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Easier Maintenance, Better SERPS Results, More Money

Posted by Paul B | December 6, 2007 .

This one started about a month ago, I seem to be spending more and more time on my websites that produce the least. One good example of this is a ballroom dancing website I started nearly 2 years ago for my daughter. She was never interested in doing anything with it and it has sat there getting 1 or 2 updates a month for the last year. It makes enough money to more than cover hosting and the domain registration but not enough to justify the time I spend updating it. This was one of my original hand built websites written using nothing more than notepad and any new pages have to be manually linked to, menus and sitemaps updated etc etc. The thing is my wife is a crazy mental Ballroom Dancing freak and loves everything about it. In fact she is always commenting on forums so I decided why not give her own website? Unfortunately she is a technophobe so I’d need some sort of CMS so that she could create new content. After trying Joomla and Drupal I settled on a WordPress install (ease of use being the main criteria), I’m very glad I did!

So I set about moving my lovely ASP.net based hand coded website over to a free WordPress theme that I had found. I was prepared in the short term to kiss goodbye to all my good rankings and any money it made, this was about giving my wife an outlet for her dancing rants. I moved all the existent content over into new pages and posts (depending on the content) and my wife started posting about her favourite dancing programmes. I kept an eye on the site daily (waiting for my figures to disappear), here is the unique visitors chart from Google Analytics showing what happened (Our visits are filtered out):-

increase in traffic

Unbelievable. In the space of 2 days the new website was performing 3 times better than the old one, natural search traffic had gone through the roof. Even better my Adsense earnings from that single website had increased by the same percentage. What all this comes down to is this, WordPress besides being an excellent blogging platform is a very search friendly CMS. To not waste my own time I put as little effort as possible into this change over but it has given me a blue-print for the future. WordPress takes your content and with a little help can create multiple search friendly copies that can really suck in those long tail keywords. This is where all my new traffic has come from. In fact I’m going to be moving one of my primary business websites over before the end of the month. I f I see the same results again I’ll be moving all my static websites.

The Changes I Made To Make WordPress As SEO Friendly As I Could

Once I had my WordPress install sorted and my template in place I did change a few things:-

1. Permalinks, I changed the permalink structure to /%postname%/
2. Add the All In One Seo Pack, Feedburner, Google Sitemaps and Related Posts plugins.
3. Add the following to the htaccess file so that only 1 copy (with and without www) of each page is linked to:-

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.yourwebsitehere\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4. Alter the robots.txt to the following to remove much of the duplicate content

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: */page/*
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /banners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /*?*

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

5. To only post to 1 category. The same content appearing in multiple categories is one of the biggest duplicate content issues with WordPress.

So that was it, those were the 5 steps I took. To be honest the only one that took any real time was installing and configuring the plugins. Even so I reckon from start to finish I could have a great performing WordPress website up and running within an hour. The only extra thing is that when it comes to making money I found that altering your Main Index Template to include a large Adsense block in the page not found area really helped. The results seem to speak for themselves, if I can repeat this success with another website then that would be proof enough for me to spend some serious time next year moving all my websites over.

If you’ve got some old content hanging around why not give it a go and let me know how you get on?

(Several people have asked in the past why I don’t link to my websites. Put simply it’s because far too many people steal/rip my original content from The Make Money Online Dot Net for me to risk sites that actually make me money).

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6 Comments so far
  1. SEO Optimization ITALY Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  December 7, 2007 3:26 am

    WordPress rocks, what I like more about wordpress is because of its user friendly platform, and the se friendly of course ;)

    Nice graph there

  2. jackbravo UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  December 7, 2007 5:42 am

    dude….people are stealing your content from this site? hmm….how do you figure THAT out?

    i wonder if people are stealing my awesomely awesome push up content…

  3. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  December 7, 2007 9:12 am

    I would LOVE to be able to go through some of my sites in detail pin-pointing what I have and haven’t done and why.

    @Jack, the obvious rips show up in the Wordpress control panel new links section when I write a post that contains a link to another of my posts. To find the less obvious ones I sometimes throw in a sentence that isn’t a common mix of words. A google search for that shows up copycats. Almost all are in the far east or eastern europe so there’s not a lot you can do about it unfortunately!

  4. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  December 7, 2007 10:57 am

    Yes SE Friendly is the key ;)

  5. Jackbravo UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9  December 8, 2007 2:29 am

    well….i use blogspot…so i wonder if i’m less targeted….yep, now that i think of it, that’s exactly the reason :)

  6. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  December 8, 2007 1:16 pm

    Jack, you’ve got to get yourself away from using blogspot if you intend to make real money. Just the amount of on-the-page optimisation you can do with your own hosted WordPress blog makes the small hosting/domain registration more than worth it. Outside of the blogosphere blogspot sites are not well received so it could be damaging your linking potential as well.