Posts Tagged ‘mybloglog’
March 20th, 2010
Load speed of WebPages is increasingly becoming important, not only for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but also because people are becoming ever more intolerant of slow Websites. As Internet network speeds have increased (ADSL, 3G, WiMax etc.) so content of Websites has increased therefore negating some of the benefits of faster networking.
The obvious question that many people on my SEO and Web related courses ask is how to improve Website Speed. There are two factors here; Website speed and Webpage speed. Both are interrelated but probably best described separately (recommendations include on-page and off-page factors and range between non-technical to fairly technical):
1. Improve Website Speed
Website performance includes factors that will influence the entire site and every affected Webpage. The obvious candidates for improvement are hosting your Website with a high availability provider, ensuring that your Website host has high-speed servers and so on. Some other factors to consider are:
1.1. Host in the same country as your primary target audience
Having your Website hosted close to your target audience can realize big benefits in Website speed. Website I have targeting the U.S.A. are hosted in the U.S. whereas this Website is hosted in Australia due to my primary audience being located in Australia. There are various good cloud hosts such as Amazon EC2 which simultaneously host and deliver from multiple geographic regions. Although often more costly, for busy Websites with multiple targeted countries Cloud hosting is likely beneficial.
1.2. Use Expires header.
Expires header instructs compatible browsers to store the file and use that local file for reuse instead of downloading the file from the Website. An expiry date and time is added according to settings in the .htaccess file and the file is only downloaded again if the expiry date and time has passed or if the browser is otherwise instructed to download all files again (e.g. ctrl + F5 in Firefox). Expires Header settings hugely benefit visitors that revisit your site.
Here is how to enable Expires Header for gif, png, jpg,jpeg, ico, css and javascript:
1. Copy the blue text below
# BEGIN Expires header
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0
ExpiresByType image/jpg A1209600
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A1209600
ExpiresByType image/ico A1209600
ExpiresByType image/gif A1209600
ExpiresByType image/png A1209600
ExpiresByType text/css A1209600
ExpiresByType text/javascript A1209600
# END Expires header
2. Open the .htaccess file of your Website which will be in the same folder as index.php or index.htm or similar (open .htaccess with notepad, notepad++ or similar).
3. Paste the copied text into .htaccess at the next line after text already in .htaccess and save changes.
The A1209600 text as entered into .htaccess determines the time for the files to be stored by the browser. 1209600 is calculated as 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 14 days. If you don’t amend affected files often then I recommend increasing the time to, say, 31 days (of course, renaming files on your Webpage/Website will make browsers download the file).
1.3. Use caching
Server-side caching benefits include the minimising of code execution. For example, on almost all websites that include multiple pages and/or anything beyond just plain text multiple files are referenced in compiling the final Webpage. This means that every time a request is made to view a webpage, multiple files are run to produce the output which all results in execution time. One way of eliminating the need for the running of all the files every time a page is viewed is to use caching. Caching stores the files and/or output in a very easily and quickly accessible ‘dynamic’ memory/storage for a period of time. Although caching may not provide significant performance enhancements for Pages accessed infrequently, for busier sites, caching provides considerable speed benefits.
The ‘WP Super Cache’ WordPress plugin is popular in order to enable Website caching.
1.4. Minify
As described on the main minify page; ‘[minify] combines multiple CSS or Javascript files, removes unnecessary whitespace and comments, and serves them with gzip encoding and optimal client-side cache Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: apache, firebug, firefox, google, GZIP, hosting, how to, htaccess, html, Internet, JavaScript, Minify, mybloglog, page load speed, php, Search Engine Optimization, seo, website host, websites, WordPress, Wordpress plugin, yahoo, yslow | 
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July 29th, 2009
What difference does Search Engine Optimization really make? Is it worth spending the time and money on SEO? From experience it is obvious that SEO is an effective activity however I thought it’d be fun to compare two identical websites; one with a bit of SEO performed and one with very little SEO.
I have set up two websites which will have the same content, structure and underlying technology. The basics of the experiment are thus:
Objective: Determine what, if any, Search Engine ranking benefits basic SEO affords a website.
Method: Set up two identical structured websites running on WordPress. The content will be identical aside from the SEO elements listed in the Limitations below. The websites will be hosted in the U.S.A. and will be configured on the same time-zone.
Measure: The number of visitors referred by Search Engines in any weekly or monthly measurement period.
Limitations: SEO activities on the optimized site will include; meta tags, ‘pretty’ URLs, updated Sitemap.xml, sitemap page on the site, robots.txt, some link promotion (in the form of my adding the link to a very few external Sites), Social Network bookmarking and sharing icons available, use of Creative Commons licensed images, pinging of ping-o-matic and enabling Feedburner PingShot, adding Website to Technorati and MyBlogLog, adding Site to DMOZ.org (well, attempting to anyway), ‘related articles’ links on each Post.
As both Sites will have the same content there is the possibility of being penalized by the Search Engines for having duplicate content.
The names of the two websites are:
http://www.jacks-travel.com : Non-optimized Travel Information Site.
http://www.harrys-travel.com : Optimized Travel Information Site.
I’ll post updates as to the ‘going-ons’ of the SEO experiment …
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June 12th, 2009
In parts one and two of the dozen simple and effective SEO essentials the following Search Engine Optimization tips were described; fresh Content, text styles and formatting, descriptive URLs, sites linking to your webpages, Sitemap.XML, Robots.txt, Meta Tags and validating HTML. In the final part, the following are illustrated; Social Networking SEO, DMOZ, page load speeds and unreadable content.
Social Networking
Twitter, Mixx, Digg, Reddit and the Read the rest of this entry »
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February 11th, 2009
Following on from my previous post ‘Friend of a Friend, the Semantic Web and Web 3.0‘ , it is worth adding how FoaF may easily be integrated into any Web Page (including Blog Posts in WordPress, Typepad, Drupal or any other platform). One of the challenges of FoaF is it’s simple to have many RDF (FoaF) files but have no single one that is up to date. Kent Brewster provides an excellent and simple means of overcoming this problem as well as integrating Friend of a Friend (FoaF) capability using a third party social networking site (MyBlogLog). His recommendation is summarised below:
- Join MyBlogLog.
- Add the following to the HEAD section of your Web page/s: <link rel=”meta” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”FOAF” href=”http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/ecksteing/foaf/” /> . Substitute ecksteing with your MyBlogLog Sign In Name.
That’s it! It’s a very good idea to keep your ‘Services’ in the ‘My Account’ section of your MyBlogLog account up to date.