July 7, 1:06 PM
Creating an effective presence in the blogosphere has become far more competitive in recent years. With the steady growth of Facebook and Twitter, blogs are morphing into social media micro sites of their social network affiliates. I only host sites on Linux backed servers for performance and security purposes. Some of the following suggestions can only be applied in a LAMP environment (i.e. - askapache's .htaccess tweaks). Here are a few tips and plugins that I have found have worked quite well. I cannot take full credit for these so please make sure to check out the developers associated with each tweak for further information.
1. Install All-in-One SEO Pack by hallsofmontezuma and Google XML Sitemap plugin by Arne Brachhold. Post titles should appear before site name and sitewide keywords should mirror Google Adwords for relevant keyword searches. Also, regularly resubmit and update your xml sitemap and robot.txt files. I know this goes without saying, but it's something I sometimes forget to do.
2. Install Wp-Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh. This will greatly speed up page load times. If you use firefox I would install ySlow to see where your site is prior to installation and your load time once you have gzip compression and page caching in place. To make this plugin even more effective check out Askapache's Hacking WP Super Cache For Speed. His re-writing of the .htaccess file has proven to be quite effective.
3. Make the most out of your .htaccess file - by enabling Gzip Compression, adding an Expires Header, and disabling ETags you can definitely give your Wordpress blog a needed boost. Here is a glimpse at some of the things I do with my .htaccess file.
# Use PHP5CGI as default AddHandler fcgid-script .php ##################################################### # Expires Header Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 EST" ##################################################### # Mod_Deflate <IfModule mod_deflate.c> <FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$"> SetOutputFilter DEFLATE </FilesMatch> </IfModule> ##################################################### # BEGIN WordPress SetEnv HTTP_IF_GZ_MATCH .html SetEnvIfNoCase ^Accept-Encoding$ "(.*gzip.*)" HTTP_IF_GZ_MATCH=.html.gz RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=200 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !s RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(.+)\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cookie} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_|Facebook Connect API Number Here_user).*$ RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/%1/index%{ENV:HTTP_IF_GZ_MATCH} -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wp-content/cache/supercache/$1/index%{ENV:HTTP_IF_GZ_MATCH} [L,NC] # END WordPress ##################################################### # CONFIGURE media caching Header unset ETag FileETag None Header unset Last-Modified Header set Expires "Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 EST" Header set Cache-Control "public, no-transform" #####################################################
This accomplishes quite a bit and I also block out known malicious IP addresses for additional security.
4. Add a php opcode cache - eAccelerator and xCache are two popular systems. You need to have a good working knowledge of .ssh terminal commands in Linux and must have root access to your server to effectively utilize php optimization and opcode caching. This will help with your blogs ability to perform server-side php functions by creating a stored cache.
5. Make your Permalinks Pretty - SEF canonical urls are a no-brainer yet a lot of blogger still don't get it. I'm always surprised to find major corporate sites that have sloppy link structure.
6. Make your code Valid XHTML and CSS, consolidating Javascript and CSS into two files - This can be laborious, but it is essential. I am a big fan of semantic tableless CSS. However from what I have read and heard it seems that Googlebot and most other bots don't really have a problem indexing tables.
7. Write compelling content with solid back links and make sure to ping! - This is not really an optimization technique. It's more or less a pre-requisite. RSS snippets that leave your readers wanting more is important. Check out Searchengine Land's 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers and Search Engines for more.
8. Deactivate unused plugins - There are several plugins I used every so often for maintenance purposes, but that don't serve an everyday purpose such as WP-DB Manager, DB Optimize, and Wp-Maintenance (to launch a quick maintenance splash page.)
9. Add rel=no follow to all sites you display in you link directory that have a page rank of 5 or less - This might be considered controversial, but to keep up with the big boys you have to pay careful consideration to who you back link to and why. Back links should fall into a related genre to what the mission your blog desires to achieve. Blogroll links need to also be site related.
10. Marry Facebook and Twitter on your blog - I encourage integrating the Facebook Connect API so users can login with their encrypted Facebook account and add a follow me on Twitter link either in your sidebar or at the bottom of your post page.
Including the Sociable social bookmarking plugin by Joost de Valk is also a suggestion. It's important to create meaningful footprints. If you provide relevant information that readers appreciate they will want to talk about it, share it, and thank you for it. It's pretty simple. Of course shamelessly self promoting your blog on Facebook and Twitter is a must! That is if you believe in what you write... I would like to thank askapache, Joost de Valk, and everyone else that contributes to making Wordpress a better and more reliable blogging platform. Their knowledge has helped me become better at what I do.
originally posted on 4 Darby Media Interactive May 4, 2009.
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