In the interest of full disclosure. I am an affiliate of GoDaddy.com and get paid by them for referrals my site makes to their services. All other ads on my sites might pay me commissions also. Now, if you’re like me you have accumulated more than one web site. I’ve racked up around 20 domains most of which are built on Wordpress. I use WP for my blog sites but also for my commercial sites. I adapt ‘posts’ to be new product offers. It’s a great way to easily add, remove and manage data. In the course of getting to this stage I had accumulated several ‘free’ hosting accounts but also an unlimited hosting package at GoDaddy. If you intend to have multiple sites the unlimited hosting is a great way to go. My problem arose when it came time for my ‘free’ economy hosting to renew. I didn’t want to pay for the separate economy packages when everything could be hosted in my unlimited account. The trick? How could I migrate the contents of the sites I had on my other accounts into the unlimited account? Luckily, all my sites are at GoDaddy. If your sites are spread out this will work but will be a little more complicated. This is a fairly advanced process and if you make an error you could lose your blog data. Proceed at your own risk.
One thing to be aware of is that simply copying the contents of your site through FTP is not going to work. WP is database drive and that database needs to be copied correctly. The first thing to do is to load a Wordpress database backup plugin to your blog. Also, you’ll need FTP access to your sites. We’ll refer to the unlimited account as ‘Main’ and the site you’re moving as ‘OLD’. Go through the process of doing a backup of your database according to the plugin instructions. Be sure you save the resulting file to your local hard drive since you may not have access to the ‘OLD’ directory. The file created by the backup program will probably be compressed as either a gz or TAR file type. Once the file is on your local drive unzip it using 7Zip or a similar program. Now, in your FTP program (I use FileZilla) you need to log into the ‘OLD’ host account. Navaigate to the folder on your local machine where you saved the backup file. On the hosted side highlight the ‘wordpress’ folder the folder where Wordpress was installed. (When installing Wordpress I always change the default folder location to ‘blog’ rather than ‘Wordpress’. ) Drag that folder over to the local folder where your backup is located. This will take a few minutes to copy but it’s worth it. You will now have all of your plugins, themes and other data saved locally. While in the FTP program, navigate to the ‘Main’ hosting account. Under the root directory create the folder where your ‘OLD’ site data will reside. I always make the folder relevant to the domain name. You can usually create a directory by right clicking over the root folder. You’ll need this folder name later.
The next step is specific to GoDaddy, if your ‘OLD’ host account is elsewhere you’ll need to figure this step out for that provider. Go to the Hosting Manager. Choose to manage the ‘OLD’ hosting account. Click the tab labeled ‘Domains’. You should now see the domain you want to relocate. You need to add a domain to the list. Make it a fake domain (I use the name on my site with a 1 at the end. It will give you error saying that GoDaddy does not control this domain blah blah blah. Click okay, this fake domain will go away after we cancel the ‘OLD’ host account. (Please note that you are not buying the fake domain, just allowing the real domain to be removed from this account.) Highlight the new fake domain and choose the “Make Primary button”. This process will take up to 24 hours for GoDaddy to complete. Please note that when they make this change your site will be down until you get it set up in the new hosting account.
You can keep checking this page to see when the ‘changes pending’ message changes to ‘Setup’. Once the fake domain is listed as the domain for the ‘OLD’ hosting account we are ready to move on to setting up in our ‘Main’ host account.
Go back to Host Manager and choose the ‘Main’ hosting account. Choose the ‘Domain’ tab. Click the Add button located above the list of domains associated with the hosting account. Begin typing the ‘OLD’ domain name in the popup box. GoDaddy should populate the field with the available ‘OLD’ domain. Now tab over to the ‘folder’ space. Click the browse option. This will open a window that shows your ‘Main’ hosting folder. You should see the folder you created for the new residence for your site. Click that folder then click ok. Now we wait for GoDaddy to do their magic. It is usually done within the hour. Until its complete the ‘OLD’ domain appears in your list of domains with a notation like ‘pending’. When setup is complete that field will indicate that it is ‘setup’.
