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Hosting your own blog or not?
By Mike | September 16, 2007
Well back to normal or at least as normal as this Old Bald Guy gets. Back to doing questions and recovering from yesterday’s blogathon.
Here is a question that came from a comment on what I wrote during the blogathon.
I’ve recently begun a blog using WordPress. For me, this is an incredibly difficult and tedious thing. There is so much I don’t know, I don’t even know the questions to ask. Except for one.
As you say, you don’t want to spend your time and effort creating a blog that you don’t control. I don’t either. I believe I should get my blog hosted by a blog hosting service. Would you agree?
I have nothing but praise and thanks for all the assistance WordPress offers. Even though it’s almost indecipherably “techie.” And I would still hope to be able to use it even though my blog is hosted by others. I suppose I can. Right?
And I’ve heard that a blog on WordPress is not optimizable for search engines. But the same WordPress blog hosted by a blog host is optimizable for the search engines. Is this correct? Since I may have my facts wrong (Ha, what facts?), would you be kind enough to ’splain to me if there are some blogs that cannot be found by search engines. And if so, is the answer to have a blog host: i.e., one not controlled by WordPress?
Just an old dumb guy’s question.
Who better to answer a question from an old dumb guy (and obviously you aren’ t or you wouldn’t ask questions) than an Old Bald Guy.
Okay first a bit of background. I believe you have started a blog with WordPress.com and they are not the most search engine friendly set up. They are free and relatively point and click simple to get set up.
You can get the same basic software and host it on your own domain. the difference is that if you host it you can add some things and make alterations that you can’t with any of the free services. The most important thing for me is to be able to edit the title tags for each post.
You can do that when you host your own blog in a few different ways. My personal choice is usually to use SEO Title Tag and Ultimate Tag Warrior plugins. This gives me a lot of flexibility in how my title tags are done.
I am testing the All in one SEO plugin and initially it looks like it may be even more powerful. If so I will probably change my recommendations but haven’t as of yet.
One of the nice things about WordPress on your domain is he wide range of plugins and ways that you can adapt your blog. I spend a few hours each week just testing and trying new plugins to see if there are better ways than what I use now. Everyday I find new plugins that have been released. (Gotta love Google Alerts.)
The other problem that most people have is that like was stated in the question that most of the help tends to be a bit on the techie side. Now this is to be expected because the people that create these are by nature techies.
That is part of what I do here and with some of my products is to try and play the interpreter and test out some of these new toys. One of the things I have learned over the years is that just because you can do something doesn’t always mean you should.
Now you can get results using WordPress.com blogs but I feel you could get better results if you used your own domain and made the additional changes. The big bonus is that you would have total control over the blog if you host it yourself.
Hope that answers the question. If not ask for clarification. As always your comments and additional questions are always welcomed and solicited. Oops gotta watch my language with words like solicited or may lose my plain talking reputation.
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