When I first started this blog a little over a year ago, its main purpose was to act as my resume. It was to show potential employers that even though I had no knowledge about the SEO industry, I was very passionate about it. I made it my goal to write at least one blog post per month even though there wasn’t any real value to it. But that will all be changing soon as I have finally decided to migrate over to the paid version of WordPress - with new goals in mind.
Branding and Reputation To be successful in the fledgling world of SEO, I have noticed you need to have a strong personal brand and reputation. You need to represent something and fight for what you believe in. For instance, the CEO of SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin is recognized as an industry leader who is more than willing to share his knowledge with others. Ross Hudgens is one savvy link builder who advocates for getting $#!t done. And although his posts may be long-winded, Michael Martinez is best known for questioning some of the “best practices” in the industry.
Helps with Ranking….perhaps? With the above goal in mind, removing the wordpress.com extension will not only be pleasing to the eye but I suspect it might even help me rank better. For the past year I pretty much stayed steadily at #23 in Google for “Christopher Yee.” Although I never did any “real” link building, I have a feeling using free version of wordpress may not help much if you are trying to rank for a competitive keyword such as my name. Maybe because it’s a gateway drug for spam bots? Or maybe because it’s not a unique domain? Maybe both? Or neither? I don’t know but I’ll definitely test it out by not link building for another year - LOL.
Highly Customizable I’ve used the paid version of Wordpress before and I think it’s absolutely amazing. The paid version is highly customizable and you can pretty much do anything you want with it - add new widgets, change the CSS, change the layout, implement advertisements, etc. The possibilities are endless! The free version is great and all but as you may have noticed, I am tied down to one single blog theme and no customization is allowed.
That being said, stay tuned as you should see a new domain name very soon. Oh, and I probably won’t redirect my old link juice because let’s be honest - I never really had any.