kadavy.net

Everything You Already Know About SEO

2010-07-14T18:41:50Z

The basics of SEO are stupidly simple; and it seems like everyone knows – or at least pretends to know – those basics. Still I get asked about SEO pretty often. I don’t consider myself an expert, but I’ll share what I know, and hopefully it will help some people.

I’ll be talking Google-centrically because Google will likely account for the vast majority of your inbound search traffic. Additionally, if you rank highly on Google, you will probably do pretty well on other search engines anyway.

I’ve been writing with SEO in mind – and using best practices as best as I can – on kadavy.net for over 6 years now, and my search traffic has steadily increased.

Consistent use of SEO best practices will lead to lots of free traffic

Why SEO is Important

SEO is the “location, location, location” of doing business on the web. If you have a bicycle shop on a busy street, you’re going to sell some bikes. It doesn’t matter how high your prices are, or how rude your employees are – you are going to sell some bikes. Likewise, if you rank highly on Google for “bicycles,” you are going to sell a lot of bikes, because a lot of people search for “bicycles.” That is your foot traffic.

I don’t want to make the mistake of assuming that everyone knows just what it means to rank highly on a keyphrase. If you are selling a product or service, ranking highly on keyphrases related to that product or service is essentially free money. If you rank first on Google for “bicycles,” (which is darn near impossible, by the way) you will get a huge number of visitors on your site looking for bicycles, and it will cost you nothing. This is called “organic” traffic, and it’s what SEO builds for you.

But, some businesses pay big bucks for such traffic by buying Google’s AdWords. In doing so, their site shows up next to Google’s organic search results, and they pay whenever someone clicks through to their site. For “bicycles,” those businesses pay an average of 71 cents per click. For “cambria bicycle” they pay an average of $12.55.

Paying for traffic like this can be profitable if the campaigns – and conversion within your site – are managed carefully; but obviously free traffic is ideal, and translates to big sales. This is why SEO is important.

Choosing the right keywords

Before you make sure you’re using SEO best practices, it’s helpful to have some idea what keywords, or keyphrases, you would like to rank highly on. But, just because you pick a descriptive keyphrase, doesn’t mean people will find you. It has to be a keyphrase they are actually searching for. I kick ass on “lump in mouth” because that’s what people search for when they have a mucocele. Most people don’t search for “mucocele” because they don’t even know what one is – until they get a lump in their mouth – and search for it.

Ideally, each page on your site should compete well on a couple of keyphrases that are descriptive of the content on your site, have reasonable search volume, and on which you stand some chance of competing.

You can find out the volume of keyphrases by using the Google Keyword Tool. If you’re just starting a site where you sell bicycles, it would be nice to compete well on the keyword “bicycles,” which has a monthly search volume of over 7 million searches per month – but you don’t stand a chance as a new site. If your site is for a bicycle shop in Chicago, then you’d probably have better luck competing on “bike shop in chicago,” which has a measly 390 searches. Once you dominate that keyphrase, then you can start trying to compete on “chicago bicycle shop,” which has 1,300 searches.

A good place to start to find keyword opportunities from your site is your existing data. If you don’t already have a stats package set up on your site, you should. Google Analytics is great and it’s free. If you happen to already have Google Analytics installed, you can find the keywords that visitors are using to get to your site under Traffic Sources > Keywords. Here you can see what keywords are bringing in the most traffic, and if you’ve set up e-commerce or marketing (such as lead-generation) goals, you can see what keywords are actually converting into business. You are likely to find a few keywords you didn’t expect, that you happen to rank pretty highly upon. It’s a good idea to aim to build upon this success by targeting these keywords further, or targeting related keyphrases. Look for synonyms that you may not already be using (bump ~ lump, mouth ~ lip), and update your content accordingly.

Ranking highly for your target keywords/keyphrases

There are endless complex theories on just how a site ranks highly on search engines. Some of those theories have no basis at all. The truth is, nobody except little robots at Google knows just how a site ranks higher than another. What we do know is that 1) the content of a page, and how it is coded, and 2) the authority of other pages that link to a page – especially for the topic in question – are the most powerful dictators of how well a page ranks on search engines.

