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. It is important to make sure your blog is optimized for its purpose and not lose sight of that. You need to be attracting the right visitors to your blog and have your blog loading as fast as possible so as not to lose them and have the search engines find you as quickly as possible.

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 will now be able to choose a domain name in keeping with your blog, if what you are setting up is a niche blog it is important to have done your keyword research and to choose a keyword-related domain name with good search engine traffic and low competition.

Once your WordPress blog is install, now is the time to optimize it for its purpose and for speed. 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. First you can install the ‘All In One SEO Pack’ plugin, enter your site details in the main settings and fill in the details every time you make a new post – you can also change the ‘Permalink Structure’ from the default setting to the custom settings /%category%/%postname%, this will all help with your rankings.

Site load times have now become a factor in Google, the faster your site loads the more love Google will give you and rank you higher than slower sites. 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 are another aspect which you will need to consider, optimize them, make their file sizes as small as possible and host them on a service like Flickr or EZS3 and not on your own server – this will improve your blogs load time. Another way to help speed up your blogs load time is to reduce the number of posts which show up on your blogs home page or just by changing the home page view to only showing an excerpt of your posts. Delete all the auto saves and revision posts in your database and change the frequency of the auto save in the PHP, this will help speed up your blog.

I hope I have 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

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