If your wordpress self hosting site suddenly got corrupted somehow,

If your Wordpress blog Sql Database got goofed up,

If someone tries to hack your Wordpress blog and could successfully changed the content,

If some of the installed files vanished,

If the web server that you are hosting your site crashed and your hosting provider has no back up of files and Database,

Is your Hosting provider sucks, unreliable, downdown time beyond the tolerance limit, server can not take load, frequently crashes for your increasing traffic then its the high time to shift to another reliable Hosting Provider preferably a dedicated server.

Every blogger will have bitter experiences like above and wants to shift to another Host. What you do for shifting the entire Wordpress blog to to your new host. This is a very easy process need to follow step by step.

1. Back up of Database: Take a back up of your SQL file. We have mentioned in previous post about most useful Plugins. We have many Plugins to take the Data back up like WP-DB-Backup.  Take daily back up or just schedule your Plugin, it will send a back up copy to your mailbox automatically. It is always useful to have a regular back of your Blog database.

2. Now go to any reliable Web Host (we will discuss later about some of good hosting companies) and take Web Space.

3. Point your domain name servers to new provider.

4. Most of the hosting providers are providing facility to install Wordpress directly from their CPanel else use “Fantastico De Luxe”, where you will find the place to install the Wordpress.org blog. Install a new wordpress blog as required like at the root or as a subdomain(dont worry about your DB at this point).

5. Now its time for main task, reinstating the Database. Under Databases of your CPanel, we can find “phpMyAdmin” which is a beautiful tool that makes our life easy. Goto “phpMyAdmin” click on the database which we need to modify. Once we click on the DB, it will take to the page where all the details of that particular DB. Now the main Course, Click on “Import” button and give the path of the Database file in SQL format on our local hard disk. Thats it we are almost done.

PS: Please note phpMyAdmin works for the database below 50MB, so beaware that your DB is below 50MB.

What if your Database is more that 50MB, just keep the sql file at /public_html of your Domain using FTP client. Go to technical support people of your Hosting provider thru Live Support or raising a ticket etc. ask them to do it for you.

6. Now open your domain to check your site, probably at this moment still the name servers might not be propagated so changes can not be visible if you type the domain. Instead use the IP address provided by your Web Hosting provider. If you see the original content appearing on your site we are 90% done.

7. Now its time to upload our Theme folder to content/themes folder to get the original look. Upload all the Plugins which you were using.

8. Wait till the name servers propagate, and start writing new articles.

Happy Blogging!!!

We have plenty of Pulgins available for Wordpress Self hosted Blog. A Plugin is simply Software Module or a piece of small code to achieve a functionality to a bigger module or software. They are very easy to use on Self-hosted Wordpress blog and can be activated or deactivated as per our requirements thru “Plugins” Tab in the Features. let us see some of Plugins that are very useful for a self hosted Wordpress blog.

1. Akismet: This is one of the most important Plugin to stop Spammy Comments on your articles. It almost stops 90% of the spammy Comments and gives a count of spammy comments that are stopped till date. To activate Akismet Plugin, you need to have an Wordpress API key, which can be easily obtained by signup on wordpress.com. And Akismet Plugin can be downloaded at Akismet Plugin.

2. Google XML Sitemaps: We have discussed the importance of an XML Sitemap. This Plugin will make an XML Sitemap for your Blog and keeps updating whenever you create a new post. Apart from making and updating the XML Sitemap, it will notify all the major Search Engines about the changes in Sitemap. Plugin is available at Google XML Sitemap.

3. All in one SEO Pack: One of most useful Plugin is “All in one SEO pack” which makes your site most search engine friendly by optimizing Title, Meta Tags, Description etc. It gives you the control over the SEO Basics like Title, Meta Keys, Meta Description of the Posts and  Pages. The Plugin is available at “All in one SEO Pack“.

4. Adsense Manager: If you want to earn seriously from your Blog, then this is the one one for you. It easily manges the Ad units from different providers like Adsense, Adbrite, Yahoo!PN etc. Ad units can be easily managed and can be placed within your posts or at the sidebars. The Plugin is available at “Adsense Manager“.

5. Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button: Social Bookmarking plays an important role in bringing more and more traffic to your website. By allowing your visitors to bookmark or share your website at their Favorite Social Networking Website like Digg, Delicious, Stumpleupon etc and alows you to share thru gmail, Yahoo mail Hotmail etc., which makes your site more visible. The Pluin is available at “Add to Any“.

6. Google Analycator: Wants to have a real time visitors count, then add Google Analycator Plugin. Plugin is availeble at “Google Analycator“.

7. WorPress.com Stats: Which is another Plugin gives the information about the real  time stats right within your admin panel. The Plugin needs an account with Wordpress.com and its API Key. Plugin is available at “Wordpress.com Stats“.

8. Contact Form7: If you want your visitors should contact you then this Plugin is makes it very simple. It allows your visitors contact you thru a contact form, which can be placed at a “Contact us” page. To keep away from spam robots it uses a simple Captcha before submitting. It is very flexible and and capable to upload files also (Wordpress 2.7 & above). The Plugin is available at “Contact form7“.

