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Posts tagged: Images

WordPress Fans:Sardines in Your Blog?

author Topmaker | timestamp July 12, 2010 | categories 7 Comments

According to Wiki:

“The close packing of sardines in the can has led to their metaphorical use for any situation where people or objects are crowded together; for instance, in a bus or subway car.”

And what Sardines has to do with your blog?

You might have a few posts or pages like them and you do not even know it!

Let’s go into details:

Keyword stuffing

Some of us think that getting as many keywords as possible in one post is a good way to attract search engines attention; true to a point, but over crowding your keywords will only lead to a shaky content and sentences that do not make sense!

Get the Mighty Search engines  and lose us as readers…tough trade, any blogger will tell you that his/her readers are the most valuable asset in any blog, so your choice should be obvious.

Solution:

  • Use keywords wisely and only if your content for that post includes those words.
  • Use long trail keywords: Will benefit your SEO efforts because they do not have much competition at Search Engines Listings.

Link stuffing

Oh please; I can not read a single paragraph in some blogs without stumbling upon quite a few links, they might be Inline Ad links, Content Related Links or the worst of them: Pop-up Links. I can understand the need for Ads and revenue to support your blog, I might forgive you for using a handful; but overdoing them will make me bounce out in a heart beat.

Solution:

  • Put the content related links first: They enrich your content and give us more to read on a certain subject.
  • Look at your links before publishing: Are they excessive? Do they interfere with the point you are delivering? If so start trimming.

Image Stuffing

Thankfully;  they are not so bad, but most of you do not know that Search Engines do panelize you for having too many images and consider that: Unfriendly Approach to web users. More images means longer page loading time too.

Solution:

  • Keep your images count to minimum: If it is decoration…you can live without it.
  • Optimize the images you keep: That includes smaller size, ALT and Description tags.

Big Word Stuffing

Not Long words; but words we need a dictionary to understand: Feeble is usually weak; Insurmountable is simply hard and so on. Some bloggers use those words as links to something they are promoting and we simple people click on those links just to know what they mean!

Solution:

Talk to us in our language: Unless your blog is so technical that we would actually know what you are talking about because we know the lingo too.

And lastly,

Old Content

Not stuffing per say; but Sardines in TV Networks language means those old movies and episodes that they use to fill empty slots in airtime; DOSE NOT WORK in blogs except maybe  History blogs.

Solution:

  • Keep up with current affairs in your interest area
  • Keep your blog fresh, inviting and interesting

Nobody I know would like to revisit any Sardine Blog: A blog that looks and feels like a can of sardines: Packed to the helm with extra and fluff, crowded with images that means nothing or filled with Old News.

Get your fresh look glasses on and start blogging!



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categories Web Design, WordPress

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WordPress Fans:How to load your theme faster,Update

author Topmaker | timestamp January 8, 2010 | categories 6 Comments

One important factor in the new and improved Google criteria for web sites ranking is : Faster Page Loading Time. The time between the click on your site link on some page (including Google Search results) or a web address window on some browser and the Done! Remark on the browser taskbar. Those precious seconds that you are working hard to make smaller and smaller!

You’ve probably read this post:

WordPress Fans: How to load your theme faster

Took my advice to heart and made the necessary changes; but now what?  You would ask:

  • How do I test my page load time in Real-Time?
  • How fast would my theme load on my readers PC, what if they have not-so-fast web connections?

The answer is: Full Page load test tool at Pingdom.com!

Image Copyright pingdom.com

A Free,  simple: Enter your URL here!  And you get a detailed second by second graph on how your WordPress blog is loading in Real-Time and where are those weak spots that are dragging your Page Load Time down into ( and I saw it happen)… Gasp…half minutes!

