“How to Back Up and Move a WordPress Blog” plus 1 more |  |
| How to Back Up and Move a WordPress Blog Posted: 22 Jun 2012 01:08 PM PDT This guest post is by Caimin Jones of Genius Startup. Sometimes you’ll need to move your blog from one host to another. It’s a bit of a pain and might seem a daunting task if you’ve never done it before. But transferring a site is a fairly straightforward process that you can do yourself with an FTP program and this step-by-step guide. Before trying the DIY method, it’s worth checking to see whether your new hosting company offers a site transfer service for new customers. Many do—but check whether there’s a cost involved. I’ve seen free services for this, but I’ve also seen prices around $300! If you just need to learn how to make a simple backup of your posts, and don’t need to move hosts, take a look at this ProBlogger post. But if you’re ready to back up and move your blog, let’s do it. What you need to beginTo get stated, you’ll need:
It’s best to move hosts during a quiet time of the week for your blog, which probably means over the weekend. Check that support is available at your new host, and have the number handy. If something doesn’t work as it should, you’ll be glad you don’t have to go looking for that phone number. Two preliminary steps to make life easierIf you’re using a cache plugin like Total Cache or WP Super Cache, deactivate and completely remove the plugin before you start the move process. Cache plugins store file settings on the server, and these will be different for your new host, so you need to do a new install for those types of plugins. Most other types of plugins won’t need to be re-installed using the process I’m outlining here. Secondly, it’s highly recommended go to your domain registrar or hosting company and lower the TTL value on your domain to something like 300 seconds, or the lowest value allowed. TTL stands for Time To Live. It’s the number of seconds browsers should wait before refreshing the DNS information that connects domain names with web servers. Setting it to a low value means you won’t have to wait more than a few minutes for your host switching to take effect. You’ll find the TTL as a setting under a DNS Zone file. For example, it looks like this in Media Temple: And it looks like this in Go Daddy: Make sure you change the TTL at least 12 hours before you plan to switch web hosts, so that the newer, faster refresh time has updated around the internet. Making the moveStep 1. Install WordPress on the new hosting companyIf the new host has a one-click install feature, use that to install WordPress—you’ll save yourself quite a bit of time and hassle. If you have to install it manually, take a look at the official installation guide. Step 2. Back up the databaseThe easiest way to make a complete database backup is to install the WP-DBManager plugin . Once it’s installed, go to Database > Backup Database and click the Backup button. If you have a lot of posts or comments, this might take a few seconds. When you see the message that the backup has been created, go to Database > Manage Backup DB and check the backup file is definitely there. Step 3. Back up all the files from your old serverUsing your FTP program, log in to your old host and navigate to your wp-content directory. Download everything in that directory to your computer. At this stage you have a complete copy of your entire blog—and you’re halfway there. Step 4. Upload your files to the new serverNow, it’s back to your FTP program. Log in to the new server and navigate to the wp-content directory. Before you take the next step, double-check that you really are logged in to the new server and not the old one. Now delete everything in the wp-content directory. Then upload everything in the wp-content copy on your computer to your new host. Step 5. Change nameserversYou’re nearly there! Now you need to log in to your domain name registrar and change the nameservers to those of your new hosting company. Changes to domain nameservers can take a few hours or more to propagate through the internet, so it may be a while before your blog is being served from its new home. However, if you followed the tip to reduce the TTL value before you began, you’ll only need to wait a few minutes for the changes to take effect. Sep 6. Make the finishing touchesVisit your blog homepage and refresh it every few minutes until you see the WordPress install page (if you manually installed WordPress) or an empty blog using the standard theme (if you used a one-click install option). Don’t panic! Log in to the Admin area and go to Database > Manage BackupDB. You should see the backup file you made on your old server. Select it and click Restore. Now check your blog homepage and you should see a fully working blog, with posts, comments, theme, and plugins working correctly. If everything looks good, you can now reinstall your cache plugin, if you were using one. I’d also say you’ve also earned a glass of your favorite beverage! Caimin Jones is founder of Genius Startup which gives bloggers and small startups no fluff, practical strategies to build a successful web business. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger How to Back Up and Move a WordPress Blog     |
| SEO Your YouTube Videos in 10 Steps Posted: 22 Jun 2012 07:07 AM PDT This guest post is by Deepak of VideoMarketing.net. In this article we are going to have a look at the various strategies and tactics that will help you rank your YouTube videos inside the YouTube video search engine. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, according to Alexa.com. A lot of people are looking for information online in the form of videos and they will come to YouTube directly to search for “infomovies.” Just like infographics, infomovies are articles in the form of a video. An infomovie can be defined as the audio visual representation of information (while an infographic is a visual representation of information). Infomovies usually include slides accompanied by text and images, and a voiceover too. Right now there is not as much competition for video rankings in YouTube as there is for article rankings in Google’s index, but as more and more people convert their articles to infomovies, it will become harder to rank your videos in the first page of YouTube search results. And that brings us to the purpose of this article: the process for optimizing your YouTube videos for search. 1. Use a suitable video filenameThe name of your video file should reflect the topic of the video itself. So, if you’re uploading an infomovie about dog training, your video’s file name should be something like “dog-training.avi.” This sounds obvious, but many people upload video files with names such as “untitled.mov” or “MOV123.MP4.” Although this file name is not visible to the YouTube user, YouTube will give search preference to video files whose names include topic keywords. 