Wizards Place New Look

There's a new look at the Wizard's place. It's been some months in the coming and it's not done yet. There are some big changes and there are some little changes. Most have been rolled out quickly and without fanfare days, weeks, even months apart. A few we've posted, Blabbed, or otherwise talked about. And whether you think of it as Wizards Place or WizardsPlace, I thought it a good time to sum things up in this post.

Wizards Place vs WizardsPlace

The first and most significant change was deciding to join the two words of the site name into one and move forward with that branding. It was a big change with a small, but significant, impact.

The reason for it was mostly all to do with SEO. Search engine optimization is important. Being found in the top pages -- indeed on page one -- of the search engine return pages (SERPs) is the Holy Grail of organic traffic and organic traffic, a significant component of inbound marketing, is the single largest source of visitors to most websites.

So why change? What's wrong with Wizards Place? Let's look at why the site is called WizardsPlace in the first place. I'm known by many online as the Wiz. Of late it comes from people calling me the WordPress Wizard, but it has a longer history than that, actually, and goes back before WordPress even existed. I won't go into that here. Perhaps in another post.

The thing is, since I was known as the Wiz (or the WordPress Wizard), a website called Wizards Place made perfect sense. An so it was. However, I should have checked things out. While the name was obvious, so was the problem with SEO -- something I'm pretty good at but I didn't bother to do my advance homework this time and it cost me dearly.

When you search the term Wizards Place in Google -- or at least when you used to -- you got pages of nothing but Wizards of Waverly Place, that very popular Disney program that has hundreds of fan pages, many news and information organizations writing about it, and dozens of it's own website pages indexed. It was difficult to overcome and I wanted at least one easy term I could use in promotion that would be easy to remember and let people search for my website and actually find it. They wouldn't with Wizards Place!

WizardsPlace - It's In The Domaine!

Searching for the domain name is a no-brainer. For almost all domains, if you search the main part without the dot extension you will find the site in first or second place on page one of Google. Try it with your own domain and see. If it doesn't turn up at the top of page one you need a little help with basic SEO. Call me.

It seemed natural, then, that to make a simple change in my branding from two words to one, WizardsPlace, would work. And it did. Of course when people search for WizardsPlace it should come up in first place. There's a guy from the Netherlands who also uses the name and his domain is wizardsplace.nl. It mostly comes up in second place. I'll be working to fix that, too, but that's for yet another post.

The thing is, if you search for WizardsPlace it now comes up in spot one in most returns. And I'm adding items to those search returns which will push competitors down, or off, page one. That part -- the rebranding -- is working. And I've started working on the Wizards Place thing too. I would really like to rank near the top of page one for that term too.

You can try each of these: Wizards Place and WizardsPlace, in separate Google searches to see what results you get. And let me know in the comments below where you found this site in those searches. I'd love to hear what you found.

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