Have a look at your browser’s address bar – your sight is just fine. You actually are on orenyomtov.com as opposed to this morning, when this website lived under the .info TLD.
It has been quite a long time since I made the decision to move to the new domain. But there were two drawbacks which delayed the domain transfer. The first one is lack of time, and the second one is… Well, my laziness.
Anyways, I thought I would share some of the steps I took in order to move the website to the new domain. I was lucky enough that I didn’t have to change hosts. Doing that may have required some additional steps.
- I bought the new domain and linked it to my hosting.
- I downloaded the latest WordPress installation and uploaded it into the new domain by FTP (Looking for an FTP client?).
- I copied the
wp-contentfolder. And in my case, the “downloads” folder which is the folder I chose to store the uploads in (Default iswp-content/uploads). - I also copied the
wp-config.phpfile and the.htaccessfile. - I used the Search and Replace WordPress plugin to replace “orenyomtov.info” with “orenyomtov.com” in the database.
- I notified Google of the domain change in Google Webmaster Tools.
- I exported a new sitemap using the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools.
- I opened a new Google Analytics account and deployed the new tracking code in the theme I copied in step 3.
- I edited the old .htaccess file to contain only:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://orenyomtov.com/$1 [R=301,L] - I updated my FeedBurner account and all other similar services.
- I updated my website to the new URL in all of my favorite social platforms (@orenyomtov) and forums.
- Twit twit.
- And then I began writing this post.
The move didn’t take as long as I expected it to take. Even though it does seem a little complicated after writing it all down.
I hope that your move will be as smooth as mine. Good luck, Oren.
Are you asking yourself “Did Google just change their front search page?”, The answer is yes.
Now officially announced in their blog, The size of the buttons, text, logo and text box has increased at google.com or at any other local google home page.
This change is not browser specific and it has been verified that the change includes but not limited to: Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.
Google says at their blog post that this change was made in order to emphasize their goal as a search engine and to show that their focus is always on search.
When I first saw the change I was convinced that me screwing around with Google Chrome’s preferences or something simillar has caused the text to be bigger until I saw Google’s post at their blog. Then I realized that It does not only happen in my computer, it happens everywhere.
Anyway, now that we are aware of actual reason, I wish you all Happy Googleing!
I’m now writing this post while I really should package my bag instead but never mind :).
Tomorrow in 8 o’clock I will be on a bus on my long way south to Eilat with my friends and we are going to stay there for four days until Sunday. We hired an apartment for those three nights and we split the rent between all of us (We are six).
Mainly I wanna say that I’m not gonna be here for some time so I’ll answer the pile of mails only when I get back. You can still send email just don’t expect to get a replay anytime soon.
How can I publish this post without some useless map from Google Maps:
I just wanted to let you all know that Gmail is no longer in beta mode.
You can see for yourself when you enter Gmail and get the following logo:
It took Google five (!) years to go from Gmail beta to an official release. I don’t think that any major updates have been added to Gmail’s interface recently except for the drag n’ drop interface.
Anyways, I think Gmail is awesome and if you don’t use it then you have no idea what I’m talking about.
WordPress is a great search engine optimized system even right out of the box but there is a lot more to do if you want to improve it.
If you have a blog or a website, you probably want people to come and read what you have there and this is where the SEO comes into place.
About eighty percent of a website’s traffic (traffic = visitors) comes from search engines like Google. If you want to increase the traffic coming from search engines you need to rank higher in the results, in order to do so you need to search engine optimize your website.
The most important things you need to do with your WordPress website are:
- Use Pretty Permalinks.
What does this mean? If you take a look at the address bar when viewing this post (not through the homepage or archive pages) you will see that the address is not something likehttp://orenyomtov.com/?p=123(the default in WordPress), instead it’shttp://orenyomtov.com/wordpress-seo-tips.html. This way you have the keywords of your title also in the URL and that helps a lot. - Use All In One SEO Pack plugin and change the post title tag from
%post_title% - %blog_title%to%post_title% - %blog_title%.
Why? This swaps the blog’s name and the post’s name in the<title></title>tag. The first words in the title tag are more important from the last words so putting the post’s name first makes the page title more relevant to it’s content. e.g. beforeOren Yomtov’s Website - WordPress SEO Tips, afterWordPress SEO Tips - Oren Yomtov’s Website. - Use tags and categories wisely. They can contribute a lot to your search engine ranking as well as do nothing/hurt your ranking.
Don’t use too many tags (I say use about 4-8 tags per post), and when you do use them, try to use the same tags over and over again. WordPress Simple Tags plugin may help you with that. Try not to create more then 2 new tags for each post (of course when writing the first posts of the blog, almost all of the tags will be new). The same goes for categories, there is no need for lots empty/one post categories. When creating categories think what will help the user to navigate through your site and that will be the best for SEO most of the time. - Use Google Sitemap Generator plugin in order to auto generate the sitemap of your website each time you add a post/page. This helps Google to reach pages that they might not reach otherwise. After you install this plugin and make sure it works (check your sitemap.xml file), add & verify your website at Google Webmaster Tools and then submit the sitemap.
Remember, at the end of the day, your website is not for Google’s crawlers. It’s for humans, average users like you and me. So you need to keep the balance between what’s good for search engine optimizing, and what’s good for your readers.