Content and coding

The content of a page – meaning the words within that page – have a huge impact on how well a page ranks for given keywords. If your target keywords don’t appear on your page, you will have a hard time ranking highly for that keyword. It’s not impossible, but I’ll get to that later. Relevant content has to be within your page – as code (meaning not as an image) – for search engines’ crawlers (the robots that read your pages) to read that content, and rank you for the appropriate keywords. This is a strong reason why Flash websites do poorly on search engines, and former print designers that just slice up a design on a WYSIWYG program make poorly-performing websites: the real content gets locked away, where crawlers can’t access it.

It’s also essential to use good coding practices in building your pages. There are standards for writing HTML content, and they help rank chunks of content within a page in order of importance. This helps search engines know the difference between the important – and less important – information on a page, and thus rank that page for various keywords.

Following is a run-down of important content-based factors that dictate how your pages rank on search engines.

URL

Before a search engines’ robot can read the HTML on your page, it will read the URL at which that page resides – and the content of this URL has pretty heavy influence on how that page ranks on search engines. So, if my bike shop is at http://bikeshopinchicago.com, it will rank very highly on “bike shop in chicago.” If I have a page for Cambria Bicycles, I may want to put it at http://bikeshopinchicago.com/cambria-bicycles. Note that you shouldn’t automatically pick your top keyphrase to be the domain that you purchase, as branding – and planning for the future expansion of your business – are both important; but you should have search engine (and human) friendly URLs that are in plain english instead of http://example.com/?p=34.

Title Tag

The Title Tag of a web page is the strongest piece of information indicating what a page is about. Many businesses make the mistake of naming this page “Home Page,” or ignoring it altogether (this is why there are so many pages on the web called “Welcome to Adobe GoLive…”). For any given page on your site, your Title Tag should contain the exact keyphrases that you want to rank highly on. If it is the home page – or if your business name contains your target keyphrases, you could then follow that with your site’s name. So, if you’re business is David’s Bike Shop, your title should be “Bike Shop in Chicago – David’s Bike Shop.”

This clever title tag is part of the reason this site ranks #1 for Chicago Graphic Design Firm

Meta tags

The meta tags also contain some information that search engines give strong authority to when evaluating a page. There are several different meta tags, but the one that you should concern yourself with is the “description” meta tag. This is a very short (like around 200 characters) description of what the page contains, and search engines not only use its content to evaluate what a page is about, but also to display to users when your page is listed in search results.

The words under this search result do not appear on the page - they are from the description meta

Headers

Then we have the headers within your HTML document. These are ranked in order of importance: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. There should only be one H1, and this should probably be used for the actual title of your page (which may or may not be the same as your title tag). Some people like to use the H1 for their logo and link to their home page – it depends upon how narrow of a focus your site is. So, if you have a long document, full of text, it’s a good idea to break it up a bit by inserting some useful headers that also happen to contain some of your target keywords.

Content – EM, STRONG, IMG

Finally, you have the actual content of your page, which is hopefully helpful, interesting, and – incidentally – contains your target keyphrases. In addition to your target keywords, your content will probably bring in visitors on a number of “long tail” keyphrases that just happen to show up naturally within your great content.

Within your content, you will hopefully have some images, since they are useful for users. Much like the URL of your page is important to search engines, the file name of your images is also important, and should be descriptive. So, if you have a JPEG of a mountain bike, your image should be called mountain-bike.jpg, or – even better – include the color and brand: mountain-bike-schwinn-blue.jpg. The “alt” attribute of your IMG tag should also be descriptive, so “blue schwinn mountain bike” would do. Don’t forget, you can end up with a large amount of traffic from Google Image Search, if you use descriptive alt attributes.

The italic and bold HTML tags (EM, and STRONG, respectively) also hold higher authority in an HTML document than your plain content (which sits inside of P tags). When you italicise or bold words within your content, it lets search engine crawlers know that those words are important and relevant to the point of the page in question, so it’s a good idea to do a little of this – provided it supports the experience for your human users.

