In early 2008, when I started my first blog entitled “Confessions Of A Traffic Lawyer“, I had to make a critical decision. Do I host it on a site like WordPress or Blogger, or do I put it on my own website? At the time, I choose WordPress reasoning that back links from a WordPress blog to my website will help my organic page rankings on search engines like Yahoo! and Google.
As I consistently updated my blog with content regarding vehicle and traffic law issues, entrepreneurial issues and personal musings, my daily views gradually increased from 10 a day to over 300 a day.
However, despite this success, as time went on, I realized that I made a wrong turn with my hosting decision. Despite the SEO benefits, I was losing out in many other ways.
First, each new post represents a new web page. It is valuable for SEO
purposes for your website to have increasing page numbers. So I was gaining SEO benefits in one way but losing in another.
Further, and just as importantly, I was directing relatively substantial traffic to WordPress rather than my site. I have some posts that rank in the top three natural positions so why wouldn’t I want that type of “juice” directed to my website?
I therefore made the decision to switch to hosting it myself but continuing
to use the WordPress platform. My web developer did most of the work but I was the one who found the most important thing. Under the paid services, WordPress allows you to do a permanent re-direct of your blog so that Google, Yahoo!, etc. simply change their records of where you data is located. As a result, when I set this up, I did not lose ANY of my high, organic rankings for my various posts. At $12 per year, this was a true bargain.
Other hiccups were the plug-ins. After reviewing my programmer’s work, I noticed that many automatic features on the WordPress blog were omitted from my newly migrated blog. The most important two were site stats and the ability to embed videos. He fixed those pretty easily but, of course, this slowed us a down a little. The final glitch was in my website’s search function. It wasn’t picking up the content from the blog (only the original site pages) but $600 later that was fixed too.
Overall, I am ecstatic about having made this change to Confession Of A Traffic Lawyer, and invite you to check it out. Any suggestions to improve it would be appreciated. I only ask that you post them as comments so others can benefit from your ideas.
2 Comments. Leave new
Just a quick followup: I’ve never seen the “index.php” in a WordPress URL. Would you care to share why you have chosen to use this format?
Congratulations on your successful migration. You made the right decision – just a couple years late!
In my second life I do website development and specialize in WordPress theme design and custom modifications. You must have a good developer because things look great!