Changing Blog Hosts to Word Press
In an earlier post, I reviewed three of the major blogging platforms availalable on the market today - Blogger (free), WordPress (free), and TypePad ($4.95/m). I was most impressed with the full features and functionality incorporated into WordPress, but was put off by the limitations put on their free account. I landed on TypePad’s Pro account ($14.95/m, unlimited domains, etc.), but am today deciding to leave their platform for a hosted WordPress Solution.
The major reason is in how TypePad handles your blog posts. There are four primary limitations that I see, and in two hours of cruising their knowledge base and forums, I could not find an appropriate resolution:
- Your posts are arbitrarily truncated at 15 characters (including spaces), meaning your url does not contain the full keyword-rich title you need for higher Search Engine Rankings.
- Spaces are replaced with an underline "_" as opposed to the more search-engine-friendly standard of a dash "-", which means search engines see "your-keyword-phrase" as one word "yourkeywordph" in their crawler (including the truncation from #1)
- You are unable to modify the Meta tags on individual posts. Although Google represents they do not use the meta tags for search engine rankings, many other search engines do, and the description tag IS used for display in the search engine results.
- Your title tag always starts with the name of your blog, followed by the post title. A keyword rich page title is an important consideration for high Search Engine Rankings.
As a result, I have decided to move to a host that supports the Word Press Installation (and hopefully most of the widgets that have been developed for WordPress as well). I have initially chosen to go with BlueHost, which was recommended by WordPress.
I will start by putting one of my new blogs up on WordPress to see how BlueHost performs. The account specifications are much higher than with TypePad, and the cost is less than half. I’ll report back with my experiences. Please let me know if any of you have had experiences with either the hosted version of WordPress as a blogging platform, or with BlueHost as a hosting provider. I’d be interested to find out more.