Authority of linking pages

Ranking highly on Google is ultimately all about the authority of your page or site on the keywords in question. This concept of authority also applies generally to your site just being an authoritative site. Google uses a ranking called “PageRank” to measure how much authority a given page has, on a scale of 1-10. There is a complex algorithm behind PageRank that you shouldn’t concern yourself with, but Google does provide a Firefox plugin called Google Toolbar, which shows what the PageRank of a page supposedly is. 7 is considered a very high PageRank. NYT.com is a PR 9. Kadavy.net’s home page is a 4, which is considered to be decent for a personal blog.

Google Toolbar says kadavy.net is a measly PageRank 4

There are a number of factors that go into determining a given page’s PageRank. While the actual algorithm is an ever-changing secret, here are a few factors that are widely accepted to be a part of the algorithm:

Age of domain: how long has the domain been registered?
Authority (or PageRank) of pages that link to the page from other domains.
Date of expiration of domain: is the domain expiring soon, or has the owner registered it a couple years into the future? This is in one of Google’s patent filings.

Content of linking pages, and of anchor text of link

To put it very simply, when other pages on a given topic link to your page of a related topic, search engines generally will rank you higher on that topic. If the PageRank of the page linking to your page is particularly high, Google will rank you higher for that.

Also important is the actual “anchor text” – or the content between A tags – of the link that links to your page. So, a link that says “Bike Shop in Chicago” will do more to rank “David’s Bike Shop” higher for searches for “bike shop in chicago” than if the anchor text says “David’s Bike Shop.” I’d be remiss to not mention that people once did this on a mass scale before (known as a Google bomb) such that the top hit on Google for “miserable failure” was once the Wikipedia page for George W. Bush. Such a Google bomb was implemented by tons of people doing this: miserable failure.

The A tag also has a couple of attributes, such as the “title” attribute, which can have descriptive text applied to it. I haven’t seen anything to make me think that using this title attribute helps with SEO, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt. The rel attribute can have a value of “nofollow” which tells Google’s crawlers not to follow the link, and therefore to not give the page any extra authority based upon the link. Most blogs give all links in comments a rel=”nofollow” attribute to discourage SEO-minded spammers from exploiting the comment functionality.

Everything in moderation

So, if you took all of this knowledge literally, you might stuff all of your pages full of keywords to the point that they didn’t make any sense, and contact site owners all over the web, purchasing links, and stuff all of your pages full of links – full of your keywords – to other pages. You may even obscure these links by making them the same color as your background, or hiding them with CSS.

Using some of these tactics in extreme moderation may even help you a little bit, but anything more than that will be heavily frowned upon by Google. They supposedly take very sophisiticated measures to detect use of these tactics, and will downgrade a site for doing so – which is something you do not want to experience (think immediate loss of tons of business). There are tons of shady tactics for getting links. As a general rule of thumb: if it feels like its deceiving someone, Google probably has some way to detect it, and won’t like it.

Getting the content / getting the links

Having a site full of relevant keywords, and being linked to by sites with relevant keywords, is a means to an end, not an end itself. You achieve this by using good coding practices, generating content, and generating useful and compelling content that others want to link to.

Here are a few legit ways – that Google doesn’t frown upon – to get content and links to your site:

