My newest tutorial is on using Fantastico to install a Wordpress blog. I’ve used images from my LunarPages account, but one beauty of Fantastico is that it’s basically the same on any of the hosting systems which offer it.

Fantastico is so simple that it doesn’t even need a tutorial. But if you’ve never used it before and are nervous, you can see how it works, step-by-step.

Once you know what you’re doing, actually using Fantastico to install Wordpress is a matter of one or two minutes. So if you’ve nervous about setting up Wordpress with Fantastico, check out the tutorial!

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• Easy Wordpress .htaccess 301 Redirect

Recently, I moved a Wordpress blog from one domain to another. Most of the time, I work with blogging platform transfers or possibly moving the domain from one host to another.

In this case, I needed to direct traffic arriving at any page on the old domain to the same page on the new domain. I knew that I wanted to do a 301 redirect, but I hadn’t anticipated how simple the whole thing would be. I had anticipated a long list of redirect.

But it turns out that if you migrate a Wordpress blog from one domain to another domain, then all you need to do is make a small change to your .htaccess file at the old domain.

If there isn’t anything about the “RewriteEngine” in the .htaccess file, then add the following:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace www.newdomain.com with whatever your new domain is. Use “www” or not as you see fit.

However it’s quite likely that in the section following:

# BEGIN WordPress

you’ll find the first two lines:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

Directly after those, before any other rewrite commands, place:

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

again replacing www.newdomain.com with the blog’s new domain.

This works on Linux servers which have Apache Mod-Rewrite enabled. That sounds very technical, but it’s also what’s offered by a large number of hosting companies. If you don’t know whether or not you have that, give the redirect a shot. You can always contact your hosting company if it doesn’t work and ask for their suggestions.

It takes about 20 seconds to do. And this works whether or not you still have Wordpress installed on the old domain. I deleted the entire Wordpress installation and just left the redirect up. Every link goes through to the new site.

A 301 redirect isn’t as good as a direct link, but in terms of traffic and even SEO it’s a best choice. Gives you time to find out who’s linking to your old site and ask them to change while making people follow those old links to the right place anyway.

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Related posts:

• Denying Access to Comment Spammers (and others) Using htaccess and 403 Pages
• Using Wordpress PHP Conditional Tags to Create Variable Design
• How to Build a Wordpress Theme Preview Site

In the long run, I use Google Analytics to track my site’s stats. But in the short term, I prefer Statcounter. Every day or two, I check in on my “Recent Keyword Activity” section to see what people have been looking for.

Most of the time, the searches are logical.

Sometimes, however, they’re actually useful for making your site more visible. Because sometimes people search for something that’s related to your site but that you haven’t actually covered.

And if your site ranks highly for this search, then it’s likely that if you write a real article based on those keywords you’ll rank highly for that as well. Apparently few other people do.

Simply use common sense by putting those keywords in the Title, in the post-slug, in the post, and perhaps in an h3 tag or at least bold. And write something useful, since part of ranking well is getting links to the post. Trying too hard—stuffing keywords and the like, probably won’t help on a number of levels.

Example of SEO Ranking for Keywords

Back in February, someone found my personal finance blog by searching for how to hide money from an abusive husband. She was sent to a post which wasn’t really related at all.

I didn’t know much about SEO at that point, I just thought it was a real pity that she couldn’t find something more useful. So I consulted my readers and wrote a series of posts. There was a lot of good discussion.

Now, I get a lot of traffic on that post. I rather wish I didn’t, because it seems to be mostly people who are being abused or people who want to hide money from spouses—which I believe is unethical if the marriage isn’t abusive. But I’m also hopeful that people coming to my site will find something useful.

And I’ve learned a valuable SEO lesson.

So the next time someone gets to your site using a crazy search term, go ahead and laugh. Just keep an eye on the search terms. Sometimes they’re a way to discover keywords and phrases which you can turn into even more relevant articles and which will rank even higher in searches.

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