After they set up your domain you need to have them install Wordpress in the new domain. Go to Hosting Manager. Choose to manage your ‘Main’ host account. Now choose the ‘Applications’ tab. In the left column, choose ‘Blogs’. Then choose Worpress. Click the install button in the center panel of your screen. Place a check mark next to the domain name. You’ll have to choose several setup options then click okay. GoDaddy will then proceed to do the install. Usually it is done within an hour but sometimes takes longer. You will receive an email telling you the install is done.
Now for the restoration. The first thing I do is open the FTP program and open the ‘Main’ hosting location. Open the folder where the ‘OLD’ site resides. Open the folder where you told Godaddy to install Wordpress. This is ‘Wordpress’ by default. Now open the ‘WP-Content’ folder. Delete the ‘Plugins’, ‘Themes’ & ‘Uploads’ folders. There may not be an ‘Uploads’ folder. Now open the local folder where you saved your backups. Open the folders until you get to the WP-Content folder. Open it. Drag the ‘Plugins’, ‘Themes’, and ‘Uploads’ folders from the local window to the web site window. This will probably take a few minutes to complete. You are now ready do the real magic.
Go back to GoDaddy and open your Hosting Manager. Choose to manage the ‘Main’ hosting account. Click the ‘Database’ button. Choose the MySQL button. You’ll now need to identify the database that GoDaddy has just set up in your new ‘Main’ site. Usually it will be the last one on the list. Copy the file name before you click on it. You’ll need to paste it in the user id to log into the database. The password is the password you set up when you had GoDaddy create your Wordpress install. Once inside the dtatbase manager you need to choose to ‘Import’. This will open a dialogue box. Browse to the location where you saved the database backup file. Be careful to choose the file you unzipped. Hold your mouse over the file. It should be file type SQL not GZ or TAR. Choose the SQL file and click the button to allow the import. This is a fairly quick operation depending on how large your blog database is.
Now you are ready to go. Try navigating to your blog. It should open. (Please note that if you had your old blog set up to open from the root domain while WP is installed in a folder you will need to move your index.php file to the root and edit the require statement in that file.) You may need to check your plugins. In some cases the plugins have not been activated. I’ve had to go through and activate the plugins. In another case the plugins activated when the database was restored. I assume it is a function of the theme or something. Hope this helps.
Posted in Blogging, Domains.
Tagged with Domains, godaddy, hosting, word press, wordpress.
By jhauer – March 26, 2010
If you are just starting your site you know how tough it is to anyone to look at it. Drawing eyeballs is the key to success in any internet venture but obviously the most difficult. The easy way to accomplish this is to buy them. Since most new net entrepreneurs don’t have an advertising budget I’ll skip this for now. I will cover it late. there are affordable ways to buy page views but you need to have some knowledge so you are not throwing money away.
I know many people are wary of Google’s hold on everything internet. I have a little uneasiness but I do trust them to a degree. The fact is that there is no better place to get your site noticed. They own internet search. Getting your site on the first page of search for your key terms is imperative to success. This is why I believe a narrower topic is easier. Niche websites are easier to get ranked than scatter shot approaches. Remember the vastness of the internet and keep in mind that getting a small percentage of viewers could make you a success. The approach I’m speaking about is counter-intuitive. Aim at a less popular topic and do it well. Get yourself ranked number one in a tiny niche and your traffic will skyrocket.
What should you do? The first thing I do with every site is create a site map file. This is an easy task that is overlooked by many if not most small sites. A sitemap is an file, usually in the xml format. It acts as a roadmap for Google and other search engines. Most engines allow you to upload a site map every time your site is updated. It puts them on notice of changes and clues them in on what part of your site has changed. They can then crawl that part sooner. If you are creating a Wordpress blog there are several plugins that will automatically create a sitemap every time you post to your blog or change a page. They do not stop there, they will also submit the file to key search engines. I’ve had great success using ‘Google XML Sitemaps’. I cannot stress enough how important this is. This will almost certainly get you on Google and Bing sooner.