Have a blog. To rank highly on keywords, it’s pretty much a must to have useful content, rich with your target keywords, that is updated on a regular basis. A blog is the best way to have these attributes. Unfortunately, Google still ranks some pretty shitty content really high, so I’d say that having some not-so-well-written content is better than having none at all; but hopefully this will change when they improve or someone gets around to building a better search engine.
Directories. DMOZ is the highest authority directory, and is free – but it’s nearly impossible to get into. There are plenty of paid directories out there, but the only ones I know of that are definitely high-authority are Yahoo! Directory and Business.com. Be wary of other directories or consult a professional. Then, still be wary.
Write guest posts on other sites. Find a high-authority site that your target audience reads, and pitch a guest post to the author. They’ll get great content, and you’ll get links, and exposure to their audience. Ramit wrote a fantastic article on writing and pitching guest posts.
Write link bait. The best way to get lots of links is to write content that other people will link to, share, and talk about. A really thorough, information-rich how-to (like this post) is a good example, but writing posts that are very controversial works well, too (unfortunately). Such posts then get shared on social news sites such as Digg.com, and on Facebook and Twitter. Do lots of research and make some pretty graphs, and your chances of getting lots of links increases again.
Find your audience. When you’ve written really great, useful, and interesting content, get as many people in your target audience to see it as you can. Submit to a social news site in a category where those people hang out, or buy traffic in your target category on Stumbleupon (5 cents per visit, with a chance of unlimited free traffic). Another good tactic is to find an already popular post on your target topic, find other sites that have linked to it, and pitch to the authors of those sites.

See?

You already knew all of this stuff about SEO, but applying this knowledge is all that you need to be well on your way to ranking highly and having money streaming into your business. There are probably some very reputable SEO firms out there who are great at applying this knowledge, and more; but be wary – because there is so much mystery behind SEO, the field is rife with consultants that overcharge and use tactics that will either only work in the short-term, or will get your site downgraded.

I’m sure there are tons of other great tips I didn’t cover – or maybe I’m just plain wrong about a thing or two. Talk about it in the comments!

Related around the web:

Search Engine Ranking Factors – A survey of SEO professionals on what is important to search rankings.
WordPress Optimization: How I Reduced Page Load Time by 75% – Google also recently started ranking based upon page load speed

No related posts.

Creativity Bootcamp: Laugh

2010-05-20T18:07:28Z

This is week 6 of Creativity Bootcamp, based upon the Eight Life Hacks for Creative Thinking. Last week, I told you to Isolate by doing an activity that strengthens your individual point of view. This week, I want you to Laugh.Not only does laughter reduce stress hormones and decrease blood pressure; but it also promotes creative thinking. Laugher is good for your health, but the very nature of jokes introduces you to non-traditional ways of thinking. And non-traditional ways of thinking are at the core of creative thinking.

To make laugher more enjoyable, give yourself permission to laugh – make it a point to laugh more over the next week. Some people experience guilt over taking time to enjoy the funner things in life, so if you’re one of these people – remember what good you’re doing yourself by laughing.

Some ideas to get you chuckling:

Watch some videos on YouTube: maybe your work blocks it, or you live in Pakistan, but if you can find your way around one of those things, YouTube is the ultimate place to find something to make you laugh. I enjoy Reckless Tortuga, The Onion News Network, or Wheezywaiter.
Go to a live show: the only limitation of watching a video on YouTube is you’re still in your usual environment. If you go to a live comedy show – improv, sketch, or stand-up – you’re in an environment with laugher in mind, surrounded by people with laughter in mind. This builds on the social aspect of laughter to get laughing even harder, and relaxing even more.
Schedule a night with friends: hopefully your friends make you laugh. If not, you need to get some new friends. If you haven’t all gotten together for awhile, host a party at your place, or summon everyone to dinner. Laughter better ensue.
Laugh while you work: if you really can’t get away – or are having trouble thinking creatively on a project at work, try consuming some funny media while you work. I like to watch 30 Rock on hulu on my second monitor while I work, but Podcasts are of course ideal for this. I hear that Uhh Yeah Dude is funny.

Yuck it up!

Creativity Bootcamp: Isolate

2010-05-06T04:50:18Z

This is week 5 of Creativity Bootcamp, based upon the Eight Life Hacks for Creative Thinking. Last week, I told you to Socialize by finding a group outside of your core interest. This week, I want you to Isolate.

Too much exposure to other people’s opinions or thoughts can drown out your own inner voice; and creativity is all about your individual interpretation of what you encounter in the world. To really develop a strong and individual point of view that is still relevant to the world, not only do you have to understand the world – through socializing – you have to develop and own your unique way of processing the stimuli of the world. But, the constant blizzard of information that we encounter throughout our day makes this a challenge.

