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I’ve been reading Blog Bloke recently (really enjoying his SEO blog tips, too) and I realised that, like, him, I had recently made the transition from Blogger to Wordpress (on my wedding skulls blog) and others might benefit from my assessment of the process.
Why I moved from Blogger to Wordpress
Blogger is crap for blog SEO. Blogbloke agrees that blogger SEO sucks. I got sick of trying to crack blogger’s code system to make SEO changes. With wordpress, optimising a blog becomes a piece of cake. A yummy, chocolate caramel cake.
Blogger’s simplistic ‘drag and drop’ systems makes perfect sense for personal blogs, but professional business blogs need the advanced capabilities the wordpress offers.
I used to get all kinds of random quirks in post formatting – not getting centering to function correctly, random paragraph gaps, etc – that are not a problem in wordpress.
Wordpress offers hundreds of free, professional-looking themes which you can tweak to your heart’s content. I love the way Wedding Skulls looks now.
How did I move from Blogger to Wordpress
First, I googled ‘blogger to wordpress’ and read as many guides as I could (there are a few useful and hundreds of ‘not-so-useful’ ones out there. It’s important to understand the pros and cons of moving your blog.
Here’s BlogBloke’s guide , and Liberty Interactive’s guide, which is more or less what I used. Add to this Yoast’s guide to Wordpress SEO, and I’m sussed.
Next, I went to my blogger dashboard, added all the code to the template file as shown in Liberty Interactive’s guide, and exported my blog. I then went to wordpress, set up my domain name and hosting with Godaddy, and imported the blog.
One of the most important steps I recommened you don’t skip is to nofollow your blog (read Liberty Interactive for more advice) as this prevents the Search Engines penalizing you for duplicate content.
I then signed up to feedburner and used their tutorials to redirect my blogger feeds to wordpress. I’m now happily attracting feeders at a rate hitherto unprecedented on my blogger blog.
How’s the change impacted my blog so far?
I haven’t been able to shift over my link juice from my blogger blog. However, because I changed early on in my blog’s life (Wedding Skulls was only three months old). Emailing and commenting about the changeover on some of the blogs that link to me will help minimize the effect of this change.
I’m already getting more hits, more subscribers and – thanks to pingbacks – more commenters.
Although the change has been relatively seamless, I’m manually editing all of my posts to optimize their SEO value and fix some of the bugs that came through in the import. With only around 50 posts this is a large – but still manageable – task. With blogs around 500 posts, I can imagine this would be a real headache.
Conclusion: I’m happy with the changeover, which went smoothly. I’d recommend changing to wordpress if you’re running a business blog and have a serious concern about your lack of SEO, though I would be wary if your blog contains more than 100 posts because of the work required in editing them for blog SEO. I think the benefits of wordpress far outway the hassle of moving over.
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Amen to that! Glad to hear my posts helped and thanks for the mention.
Cheers!
Comment by Blog Bloke - Helping You to be a Better Blogger — March 25, 2009 @ 8:47 am