A second step is to sign up for a Google account. I suggest setting up an account for use with your web businesses that is separate from your existing personal G mail accounts. You’ll be using this account to use an incredible cadre of absolutely free tools Google has created for webmasters. Why, you may ask, is Google doing this for free? Won’t they eventually charge for this great service? I highly doubt they have any interest in monetizing this. It’s in their interest for your site to do well. They are an advertising company and they want you to succeed using their ads. They do not require use of their ads but when you work with them I don’t know why you wouldn’t. Google has proven they are very adept at developing loyalty among webmasters.
Step 1. – Set up a Google Analytics account. You’ll want to start off with a basic set up but eventually you’ll learn how to use this free tool to do amazing things. Follow the steps to add a website. I also always add a ‘filter’ to block Analytics from counting my visits. It’s easy to add your IP address to a filter. This way you don’t get stats skewed by visits you make for maintenance. Eventually you will need to add a snippet of code to any web page you want analytics to track. If you are using Wordpress you’ll want to inject the code into the “footer” section of your template. There are many instructions out there that can get you through this if you haven’t done any editing before. I always save a backup copy before I make changes to the template. NOTE: Many Wordpress templates have a pre defined option that allows you to simply enter your Analytics code and it does the rest. One that I use often is Crowd Favorite’s Carrington Theme. It is very flexible and allows you to paste the Google code snippet in a box in its setup screen. It then adds Analytics to every page and post. Another handy Wordpress plugin is ‘Google Analytics Dashboard’. This handy gadget gives you Google Analytics stats on your Wordpress dashboard. It also gives you stats next to each post and page in your list (when in edit mode). Simply a great free plugin. Google Analytics is more than fancy graphs. You can use this to decide what to focus on. Since analytics gives search terms that have led people to your site, you can see what may be a hot, trending subject. Use these tools to focus on what your readers want. There are far more features in Analytics than I can give justice to in this session. I’ll do a separate post focused on Analytics in the future.
Step 2. – Set up a Google Webmaster Tools account. This site takes it all to new levels. This site will help you discover errors you’ve made or things that may hold you back in getting ranked. The truly useful information becomes available after Google spiders your site. It will give you great tips on meta tags in your site. It will pinpoint problems on each page of your site. this is huge. Google is actually telling you why they may not rank this page highly! Putting it bluntly, anyone who does not take advantage of this free information is simply foolish. A very useful piece of information you can glean from Webmaster Tools is the list of search terms on which your site appeared. This can give you incredible insight. It lets you know that you are showing up in results for various terms. If the terms make sense for your site you can concentrate on gearing more content to those terms. If your site is appearing in the top ten results for a category you should focus on moving up the list. If important terms are not showing up here you should focus on adding meta tags and content toward that goal. Again, there are so many useful features these tools I can’t get into detail in this post. I’ll do posts addressing things as I stumble upon them. Almost every time I spend time poking around in this tool I find another interesting way to use the info. The best thing you can do is to invest a few hours in here exploring. It will take time but it is time well spent. I’ll do an article in future focused on things you can do with Webmaster Tools information.
Step 3 – I always set up a Google AdSense account. I usually try to place at least one Google advertisement in my Wordpress sidebar or footer. It generates a little cash but I use it as a real time (almost) monitor of traffic to my sites. This info is reported on a small delay but it gives a good heads up if traffic spikes. Later I’ll get into using Adsense to make more meaningful money via niche sites. (Also see my previous article.)
Hope this article is helpful. It’s a high level guide to some things you should do to improve your site’s ranking in Google and other search engines. Please keep in mind that all of this is useless if you do not have high quality, fresh content. In the end that is the most important factor in search optimization.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization.
Tagged with adsense, adwords, analytics, Google, statistics, stats, webmaster tools, word press, wordpress.
By jhauer – September 16, 2009
I recently migrated my Blogger blog over to a Word Press blog hosted at GoDaddy. I thought it might be helpful to post my experience and some helpful resources I used to accomplish the process. It was a relatively painless effort with the only down time being the Godaddy process of pointing to my new blog. This took less than 12 hours but they do warn that it could be 24 hours. I’d recommend pulling the trigger late at night (unless your site is geared to a late night crowd.) A short post to the Blogger blog warning of upcoming down time is also a smart move that I thought of after it was too late. If you’re using Twitter as a toll (you should be) you can also tweet about the down time.
