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A lot of people who enter the world of blogging start out using free hosts with the three most popular hosts being Blogger, Wordpress and TypePad. Using such hosts, you can start a blog, your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more. All for FREE.

So what happens once your blog becomes very popular because of your original creative and useful content. You can still stay on Blogger, but most publishers want to move to their own website where they have total control.

Google’s Blogger service contines to hold the lion’s share among free blog hosting services. So, you have your blog hosted by Blogger and you decided to move to your own website using WordPress as your publishing platform. So you go to WordPress, and download the exec and upload it to your site. Finally, you decide to import your valuable posts and comments from Blogger to WordPress. Guess what you will see.

In the import options you will see

Old Blogger — Import posts, comments, and users from an Old Blogger blog
Blogware — Import posts from Blogware
DotClear — Import categories, users, posts, comments, and links from a DotClear blog
GreyMatter — Import users, posts, and comments from a Greymatter blog
LiveJournal — Import posts from a LiveJournal XML export file
Movable Type and TypePad — Import posts and comments from a Movable Type or Typepad blog
RSS — Import posts from an RSS feed
Textpattern — Import categories, users, posts, comments, and links from a Textpattern blog
WordPress — Import posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a WordPress export file

If you are using a @gmail.com email address to sign in into your Blogger account, you cannot use the import feature in WordPress. So, how do you move your posts from Blogger Beta or the New Blogger to Wordpress. You have three options

Method # 1: Copy and paste your posts

This is the worst method where you log into your blogger and wordpress account and manually copy and paste your post content from your blogger post to the wordpress post. This can easily become very tedious if you have a large blog. Also, how do you import the valuable comments? You can’t.

Method # 2: Use a Wordpress plugin to import from Blogger Beta to Wordpress

You can use Ady Romantica’s Blogger RSS Import plugin to import from Blogger beta to wordpress. However, this method is not a simple plug and play. There are a lot of issues using this plugin. The author himself provides a link to WordPress suicide to mass delete your wordpress posts in case the import fails and you have to try again. However, if you are looking at the plugin option, this is the best and only option right now.

Method # 3:

Import Blogger Beta Posts to WordPress

This is the best and the easiest method to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress.

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In case you didn’t know, Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog posts. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article(or section) , or how you may send a link to your story in an email message or post it on a social bookmarking site. Especially when they are used to link to individual posts, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence … permalink 

If you are a new beginner using WordPress, having an optimal URL structure for your blog is very important firstly because search engines love it and bring in more people to your blog. Also, once your links are linked back by the various websites out there or indexed by the search engines, it can become very difficult to change your permalink structure as they will then lead to broken 404 links.

An optimal URL structure will not have numbers or strange characters in its permalink. A permalink or the URL of the post should help the visitor decide the contents of the post better.

Here is an example of a poor URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/2007/04/19/archives/p=?420

Instead, here is an example of an efficient URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/category/post-title

Having such an optimal URL structure makes your blog a lot more user friendly than the default options in wordpress as shown below. More importantly, you will increase your search engine rankings as a lot of search engines give a high weight for keywords present in the URL structure.

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Popularity: 50% [?]