As I surf the blogosphere I read many articles related to either SEO or SMO (social media optimization). At times it seems that if you optimize one, the other suffers. If you try to optimize for both the end result is a poor compromise. I don’t believe this is true. You can optimize for both if you plan and work to that plan. Continue Reading

Over the last two days I have gone from the easy – trimming graphics and reducing page lengths – to the quite difficult – editing your header and footer files. Today’s article sits somewhere in between.

The first comment on would like to make regarding any blog, no matter which platform you use, is good housekeeping. How often do you actually look at your blog and analyze what you have on screen and what you have going on behind the scenes. Continue Reading

In part one I looked at graphics and page length and how to optimize them for speed. Today I am going to go through a couple of areas that require getting your hands dirty.

One of the first things to look at is your theme (what do you think of my new theme). I have just changed my theme and one of the things you may have noticed is how the page loads – not the best – if you can’t remember – hit refresh. The sidebars load first and the content last. This is not ideal. The first thing the reader sees are the sidebars and they have to wait for the content to appear. Over the next few days I will look to change the order so that the content appears first – it is only an illusion – but to the reader the page appears to load faster as they are getting the content first. Continue Reading

Have you ever visited a site or blog and waited, and waited, and waited for the page to load. It is one of the most annoying aspects of surfing the blog world (I would appreciate some feedback on my page load speed). The question is, how do I speed up the loading of my page? Over the next few days I will publish a series of articles on how to speed up your blog along with hints and tips to improve its look and feel. Continue Reading