I visited Jaypee today and he posted a very interesting utility called Xinu. Basically, it gives you all types of information about your blog such as pagerank, backlinks and website syndication just to name a few.
While I had a very decent Google Pagerank and positive diagnosis for 7milesdown’s description, title and URL (using the All in One SEO pack plugin for wordpress), I noticed that it lacked in many important areas to get the proper exposure on the web. With this in mind, over the next few hours I spent my time searching the internet and looking for ways to help optimize my site.
The very first problem I discovered was that my blog was in a subdirectory. I really dislike the clutter of setting up wordpress in the root of my server so I placed it in a folder called “/wp“. This was a bad move. I wish I had known more about SEO or Search Engine Optimization before I started this blog. You can read this article for more details on this.
As for my solution to the problem it wasn’t very simple. Originally, I had a redirect from my root to my subdirectory using a simple redirect script in HTML. I finally decided it was in my best interests to allow access to my blog using the root instead of “7milesdown/wp”. I didn’t however want to lose all the traffic I’ve generated from almost three years online, so what I did was kept the install in the subdirectory while allowing access from the root by following these instructions. It seems to have worked out pretty well. I had to adjust my permalinks to mirror the changes made, but it was pretty simple to do and things seem to be working fine. While doing this, I found out my two sentence post on the postal service exam is ranked sixth when you type in Postal Service Exam. Who knew?
There is still quite a bit of work to be done but I’m happy with what I accomplished so far. My next step is to try to monetize this site like John Chow did with Jonchow.com less than a year ago. Its hard to believe he is making over $10,000 a month off one blog alone! Simply amazing. If I could make just $1000.00 extra per month I’d be ecstatic, wouldn’t you??
Like you, I had previously installed WordPress in a subdirectory. Then when I lost all my data and had to start from scratch I decided to install it in the root directory. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. One thing that I regret not doing is changing the format of my permalinks. I found out about it just recently and it’s too late to change it now.
Thanks for the mention and the link love!
No problem Jaypee, but thats as far as the love affair will go! Man, I thought my Alexa rank was decent at a little over 1,000,000.. yours in in the 275,000 already! Must be the technology stuff. Alexa eats that up!