This week: do one activity in isolation – away from computers and people – that uses your brain. Here’s a few ideas:

Check out a book from a library: yeah, that’s right, a paper book. One that doesn’t even have hyperlinks on it. Choose a dense subject which interests you, preferably non-fiction. Read the table of contents, and pick the chapter that makes your brain “salivate” when you read it. Then eat it up. Take notes. Repeat. If you don’t finish the book, who cares? I recently did this with Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner’s Guide. What subject will you explore?
Write in your notebook: this is like the writing exercise I talked about, but this time you have to use a notebook – not a computer. This is to slow down your mind to your writing pace, and keep you from checking Twitter every 3 minutes.
Think: stare at a wall. Stare at a sunset. Just do nothing, and think. I do this habitually, and I swear – it’s like watching television for me.

Or, maybe you have an idea for an isolating activity that helps you develop your own point of view. When you’re done, do some more thinking: how do these new thoughts that you’ve processed – isolated from the day-to-day world – relate to the discussions and subjects you encounter day-to-day?

Google Crawls My Site 90% Faster: Why Speed Will Be Important on Google

2010-04-28T22:28:42Z

Remember last week when I told you that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting faster page load time? Well, I found another interesting metric, under Diagnostics < Crawl stats. It looks like the Googlebot is also crawling my site much faster:

Google did say that their new speed standards will only affect about 1% of searches; but this graph makes me believe that portion will increase. If a site can be crawled faster – and requires less resources (clarification: time & money, not CPU) to index, doesn’t it stand to reason that it will be rewarded with higher search rankings? Additionally, I’ve heard from a number of people that they’ve seen higher CTR on ads when they improved performance – since so many sites have Google AdSense, Google will make more money by directing users to these faster sites.

Cheaper indexing, higher revenues on visits = speed is good.

Here’s that beautiful page load time graph from last week’s WordPress performance optimization post again.

No related posts.

Creativity Bootcamp: Socialize

2010-05-06T04:50:12Z

This is week 4 of Creativity Bootcamp, based upon the Eight Life Hacks for Creative Thinking. Last week, I told you to Use Your Senses by cooking something. This week, I want you to Socialize.The more you socialize with others who have genuine interests, the more you get the opportunity to observe the patterns that make passionate people successful at what they do, and the more you begin to see the opportunities that are present in your own life.

This week: attend a social gathering around an interest that is outside of your core competency (but is still something about which you are curious). If you’re a designer, go to a gathering of computer geeks. If you’re an architect, go hang out with some web designers. As you talk with these people, what do you notice about them that is different from what you observe in people from your own field? What are some similarities that you find?

Sometimes when we get too involved in a particular interest, we forget that there are communities around other interests, which approach things differently. I’ve encountered many different communities of interest working in Advertising, traditional Graphic Design, Architecture, and startups – and they all have their own unique ways of seeing the word, and different sets of things which they value.

For example, the people I encountered working in Architecture tended to have an appreciation for design, history, and credentials that was completely different from what I encountered working for startups in Silicon Valley. While an Architect will tend to be interested in the material honesty of a real brick wall vs. a brick veneer – the tech startup person tended to be interested in disrupting the status quo. When I moved to Chicago, I wanted to reconnect with the Architecture community, so I went to a Young Architects Forum happy hour just to get that fresh perspective.

Where can you find these groups with which to meet? Meetup.com is probably the best place, but there’s also Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, or even Craigslist.

So get out there and have some conversations with some people who are passionate about something that may just be a curiosity of yours. It will open your eyes.

WordPress Optimization: How I Reduced Page Load Time by 75%

2010-05-03T17:19:54Z

I heard rumblings last year that Google would start altering their rankings based upon speed of page loads. This was confirmed a couple of weeks ago on the Google Webmaster’s blog, and – while they say that their new speed standards will only affect 1% of searches – you can bet that portion will rise in the future.

