Google is almighty and powerful in the Internet world! That’s what I have come to terms with in my Internet marketing experience. The reason for this introduction is that I just realized that my Google page rank and search engine ranking for this blog dropped significantly after I changed over from a RapidWeaver blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog.

Now at first I thought, its because the search engines needed to re-index my pages and it would return to its original ranking. However, I now realize that is not the case. I spent the last month reading all about SEO for my marketing sites and when I re-looked at my new WordPress blog, I realized that I was just very careless in not optimizing my site.

Here are some of my SEO mistakes that I hope you benefit from:

1. My old blog had the words “Copyright © Brian Wong” on the footer of EVERY page. The keywords “Brian Wong” used to appear on every page which is very important if I wanted to be ranked for these keywords on Google. My new blog did not. (now fixed).
2. My previous blog resided on the top level domain at www.brianwong.com. My WordPress blog resides on www.brianwong.com/blog. While there is nothing wrong with this structure, its very important to use a “301 Permanently Moved” redirect script. If you do not, the search engine thinks that there is NO information on www.brianwong.com and does not index it. See the resources below to check if your redirect script is SEO friendly.
3. My previous blog software (RapidWeaver) allowed me to add custom meta tags on every single page. I included author, content and keywords thus making my pages rank highly. On WordPress, you need to install the plugin – “All in One SEO” for WordPress and manually apply the SEO options around your keywords.
4. My previous blog had many back links that were not updated to the new one. So when the search engine finds that those links are no longer in existence, I got penalized (I assume) for having missing pages! You need to add a 404 redirect to new pages if you are changing your site and notify your link partners to update their links.
5. Additional improvements – I now created a site map of my new site structure and resubmitted to the major search engines.

So, if all goes well, I do expect to see my page rank and search engine ranking move back up to where it was before. I’ll update you on a later post when this happens.

Here are some resources that I used to optimize my site this week:

This link checks if your redirect script is SEO friendly:

Free Redirect Checker

This is a very useful SEO optimization and analysis tool (check out their tutorial videos):

Brad Callen’s SEO Elite

Tags: google, search engine, SEO