just a sub directory of the main domain, search engines look at it as a separate entity.

The disadvantage of using sub domains, is that if your main domain name ever gets banned your sub domain will be affected. And that’s a hard one to shake especially if you have many sub domains each with it’s own unique landing page.

That’s it for sub domains for now, leave a comment for anything that you would like to add.  If you are looking for a hosting plan that uses sub domains, you can checkout EnviroGreenHosting.com

Next, I want to discuss what a search engine sees with ‘www.domain.com’ and ‘domain.com’. Some search engines treat it as 2 different websites and I want go into 301 redirects on the server.  Till next time.

In a situation with traffic heading to the main domain and transferring it a sub domain, pages will be missing resulting in a 404 error (page not found).  Ideally, on a 404 error, it should redirect to the sub domain.  If you are using an Apache server, you will need to have access to the .htaccess file where you can make changes to the server settings.  The idea here is to redirect to a page, if it can’t find a previous page that was now located at the sub domain.  To access your .htaccess file, you either require access to the File Manager in your CPANEL or have an FTP connection.

This is the code that you need to add:

ErrorDocument 404 errors/404.html,

where 404.html (it could be another name of your liking) is the temporary page that you would need to create. This page would have the link to the sub domain.  Simply upload or add this directive to the .htaccess file in the file manager of your CPANEL

Another consideration, is how long would you leave a page like this up? I would say permanently or for as long as your old links exist. It also depends on how many deep links from the search engines and other sites are pointing to your old page location although at a minimum, one year is a good standard.

I am going to continue with this topic of sub domains, domains and 301 redirects. Till next time.

I often get this question especially about reduced search engine rankings and traffic by moving an old website to a new host or even a sub domain.

Currently one of my clients is wanting to take their old website and move it to a sub domain.  A new designed website was to be placed into the current location.  The new website was designed to allow for faster loading loading times than the previous website and was more SEO compliant. However, the client didn’t want the old site to disappear.

The important point to remember, is that by creating a sub domain, it’s like a new website in the eyes of the search engines.  Instead of having a domain name such as http://www.domain.com, a sub domain is http://subdomain.domain.com.   They are folders created in your root directory.  It may seem strange that it is a sub directory on the root but Google treats it like a separate entity.

There is some clear advantages using sub domains besides being cheap to use. Other reasons are to break up main topics on a website.  You can separate themes on a website and even target keywords.  You should be cautious here, because people have used them for Spamming and could  be flagged by search engines such as Google. I’m not saying, don’t use sub domains, but just be cautious about the over-use of them.

Next, I am going to cover the issues of transferring a domain to a sub domain.