This test will open your eyes and make you see your blog in a new prospective. Starting from your Style Sheet and your HTML and not ending with those lovely images that you have on your blog or that widget that is living in your sidebar, almost everything is there, with a brief legend that shows:

 

 

• Total loading time: in seconds, the smaller the better, there, I said it again! • Total objects: in KB, Aim for less • External objects: in KB, Less is better. • (X)HTML: in KB, your page code. • RSS/XML: if you are displaying Any feed from another web site or blog.  • CSS: SyleSheet count in KB, some Plugin stylesheets are included here. • Scripts: in KB, including External Java Scripts, , try to combine them if possible. • Images: in KB, should be the largest portion of Load Time; Optimize them for less KB’s. • Plugins count • And even Redirected links!

You will see a Measurement Bar with: Yellow, Green and Blue sections:

Image Copyright pingdom.com

• Yellow  is Pingdom.com part of the test. • Green is connection time and it is up to your web hosting server and how fast it is, • Blue is your main focus because it measures the time between loading of the first byte in your page and the last,  needless to say:  If that blue section is long; you have a candidate to work on.   As for the Red notes: Those are to draw your attention to entry(s) that are hurting your Page Load Time and a sign for you to slash or at least find a work-around them, and finally Timed out note means you really have to work on that entry!

So if you are still working on improving your readers experience when they visit your blog, Shave those seconds away and keep testing till you see them get smaller and smaller; your readers will appreciate it and will be back for seconds…visits that is!



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WordPress Fans: SEO Specific Plugins – SEOPS

author Topmaker | timestamp October 18, 2009 | categories 27 Comments

SEO Specific WordPress PluginsSearch Engines Optimization (S.E.O for short) is what most webmasters dream about achieving; and work long hours tweaking this and trying that to keep search engines spiders happy and coming back for more visits.  WordPress codex itself comes with a few SEO tools built-in, but you know us: More is better!

 

 

Those are few of SEO Specific Plugins (SEOPS) in no particular order:

HeadSpace 2

The AIO fans are saying : Oh no…here is another kudos for Head Space …and yes I did convert!

A lot of work was put in this plugin, with the new version of  headspace  few wrinkles are gone and you have in your hands a powerful SEO plugin, do not let the short author description fools you. You need to know How-to use the most out of it; check out this link

Author Description

“HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.”

Plugin Home Page

 

Insights

Internal Linking is the rule here, it scans your post for keywords and let you link those words to your other posts, Use with moderation, too many internal links looks spammy!

Author Description

“Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time quality of your posts. Insights performs following functions in real-time: Interlink your posts, Insert Flickr images, Insert Youtube videos, Search Wikipedia, Search Google, Search Google News, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Insert a Google Map.”

Plugin Home Page

 

Link Harvest

A plugin to use and use again!

You need to use it at least once a week to gather information about the Links and the Link Juice LEAVING your blog, give up too much juice and down we go, give up so little and your blog will look Egocentric and helpful to nobody. Scan (or harvest) your outgoing links and keep them in check, and if you are big on sharing where you sent your viewers from your blog make a page for those external links!

Author Description

“Link Harvest will go through all of your posts and pages and compile a list of all external links. Then it will create a live updating linkroll for you, based on your actual linking activity.”

Plugin Home Page

 

SEO Friendly Images

Images are frequently overlooked as an important part of SEO, you need to optimize them and make them..well..SEO Friendly!

Author Description

“SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.”

Plugin Home Page

 

SEO Smart Links

Author Description

“SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.”

Plugin Home Page

 

Automatic SEO Links

Author Description

“Forget to put manually your links, just choose a word and a URL and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your blog. You can set the title of the link, target, rel and also you can know every moment how many times a word has been changed. In case the plugin finds more of once the same word in a post, it will only change the first one. This is to avoid black seo and inconveniences to the users.”

Plugin Home Page

 

SEO Tag Cloud Widget

Author Description

“SEO Tag Cloud Widget displays the tag cloud in a SEO-friendly way, using a search engine optimized html markup. It looks the same as the default WordPress Cloud Tag, but with an optimized html markup. You can put it to your sidemenu.”

Plugin Home Page

 

SEO Booster Lite

Author Description

“SEO Booster Lite detects and analyzes incoming visitors from search engines, and displays the most popular queries in a Widget or via the provided built-in function. The list generated is dynamic, and changes according to the popularity of your blog, making it self-optimizing and totally hands free.”

