SEO is a bitch ain’t it? Google changes algorithms at their whims and fancies and what we know now might be obsolete one or two months down the road. It’s a tough job catching on all those new information that I have practically given up trying. I used to be over paranoid over these things. I fear losing out on whatever rankings that I am enjoying at present for my keywords so whenever Matt Cutts announces some new changes, I can’t help but use to worry if my blog here is up to it.
However, after sometime, I get used to it and start to accept the fact that I will never be able to do whatever Google wants or prefer us to have. So, I just stick to what I can do and leave the rest in the hands of our creator.
What Can We Do Inhouse To Rank Better In 2010
In spite of all those new algorithms, some basic in-house SEO practices never changes. Things like having good and distinct H tags for your Blog and Post titles remains as an important aspect. Knowing what keywords to use for your Blog title and your Post titles still plays an important aspect as to how your post will be indexed. Writing a good keyword description for your post still holds true. Inter linking your posts still lets you get that double listing.
As for out-house SEO, using the right keyword anchor text when getting in bound links still works best. Natural links or links that other related blogs anchors you with when you write a good post is still the most valuable. Links derived from social bookmarking sites, directories and even comments have little value bit still good to make up the numbers. Like before, a link from a blog with a high PR4 or higher is still better than 100 links from PR0 or PRNA (Page Rank Not Available) sites.
The latest bombshell that is suppose to happen in 2010 is the loading speed of your Blog. The time taken for a site to fully load will be taken as a factor in ranking your sites in the SERPs. A good ranking in the SERPS is what we are looking for. Not a good ranking for our blog in terms of Page Rank shown in that tiny green bar. You can have a PR0 blog but if your keywords ranks in page one of SERPS, you will get thousands more hits than a PR5 blog with nothing on page one.
Since Matt Cutts have hinted that the loading time of a site will be taken into consideration when ranking a site, we should take this seriously. It is also something that we can to by ourselves to a certain extent. Things we can do to increase the loading speed of our blog includes.
-
Removing all third party widgets that serves no purpose for your blog other than an adornment.
-
Deleting all unused plugins and Themes that you have installed.
-
Do not use too many images for your WordPress Theme. Stick to hex color codes.
-
Use images sparely for your post.
-
Use the “save for web’ function in Photoshop when you edit your image. Save as jpeg.
-
Try to use Google Analytic instead of other stat counters.
Please feel free to add more if i have left out any that I do not know. As a confession, I myself do not follow all those “rules”. HA HA. I’m a blogger and what does blogger do?
Seriously though, at least try to adopt some of it. I don’t bother because I feel my blog here is loading reasonable fast. For those who are familiar with php, Google has some tips here to speed up your site.
After doing all of the above, the rest will depend on how your Theme is coded. A good Theme coder will always code their Themes lean and mean so that it loads fast and furious. If you feel your Theme is taking ages to load, do yourself a favor. Get a new Theme. I heard the Thesis Theme loads like a speeding bullet.
I would say, remove all of those flash banners, JavaScript scroll scripts!
And the guy in the video mentioned a FireFox plugin called PageSpeed,so I would give that a try!
I am surprised no one mentioned this but, your Hosting, can also cause delays. So If everything looks tip top, and you site is still lagging, consider at least calling and checking what’s up!
If nothing works try out a different one! I have a question though, Why remove unused plugins and themes?
Updated comments
Apparently Google Webmasters has now Page Speed page.
You can download the FireFox add-on FireBug and the Yslow plugin or Page Speed one recommended on your Google WM page.
Both will give you pointers to what’s missing and what has to be done to improve speed. I was missing for example, gzip compression.
Now that, that’s on, the page size went from 24kb to just 7! Be careful, some of the pointers are wrong on a given page. What do I mean?
If you run the add-on on your main page where you have posts, and no pages, It will tell you that your css lines for the post-pages are not used and it’s safe to removed them!
Also caching your files is one of the pointers! I found a great piece of code for your .htaccess that you can use.
First create a file called gzip.php or anything that you want in your root! Insert the following:
Now once you saved it open up ur .htaccess
################ Expires Control ################
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0
# 2 weeks
ExpiresDefault A1209600
Header append Cache-Control “public”
# 2 hours
ExpiresDefault A7200
Header append Cache-Control “proxy-revalidate”
# 3 days
ExpiresDefault A259200
Header append Cache-Control “proxy-revalidate”
################## GZip Files ###################
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .js
php_value default_mimetype “text/javascript”
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .css
php_value default_mimetype “text/css”
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html
php_value default_mimetype “text/html”
php_value auto_prepend_file absolute/path/to/root/gzip.php
Notice the last line absolute/path/to/root/gzip.php If you do not know your absolute path create a test.php file and insert
then run it and it will be shown to you.
What this above long piece of code does is, it ensures you that if you are using more than 1 css or js from different directories, it will gzip them as well, without having to put another .htaccess in the directory and modify it as well.
Finally put the
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
this is for your permalinks to work! This is actually automatically added, once you resave your Permalinks! Don’t panic if you have forgotten to resave them after editting the .htaccess and now all of your posts link to 404
I know I did freak out
but after re-saving from WP’s options it all worked out.
One last thing if you wanna make the cache period longer the numbers represent the time in seconds so # 2 weeks
ExpiresDefault A1209600 = 1209600 is two weeks in seconds.
Just picks a period of time and calculate it in seconds. The above add-ons recommend a month or over!
Plugins and WordPress Themes bloats up the whole WordPress installation which is already getting getting quite bloated up with each upgrade.
Btw, use these with caution, if you dislike things getting broken!
I spent 3 hours looking for a solution why my admin .css was broken, figures, gzip breaks it. Your install plugin button would also probably not work I haven’t found a solution for that yet
Just wanted to share my results! Here is the graphic from Google Webamasters for the past 3 days, after I have turned on zlib compression, combined css and java in single files, have optimized all images, have enabled cache and have minified every css and js code:
http://bit.ly/5xGL5R google really needs to shorten than 3 paragraphs URL
The blue line is the time it takes the site to load, according to google 1.2sec
One word, even though the link you gave is broken,
IMpressive! Hope this stripped down theme of mine can load as fast. I’m too lazy to put it to test though. LOL
Is it white, or is my browser playing games on me
? I am so used to ur old theme i restarted few times to check if my net isn’t freezing up or something.
I am satisfied with the results hopefully u will be too. Although I am not sure how big of a role this will play on my blog since it’s still pretty new and probably sandboxed on major keywords.
Btw how’s bluehost, I am really thinking of switching over?
It’s white, as in white-washed. LOL. Yea, got fed up with all the different colors so decided to go for a borderlless and colorless look. That’s me, itchy butts.
For the years I have been with Bluehost, they have been good to me, though there are some negative reports about them. For me, they have been great, support tickets gets replied within a few hours and they are helpful.
One tip though, don’t buy domains from them. You don’t actually own the domains if you buy from them. It is almost impossible to sell domains registered with Bluehost. Go with goDaddy instead.
Another personal opinion, if you intend to grow your blog phenomenonly in the future, use Hostgator. They have dedicated servers. Bluehost only offers shared hosting.
For small business and marketing sites where you don’t get tons of visitors, Bluehost is good. You can have unlimited sites and domains hosted.
I see well that might be a step in the future, depending on how it’s going to go, there’s a new site we r launching with a major keyword for a domain name that probably will grow one day pretty big since the monthly searches r close to 20,000,000