9. WP-DB-Backup: without this plugin the list never get completed. Its always the best to get the Database backup. Will be useful if something goofed up with the server or database and we’ll have our database ready to use for reinstallation. We can have our database backup copy on demand or we can have a scheduled back up hourly, daily etc,. and can get the copy right in our Mailbox. My rating for this plugin is a 5*. The Plugin is available at “WP-DB-Backup“.

These Plugins are basic requirements for your Wordpress.org self hosting blog. And in next artical we’ll discuss about some other important and most highly recommended Plugins.

There are many types of Traffic like Search Engine Organic Search, Referrals, Type-in or Direct traffic and other traffic coming from RSS, Email Subscription. We cant always rely on Search Engine Traffic as there are many factors like Site Rank, Penalty etc., may not show the site in Search Results.

There are many legal ways in terms of Search Engines (without getting penalized) to get more traffic. These methods will decrease the dependency on Search Engine Traffic and will keep the Traffic level up always.

The best way is to get more Type-In traffic. People are typing the website domain and entering the site happens when the website has a repute brand name. Branding again has many ways to get reputed. One of the best ways is Advertisement on reputed websites. Getting Reputation has many factors again to get affected by and that is certainly not the point here to discuss now.

One more important factor that will make sure that your traffic will not get affected is “Subscribers to RSS feed” and “email newsletter”. These subscribers like your site’s content thus subscribed to get in touch with new postings in your website and we can call them as very loyal and will always ad a significant amount of traffic to your site.

One important factor is get in touch with co-bloggers and competitor sites and post or advice regularly at forums etc which makes your site visible to many and likely get more traffic in future and sometimes helps in getting valuable links to your site.

And for some business websites advertisement in local media always pays a better part. One of my Clients has a JobBoard site and advertisement in local news paper twice a month paid him a lot in terms of traffic from job seekers as well as more and more advertisements from employers on his site. SMS marketing is a niche marketing strategy and emerging recently. We have plenty of companies providing this facility where they will send SMS to get more targeted traffic. For new and small company business websites, Yellow pages will get certain amount of traffic.

Every website is unique and the scope of getting more and more traffic always differs and need to be analyzed by a specialist SEO. Many SEO Companies are providing more strategic analysis of traffic sources for a particular website after studying the websites business and the scope of Traffic.

More Strategic analysis in future articles….

WikiPedia defines a Sitemap as a representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

Sitemaps are very useful especially for Blogs where the content changes dynamically whenever a new topic posted to give the Page Information to Search Engine Bots. And sitemaps are useful for those websites whose Pages are not interlinked properly. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. WebPages pages which have Ajax and Flash find it difficult to get crawled by Search Engines and using a sitemap will solve the problem.

A Sitemap can be in two forms; 1 HTML sitemap 2. XML Sitemap. Did you notice I used ‘s’ in lower case for HTML and “S” in upper case for XML. HTML sitemap is a simple and normal webpage where the pages of the Website are shown in a hierarchical fashion can be included in a website along with other pages and is purely to help the website viewers to tell them how the website pages are interlaced.

XML Sitemap is an XML file that lists all the pages or URLs available in that Domain. Additionally XML Sitemap provides the additional data (Meta Data) like “Change Frequency”, “Last Modified”, “Priority” etc.

Change Frequency: Change Frequency indicates how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change.

Last Modified: The time the URL was last modified. This information allows crawlers to avoid recrawling documents that haven’t changed. You can let the generator set this field from your server’s response headers or to specify your own date and time.

Priority: The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site. The value for this tag is a number between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your site. The default priority of a page will be 0.5.

Some General rules for making a Sitemap:

1. Sitemap can have upto 50000 URLs
2. Sitemap can be split to multiple small Sitemaps
3. Can not be larger that 10Mb.
4. A Sitemap can have a Sitemap within it and can not have more than 1000 Sitemaps

Sample XML Sitemap Index

The below is the Sample XML Sitemap file.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

<sitemap>

<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>

<lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>

</sitemap>

<sitemap>

<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>

<lastmod>2009-03-12</lastmod>

</sitemap>

</sitemapindex>

SiteMap for WordPress Blog:

Do we need to prepare a Sitemap manually for a Self-hosted WordPress Blog. A big NO, just install an XML Sitemap Plug in and rest it will do for you.

Now we know the importance of Permalinks in WordPress Blogs. Restructuring Permalinks is pretty easy if we follow some simple and easy steps. We can find Permalinks Link in WordPress Settings. Clicking on Permalinks we will get the Options, and select the option “Custom Structure”. Enter the selected permalink structure there.

Permalink Structures are like

“/Category/Postname”

“/YYYY/MM/DD/PostName”

“/Category/PostName”

Enter the above code and don not press the “Save Changes” button. We need to have one more step to follow. We need to modify the file “.htaccess” which is located on our hosting server where the Wordpress Blog is installed. Check the root where the main domain of your site is located for “.htaccess”, if available then change its “Permission mode” to “777”. If the file is not available then create an empty note pad and name it as “.htaccess” and upload it to the root where your main domain is placed. Change its “Permission mode” to “777”. This can be easily done by just right click on the fine and change the attributes. Most of the FTP clients or File Manager of your Host will allow right click on the files.

Now again go back to your Permalinks Section and click on “Save Changes” button. That’s it, you are done with the changes. Check your blog for verification. Don’t forget to change the file attributes to safe mode like “660” or “644” after the process.

Happy Blogging