A few weeks before Google’s announcement, I decided it was time to start looking at site performance. I moved a couple of my sites, including this one, from my Dreamhost Shared server, to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) on The Rackspace Cloud. Additionally, I implemented a few other performance enhancements that I’ll cover below. From all of these changes, I cut load time of pages on kadavy.net by 75%, and my Webmaster Tools performance graph now looks like this.

Also, Googlebot now crawls my site 90% faster. A summary of what’s to follow:

I reduced average page-load time from 12 seconds to 3 seconds, saving my visitors almost one week of time per month.
I did this by first switching from a Dreamhost Shared server to The Rackspace Cloud.
I then used the W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin, and served my media files from Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN, from multiple subdomains.

Great web publishing platforms like WordPress have made it easy for just about anyone to publish information and have it seen by the world, but as Google starts favoring sites that have the resources and knowledge to optimize page load time, some publishers’ messages may not have the reach they once did. Exacerbating this problem is that information on website optimization is somewhat complicated and assumes a considerable amount of technical knowledge. I hope to share my experience with improving the page load time of my WordPress site in as plain of language as possible. I’m a designer by training, and get by how I can as a developer. So, maybe some folks out there who know more than I do about this stuff will have some knowledge to offer. Maybe I did something completely wrong, in which case, let me know in the comments!

Servers: What’s the difference between Shared and VPS?

With shared hosting – such as Dreamhost‘s – your sites are all on one machine with a whole bunch of other sites, sharing all of the resources (CPU usage and RAM usage). You also don’t have much control over the configuration of your server, such as what PHP modules are activated (of which, there are probably way too many), and the configuration of your PHP.ini file.

With a VPS – The Rackspace Cloud, specifically – your “server” is a piece of a machine, with CPU and memory resources dedicated just for your piece of it. You can choose what flavor of Linux you have installed, how your Apache server is configured (if you want to run Apache at all), how your PHP is configured – you can control pretty much everything. The drawback is that you have to administer it all yourself. This was challenging for me to figure out, but as you can see the speed payoff is pretty amazing.

Why not use Dreamhost’s PS?

As I evaluated my options, I considered simply upgrading to Dreamhost PS. All I would have had to do was press a button to do this, but I had heard not-so-good-things about Dreamhost PS – and most importantly, my MySQL database would have still been on a shared server. I would have to pay extra if I wanted my database on a nicer server. This seemed pointless to me, and didn’t sound like a VPS at all. I wasn’t keen on administering my own server, but after help from some nice people at Jelly (especially Chris Chandler from Flatterline) things are going okay so far.

How much does the Rackspace Cloud cost?

I’m not really sure yet, because I haven’t gotten a bill, but it looks like you can get started for around $12 a month, with a server with 256MB of memory. There are bandwidth and storage fees on top of this, but they seem pretty low. The coolest thing about The Rackspace Cloud so far is that you can scale your server up and down in a matter of minutes, and only pay by the hour, based upon the size of the server. My two WordPress sites, totaling about 60k pageviews a month, are currently on a 1024MB server, which I hope will cost me less than $50 a month, but I’m starting to make money on my properties, so the expense is worth it for me. If you don’t have much revenue, it may not be worth it for you – or you could increase your revenue: something I hope to write more about in the future.

Using the Rackspace Cloud

Once I signed up for Rackspace (they called me within 15 minutes of signing up, to confirm, before I could start using it), I signed in and created a server. When doing this, you can pick the flavor of Linux that you want to use. I didn’t really know what this meant, but I was advised by a friend to choose the latest version of Ubuntu they had. So I chose 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I also could have chosen one of various Windows servers. After selecting the Linux flavor, I was able to name my server, and select the size of server that I wished to use. I started off with 256MB, but I very easily scaled up later on. After a few minutes, the server was all set up, and I got a confirmation e-mail, with my dedicated IP address, and login and password.

You can quickly and easily resize your server on the Rackspace Cloud

Setting up the rest of the LAMP stack

Now that my Linux was set up, it was time to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I SSHed into the server using Terminal on the Mac. That command looks like this (but I used my actual IP address):

ssh root@111.111.11.111

Setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP – and phpmyadmin – was super easy thanks to this great article in the Ubuntu Documentation.