2. Put your keywords firstPut your main keyword first in the video’s title, description, and tags. Your brand name or website’s name can be included at the end of the title, but put your topic keywords up front. The title should, of course, be compelling and entice users to click on it. The rules of copywriting which you apply to blog titles and sales pages also apply to YouTube video titles. If you have an effective title, you will have a better clickthrough rate, and the YouTube search algorithm will take that into account in ranking your video. Some videos that you upload will not get a lot of viewers in the beginning, but will gain traction and traffic in the long term—so there are long-tail possibilities with YouTube search! 3. Include keywords in your video voiceoverWhen you’re creating an infomovie, you’ll likely include a script from which the video’s voiceover was made. This script is nothing but an article with small modifications to make is suitable as a voiceover for a video. And, just like a search-optmized text article, your video script should include the main keywords for your topic. Here’s an example of a video with a voiceover: Google has developed speech-to-text conversion technology which will try to convert your infomovie’s voiceover into captions—you can see the captioning in the video above by clicking the “CC” button at the video’s bottom-right corner. “CC” Stands for closed captions. Although YouTube cannot always transcribe your voiceover accurately, the technology is good enough to get an idea of the keywords you’ve used in the voiceover. And Google is improving it every day. This technology was originally developed for the free-411 service—a technology whereby users can call 800-GOOG-411 to get free, automated directory assistance. But Google has further developed this system to understand what videos mean and to improve video search technology, as Google’s Marissa Mayer explained back in 2007:
Google—through YouTube, which it owns—is constantly trying to deliver the most relevant results for customers and users. This is particularly useful for those of us who create infomovies packed with content. If we include keywords in our voiceover scripts, Google’s voice-to-tect technology will pick them up and use them, along with the other factors mentioned here, to rank your video in the youTube search results. 4. Upload a transcript file for video captioningYouTube also gives us the option to upload transcript files for our videos. It has been confirmed through experiments that YouTube indexes the captions file of a YouTube video, and uses this information to help determine the video’s keyword relevancy. In the experiment, a unique text string was included in the captions file. After a day a search for that string in Google returned that video. It couldn’t have been possible unless Google indexed the text in the captions file that was uploaded. Uploading your own caption transcript is a better option than letting YouTube transcribe the audio itself, as you get total control over what appears in your video captions. The original caption uploading feature required us to include the timing for each sentence or line in the video. This was a tedious process. It would take hours to create a captions or subtitle file if you included the start and stop timing for every single line. But recently YouTube has refined its speech-to-text technology so that if you simply upload the transcript file without timings, it will automatically set the timings. This feature is still in beta testing, but I have never seen it make a mistake. Google describes the difference between captions and transcripts like this:
To upload a transcript file, click on Edit for the video in your YouTube video manager. Click on the Captions tab. Under the Add New Captions or Transcript header, select Transcript File as the Type, and upload your script file—the article from which we created the audio file for the infomovie. Within a minute, YouTube will do its magic. You can see it work by watching your video. Click the CC button on the video and YouTube will display the words in exact sync with the audio. And your keyword-rich transcript file will be used by the YouTube search engine to rank your video appropriately in user searches for those terms. 5. Build an authoritative YouTube channelIf you are uploading your video to a brand new channel, your videos may not have a good ranking to start with. However if you have an established channel with lots of videos and subscribers, your videos will rank more highly in the search results as competition grows. So try to create a channel for each niche you’re serving through YouTube. 6. Upload videos regularlyIf you upload a bunch of videos to a channel and never touch it for years, then those videos may not have as much SEO power as the videos in the channel which are updated regularly. This is just like blogging—if a blog is not updated for a long time then it will lose its rankings in Google. Freshness is seen to indicate relevance, at least to some degree. So keep your channel fresh with recently uploaded videos. 7. Respond to comments on your videosYouTube tells us to “Respond to comments in the first few hours after you publish a video. These first viewers are your core audience and building comments early helps increase the video’s ranking in search.” 8. Create and use playlistsYouTube has a feature called Playlists that allows users to group videos spread across YouTube into a single list or collection. If your video is added to a Playlist, it can increase the SEO power of your video. We can see Playlists as social signals about videos that are popular or valuable to YouTube users, and well all know that Google’s working hard to integrate social signals into its search algorithms. 9. Encourage other social signalsIn a similar vein, your video’s search rank will benefit the more comments, favorites, likes, and video responses it receives. To attract these social signals, you’ll need to create a high-quality video and ask people to take those actions on it. However, be careful not to incentivize users to like or comment on your video. For example, if you offer to give away a random prize for the commenters on your video, your channel may be terminated. YouTube does not like playing games with their algorithm and this kind of activity is against their terms and conditions. 10. Encourage off-site backlinks to your videosJust like any web page, backlinks from other sites will help your videos to rank better in YouTube search. Submit your video URL to social bookmarking sites, blog about it, and share it on your Twitter and Facebook profiles. The more backlinks you can get for your videos, the better. Are you optimizing your videos for search?With these ten tips, you’ll be on your way to much better YouTube search rankings for your videos. Have you created an infomovie yet? And are you using any of these techniques on your videos? Let us know how your videos are ranking in the comments. Deepak blogs about video marketing for bloggers at VideoMarketing.net. He has 5 years of experience in using web videos to drive traffic. You can grab his 14 day free video training program on video marketing from this page. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger SEO Your YouTube Videos in 10 Steps     |
| You are subscribed to email updates from @ProBlogger To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 comments:
Post a Comment