The Importance Of Optimizing Wordpress. How To Boost Your Blogs Speed & Traffic
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In this Wordpress How To Article I am going to be covering some of the basic strategies which can be carried out to help improve your blogs speed and traffic.
It is often over looked how important it is to optimize your Wordpress blog when you first install it. You need to keep in mind what your blog is going to be used for when you are installing it. You want the right visitors coming to your blog, the search engines to be able to find your blog and to make sure that your blog loads fast enough so your visitors don’t get bored and leave before you catch their attention.
It is important to write a list of what you are going to be using your blog for and the type of visitor you are going to be targeting, as there are some aspects which need to be implemented on the installation of your Wordpress blog. Think about what your blog is going to be about or what purpose it is going to serve. What type of people you are going to be targeting, whether it’s for business purposes or for friends and family… you get the idea. When you first install your Wordpress blog you will first need to setup a domain name on which to install it on to and this is why you need to know its purpose before installing. You can now see why it is so important to do your research and know what you are doing before you get started.
Once you have your Wordpress blog installed don’t think ‘That’s it – I’m up and running’, there is much more needed to have your blog optimal for its purpose. Don’t get me wrong optimizing your blog to the fullest is not a difficult task, you just need to put in a little time and effort, but it will pay of in the end.
To help get the search engines to your site quicker there are a few simple tasks you can do. Changing the ‘Permalink Structure’ from the default setting to ‘Custom Structure /%category%/%postname%’ and installing the ‘All In One SEO Pack’ plugin – fill it in with all your site details and each time you make a post, will all help with your SEO efforts and make a difference to your rankings.
You need to make sure your blog is running as fast as it can as Google now take into consideration how fast your blog loads as to how well you rank. Some of the things to consider are plugins, as having to many installed whether they are active or not can slow your blogs load time down, so analyze your plugins and only have installed what you are using and consider whether you need them at all. Graphics and pictures can considerably slow down your Wordpress blog, check your graphic and pictures file sizes, you may be able to increase the compression on a jpg file for instance and make the actual image size smaller, also you could host all your pictures on image services like Flickr and EZS3, this will all help towards your blogs load time. Changing the number of posts which show up on your blogs homepage or only showing an excerpt of each post can improve your blogs load time and increase speed. Cleanup your database and changing the autosave function in the PHP will also help with speeding up your blog.
I hope this has given you something to think about. You can now see the importance of thinking and planning, before you jump in and setup a Worpress blog, but by applying a few simple strategies it will give your Wordpress blog a better standing with the search engines and your visitors.
There are of course may other Wordpress How To strategies which can improve your blogs speed and search engine rankings, but I hope the few I have laid out here will give you a head start.
Alester Fox
Wordpress How To
Related posts:
- 10 Ways To Optimize Your Wordpress Blog
- How To More Traffic And Backlinks Using A Free Traffic System
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Tagged with: how to install WordPress • install wordpress • installing wordpress • wordpress how to
Filed under: create a blog
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Great tips what people do not realize is Google is starting to rank heavily a blog, or Websites speed or load time. So if your blog is slow loading it can effect you in the serps a great deal. Your tips are very useful for all Internet marketers thanks!
Thanks for the tips. I’m learning seo as an intern for Gogo Dropship and decided that as a I learn, I’ll put what I learn into practice on my own personal blog. It has been both fun and challenging.