Transferring the Data

Now I was ready to get the data over to my new server. I SSHed into my Dreamhost server (you may have to contact support to get this enabled), and created an archive of kadavy.net:

tar -cvf kadavy.tar kadavy.net

I then transferred that archive over to my Rackspace Cloud server using Secure Copy:

scp kadavy.tar root@111.111.11.111:/home

Then I decompressed the file on my Rackspace Cloud:

cd /home

tar -xvf kadavy.tar

Setting it up

I then used PHPMyAdmin to export my database from Dreamhost, and import it onto my Rackspace Cloud instance. I had to change a few settings in the options table of my database to match the IP address of my server, rather than my domain, so that it would run properly before setting up my DNS. I also made a few changes to my wp-settings.php so the installation was pointed at the right database.

Using the easy instructions from the Ubuntu documentation, I set up the virtual host on Apache, and started up the server.

After I felt everything was right – and after messing around with optimization tricks below – I pointed the DNS to this new server. Rackspace has a DNS management tool, but I found that GoDaddy (my registrar) had more user-friendly DNS management.

Optimizing WordPress / The Front-End

Now that I was on a much faster server, there were a few other things I learned that made my pages load even faster. After learning these tricks, I found that there was one WordPress plugin that used many of these tricks. I used the YSlow Firefox plugin to benchmark the speed of page loads, and also to get tips on ways I could optimize my pages. Here’s some of the more important tactics I learned.

Page Caching

The most popular WordPress optimization advice I found was to cache the pages. Instead of having to hit the database every time a page is called, caching allows your server to serve up static HTML. The server doesn’t have to process all of that PHP and build the pages from the database. There are several plugins for WordPress which automate this, one of them being W3 Total Cache, which I’ll talk about more in a minute.

Using a CDN (Amazon Cloudfront)

This was the most intimidating sounding advice I received, but it turned out to be pretty simple. A Content Delivery Network is basically a bunch of servers around the world through which you serve your larger files, such as images, CSS, and Javascript. When someone visits your site, the assets are served from the closest server to them, thus speeding up load time. I had heard of Amazon Web Services many times before, not really understanding what it was, but their Cloudfront service is a very cheap CDN (looks like it will cost me less than $1 a month). You can sign up for it at aws.amazon.com, and can freely upload assets using S3 Browser, amongst other applications.

Once you’ve signed up for Amazon, you can create a “bucket” on Cloudfront by clicking on the Cloudfront tab, then Create Distribution. Name your bucket, and you can set up CNAMEs (media1.mydomain.com, media2.mydomain.com). You’ll have to set these up in your DNS with your registrar as well. I’ll get to why you would even want to do this in a bit, but this gives you various subdomains you can use to access the same resources in your bucket. In addition to these subdomains, you’ll be able to access your resources at locations indicated under “Domain Name” and “Origin Bucket.”

Using Amazon Cloudfront, you can set up a bucket from which you can serve your media files

You can get the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key required to upload resources via S3 Browser by creating an Access Key under Account > Security Credentials.

Using S3 Browser, you can upload your media files to your Cloudfront bucket

The most daunting thought about using Cloudfront was uploading all of my resources, and pointing my code to them, but there are a number of WordPress plugins that automate parts this process, including W3 Total Cache, which I’ll cover in a bit.

Using Multiple Domain Names

Why did I set up multiple subdomains on my Cloudfront media bucket? It turns out, the HTTP spec states that “A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy,” and, even though this spec was written in 1999, many browsers still adhere to this specification. So, if you are accessing more than two assets from one domain – be they images, CSS files, or Javascript files – many users’ browsers will only download them two at a time.

The workaround for this is to set up multiple subdomains that all point to your Cloudfront bucket (media1.mydomain.com, media2.mydomain.com, media3.mydomain.com, media4.mydomain.com), and rotate through them as you code URLs to various media assets. I’ve been advised that 4 subdomains is plenty, as this will allow any browser to download as many as 8 files at once.

