In my search to begin blogging I decided to try out Google's Blogger two weeks ago. It was quick and easy and seemed to be a powerful platform. It is connected to Google and so I believed that a Blogger blog would give me a better chance at good SEO. In a short time I began to read articles that stated that SEO and link building would be better on a self hosted blog.
One reason is that you are not building any Search Engine love for your own site by having your blog on Blogger. Secondly, if you decide to move it Google will not give you the credit for the links that you have attached to your Blogger. Since I was so new at it I decided I would do the best thing and make a clean break from the start.
I had heard of WordPress for a long time. I knew that WordPress had a huge following and It was clear that there were an abundance of nice free themes. I set up WordPress on my site in a folder named blog. True to the claim it was an easy 5 minute setup. I have installed plenty of scripts which require one to set permissions on a myriad of folders and files. Nothing like that with WordPress. It was nice and seemed to be very stable and full featured. I like it.
I wanted to integrate my blog directly and seamlessly into my site. I searched and I found a good tutorial by Burn SEO. The people at Burn have provided an excellent tutorial on how to integrate the
There are about 5 files that need to be modified in order to make it work. My site has a lot of stuff beyond a header that I needed to go into the header file, but that didn't detract. In the index.php goes everything else except the footer code. When you are finished you will have a few little syntax errors.
That is because the person who made the code examples to insert used the wrong character for escaping special characters. Use the ( ' ) comma, instead of the slanted hash marks that are in it; this will fix most of your problems. Also, keep in mind that you will need the "default theme" (original default theme- see picture) that used to ship with WordPress and not the one that comes with the current download.
Everything worked out perfectly. You will need to do some tweaking of your CSS for your archive.php, archives.php and single.php files to get them to work properly. The theme applied to your main index.php will not be recognized by the output of the Archive and Single view of the blog post. This is good; now I can move forward on a better foundation than with Blogger.
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