Plugin Home Page

 

Nofollow Case by Case

Comments are vital part of your blog, but if you are suffering (like this blog) from tons of Spam comments and some of those are real viable comments your spam filter put there by being False-Positive; then you need this plugin to help you sort them out and approve the good ones.

Author Description

“Nofollow Case by Case strips nofollow from comment links, comment author links, pingbacks and trackbacks (default). Selectively apply nofollow to any comment link you do not like to support. Selectively apply nofollow to any comment author link you do not like to support… The major search engines will not give link juice to your comment link anymore.”

Plugin Home Page

 

I would need more than one post to list  them all,  and though you need all of  the SEO you can get your hands on; try to go easy and use them one by one:  Install…activate…test and move on to the next, and remember that you have to be patient when dealing with Serach Engine Optimization and give the results some time to show.



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categories Plugins, SEO, Web Design, WordPress

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WordPress Fans: How to load your theme Faster!

author Topmaker | timestamp September 22, 2009 | categories 4 Comments

wp-lightningOne of my readers asked me: “I like my theme BUT it takes forever to load in my browser; what can I do to make it load faster?”

The answer my friend requires some work on your part; nothing fancy…. just simple steps:

 

 

 

 

Take a look at your Theme

  • Your Page

I mean take  a really good look and start  taking out all the elements that are not necesary to load your blog or that do nothing to benefit your readers, shrink  those BIG images or optimize them to load faster (usually changing the Type to GIF instead of PNG or JPG is a start). And drop that Background image for the whole page, you can get the same FEEL for your blog with a solid color and some Gradients.

  • Trim the Extras

Those are the Bells and Whistles that you can live WITHOUT!

An example is Web Page Visitors  Counter:  it is so Web 1.0  and your Stats should be on to your Dashboard,  not on your page!

  • Your Style Sheet (CSS)

Some of the Theme Authors will add Extras elements in the CSS  to Beautify the theme, check your StyleSheet(s) and trim them a little.

  • Your Java Scripts

I stopped visiting some of my favorite blogs because they have TOO MANY of them with too many errors on the page (if you use FireFox you know what I mean).  Granted they serve a purpose, but if you have a choice between Java Script and Plain HTML for let’s say: a Button; take that HTML and put it in an External Java Script File….Just read below.

Use WordPress Plugins

You knew this one was coming!

I’ve mentioned some of them at earlier post as Plugins you can live with; but there are more:

  • WordPress Super Cache

It is not called SUPER for nothing, it will make Static HTML copies of your Pages, store them on your server; the result is On-Demand service for them, no waiting for larger PHP files.

I would set Caching to 2400 seconds with no compression at first( some web hosts have problems with compression). Enable Cache Rebuild and Mobile Device Support.

Plugin Home Page

  • WordPress Widget Cache

Same purpose as Super Cache but for your widgets on your sidebar(s), footer …etc. Set it to 2400 seconds with an option to delete the Cache if you make any changes on your blog, this way you would have Fresh Widgets.

Plugin Home Page

  • PHP Minify Plugin

This plugin will compress and combine Java Script and CSS files on your pages. Think of it as Mini-Me machine for your JS and CSS. Take it slow with this one and deactivate it if you have any Fatal Errors.

Plugin Home Page

  • jQuery Image lazy load plugin

The biggest part of loading a page in a browser is the images,  if you have a Photo Blog or a lot of images;  this plugin will allow the rest of your page to load first and gives your images the chance to catch up and load later.

Plugin Home Page

Use External Java Script Files

Yes they are Java Scripts, but they are hosted on Your Server and your page does not have to fetch them from far away!

As you do with your regular web page, Put those extra HTML lines in an External Java Script file (.js), Upload it to your Root Directory and call it wherever you need at your page or even in your widgets. just remember NOT to include any Java Script inside your external file ( No Java Inside Java).

The Results?

May vary of course, but you would have a Leaner and Faster theme,  you do not have to give up your favorite one,  and most of all: Your readers will thank you for it!



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