Before I get into the transfer process let me give you some history. I purchased my domain (BlacknGoldNation.com) from GoDaddy.com
. I set up a blog in Blogger and followed the Blogger instructions for pointing a custom domain to their servers. They had very good instructions specific to GoDaddy domains and that was a very easy and seamless process. It involved going to “Total DNS” in Godaddy’s Domain Manager and changing the www setting to a Google server.
I also already had a GoDaddy.com Deluxe Hosting Plan
account for another blog I was running (ShoestringVacations.com).
The first thing I did was go to GoDaddy account through FTP and set up a new folder in my Primary Domain (ShoestringVacations.com in my case). I currently have a Deluxe account which I’ll be upgrading to Unlimited very soon. I added a new folder under the primary domain named ‘blackngoldnation’. I then went to manage the hosing account. Clicked “Add Domain”. Choose the new domain (blackngoldnation.com in my case) Choose to add it to the hosting account. I then went to manage domains and chose ‘Applications’. I chose to install the current version of WordPress. I pointed the installation to the new folder location. I changed their defaul install location from WORDPRESS to BLOG. I like the generic aspect plus it’s easier to type when you need to access your settings. It took about 2 or 3 hours for GoDaddy to finish setting up the database etc for my new Word Press install. At this point I’ll assume you’ve worked with Word Press. I didn’t worry about a new WP theme for now. I wanted to be sure I had my Blogger content imported before I tweaked anything. At this point I found a great post on Tech Ravings. You can see this at http://tinyurl.com/b92xfd . There is a very helpful tip there. Before going through the import process in WP you should change the permalink settings. This will ensure that Google and other search engines will not see any change to the structure and any good rankings you might have built will be retained.
Go to your WP settings. This will be http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/blog/WP-ADMIN or http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/WORDPRESS/WP-ADMIN if you didn’t change the default installation folder. Here you want to choose the “Settings” tab on the left margin. Then choose “Permalinks” option under ‘Settings’. Choose the custom option and paste the following /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html . Thsi is the default Blogger format so your posts will retain their current structure. You can change this permalink setting later if your like.
Now you’re ready to import the posts from Blogger. On your WP-ADMIN screen chosse ‘Tools’ in the left margin. Choose ‘Import’, then choose Blogger from the list and fllow their easy instructions. That’s the import process. From here you’ll want to change your theme, and add some plugins. That’s the biggest advantage to WP over Blogger. The ability to easily add plugins to customize your blog. I’ll be poting my list of suggested plugins plus some themes I’m currently using in upcoming posts.
Posted in Blogging.
Tagged with blogger, godaddy, word press.
By jhauer – June 25, 2009
If you’re considering a website without any real website experience Amazon has made the process easy. The offer a turnkey solution for getting started on the web. Sure there are less expensive options but they really have made this easy. Check out their program at
Amazon webstore
Posted in Uncategorized.
Tagged with e commerce.
By jhauer – June 22, 2009
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| What is a domain name? | | A domain name is a Web address, such as godaddy.com, that is linked to an IP address (which represents a physical point on the Internet). When someone types a domain name into a Web browser, the requested Web page displays. A domain name consists of a top-level and a second-level domain. A top-level domain (TLD) is the part of the domain name located to the right of the dot (godaddy.com). The most common top-level domains are .COM, .NET, and .ORG. Some other popular top-level domains are .BIZ, .INFO, .NAME and .WS. These TLDs have certain guidelines but are, for the most part, available to any registrant, anywhere in the world. The part of the domain name located to the left of the dot — "godaddy," in this case — is called the second-level domain (SLD) name. The second-level domain name is the "readable" part of the address and refers to the organization or entity behind the Internet address. Second-level domain names must be registered with an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)-accredited registrar. |
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Posted in Tech.
Tagged with Domains, godaddy, hosting, word press.
By jhauer – May 26, 2009
