Adsense 101 Bootcamp Week 3 – A complete website overhaul

Sorry things have been a little quiet around here this week – I’ve been busy overhauling my travel website and it’s all thanks to Steve and the Adsense 101 Bootcamp!

The website in question is built around Disney World vacations; I’m not sure why I’ve avoided sharing that up until now, after all I publish the site under my own name so a simple Google search would bring it to your attention! It started out life in early 2008 as a blog called A Pocketful of Pixie Dust and was a place for me to write about Disney World and why planning is key when anyone goes to visit the Mouse. I’m a long time fan of WDW and am always amazed at the number of people who just seem to show up looking lost so I wanted to ‘give something back’.

Fastforward to 2009 and I got caught up in the world of Internet Marketing and decided that my blog should become a fully fledged website with it’s own domain name. Of course we all know that domains with keywords rank better so that’s just what I did. Just recently I’ve been asked by a couple of people whether I was at all worried about using a trademark in my domain name, and I have to say I wasn’t – until they mentioned it!

Then along comes Steve and the Bootcamp and I decide that it would be a great idea to use my Disney site in the course as it already makes a little bit of money from Adsense and it would be good if it made a bit more.

In the first couple of weeks Steve went right back to basics and talked us through keyword research and site structures. I hooked up with Market Samurai and discovered all sorts of keywords that I’d like to rank for, and realised that my site structure was an absolute mess. That’s what happens when a site grows organically with no clear aim I suppose.

With the help of MS I spent a good few hours doing some keyword research and categorising the keywords to help me build a structure that is easier for the reader to navigate but also should help my SEO.

I then set about buying a new domain name. It’s pretty impossible in this niche to have a keyword based domain name as the majority include one trademarked term or another so I decided to build my own brand instead. Ironically I went back to the beginning and Pixie Dust; I wanted something a bit punchier and easier to remember though so I thought about a phrase that conjures up planning. I personally plan my WDW trips like a military exercise so I came up with Operation Pixie Dust

I wanted to build a website rather than a blog so I selected newly release The Corporation theme from Elegant Themes. These themes are so easy to use, I’m quite enjoying not having to hack them. The support forum for members is great too, I had a couple of issues and when I headed to the forum the answers were already there.

Transferring the content from the old domain to the new one was simple:

• Set up a WP install on the new domain using Fantastico
• Download the WP-Content folder from the old domain using FTP (It’s a big site so this took a while!)
• Upload the WP-Content to the new domain writing over what was there as part of the fresh install
• Head over to MySQL and export the old database tables
• Open up the exported file in TextWrangler and do a find and replace for the old domain to the new. Do the same for the old name to the new name
• Locate the new database in MySQL and ‘drop’ the tables
• Save the exported sql database so that it has the same name as the new install’s database
• Import the database

At this point the website worked, including all the links.

I then set about restructuring the content. I deleted all the old categories and loaded in the new ones. I then spent a couple of hours doing a quick edit on all 280+ posts to drop them into their new category – the most boring part of the whole exercise!

Don’t worry about broken links – I have a plugin which redirects links based on the filename of the blog, so if you change the domain or the category it still knows which page to load.

Since this is a website theme rather than a blog I also had to build some new front end pages and create some images. The pages I’ve built need some work but at least there is something there for people to see.

Everything finished it was then time to redirect the old domain and tell Google.

• Log into your Webmaster Tools account and add in your new domain.
• Verify the new site
• Add in the alternative version of your old domain – ie if you have www.domain.com listed you also need to add in the domain.com and verify it
• Go into the www.domain.com version in Webmaster Tools and complete the change of address form

This step will ensure that Google knows you have moved and they’ll move all your site listings and backlinks to your new site.

Now all that’s left is to set up your domain redirect. Simply type this into the .htaccess file of your old domain:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Quite stupidly I set up the redirect before I told Google, so of course they then couldn’t verify my site so I had to undo it and then go back through the steps lol

That’s it – Operation Pixie Dust is now live

I then repeated all the steps again to move my Disney membership course to a subdomain. This time I stuck with the original theme and just created some new images so it was much quicker, oh and I didn’t mess with the structure either as I built this one properly to begin with lol

I’m all fired up now to start adding new keyword focused content to the website and then to drive traffic and hopefully increase the income I make from it

Sorry – that was longer than I had expected but it’s always good to document this stuff in case I ever have to do it again!

The Bootcamp lessons this week were all around setting up the essential information pages like Contact us and Privacy Policy and looking at on page SEO. Next week we’re moving onto content creation. Incidentally Steve is planning on opening up another session soon so if you’re interested head over to http://100buckschallenge.com/adsense-101-bootcamp-new-openings and put your name on the email list.