Multiple subdomains, one Cloudfront

Doing it all (almost) with W3 Total Cache

The caching component of the advice I found has been around long enough that not only is there a WordPress Plugin called WP-Cache, there is also another plugin called WP-Super Cache. Now, there is the amazing W3 Total Cache, which not only caches your pages, it also minifies (removes line breaks to save space), and uploads files in your media library to a CDN, such as Amazon Cloudfront.

While W3 Total Cache does upload to a CDN your wp-includes, theme files, CSS, Javascript files, and any other files you specify, it does not soon will change the paths to any images within your CSS files , and in your theme files, so you have to do this manually. But, since W3 Total Cache doesn’t soon will support the multiple subdomains I was talking about, this is probably for the best. I manually inserted different subdomains into my CSS and theme files.

W3 Total Cache will cache pages and upload all of your media files to Cloudfront

Be careful with minifying your Javascript files, as I found that doing so broke Google Website Optimizer tracking code.

Other Optimization Tricks

CSS Sprites: This is the technique of putting all of your design graphics in one giant file, and selectively displaying parts of it through CSS. This reduces the number of HTTP requests, and the total size of graphics to be downloaded, this reducing load time by quite a bit. It’s also a bit of a pain in the ass, so I’m saving it for a future redesign.
Putting CSS and Javascript inline instead of in separate files (for pages that are usually the only one visited): Since I have a couple of pages that visitors hit from a search engine, and then tend to leave, I did this on a dedicated template for a few posts. This really only helps if the page in question is the only page a user is likely to visit on your site. This is not a good technique for visitors that visit multiple pages, as they will have to re-download all of your styles.
Gzip files: but Amazon Cloudfront does this automatically.
Yahoo outlines some other best practices you may want to try, depending on how much effort you’d like to put in.

It still remains to be seen whether this performance enhancement will improve my Google rankings, but I hope this document helps some less technical publishers understand just how much impact they can expect from the choices they make in hosting platform and front-end development.

P.S. If you do decide to use The Rackspace Cloud, I sure would appreciate it if you signed up through this link. Clearly they’ve worked well for me, but I wouldn’t mind the referral bonus.

Elsewhere on the web: How to speed up your blog (the non technical guide)

Google Crawls My Site 90% Faster: Why Speed Will Be Important on Google

Creativity Bootcamp: Use Your Senses

2010-04-20T23:33:34Z

This is week 3 of Creativity Bootcamp, based upon the Eight Life Hacks for Creative Thinking. Last week, I told you to Express Your Thoughts by doing some writing. This week, I want you to Use Your Senses.Often times in life, we see someone with great creative talent – or any talent for that matter, and marvel at how they are able to do what they do. The great chef, the talented artist, the magical basketball player – whatever their skill – you can be sure they all got to where they were through essentially the same means. They used their senses, and through trial-and-error, developed their unique approach that makes them special.

The most relatable medium I can think of for understanding this is cooking. Some people are great at it, but even more are absolutely paralyzed at the thought of trying to cook something. I personally used to not cook that much, relying mostly on frozen microwavables.

Eventually I forced myself to start cooking. As someone who suffers from perfection paralysis, in the beginning, making a meal was an incredibly difficult undertaking for me. I would look up a recipe on my favorite recipe site, make a list of ingredients, and – hey, what is a beet anyway? (look up on Wikipedia). I’d finally make a list of all of the ingredients, buy the stuff at the grocery store, and check the recipe 3 dozen times to make sure I was getting everything right. Today, I can improvise a meal – with modest skill – out of whatever is available, and I don’t even own a microwave.

I get the sense that next time, I'll use less heat.

The valuable thing I learned after awhile is that cooking isn’t all that difficult. You get some food, and you heat it up. Wonder what two foods might taste like together? Just smell one, then smell the other, and imagine. If that doesn’t work, then simply try eating them together. The same thing works with spices. Sometimes, you fuck up and overcook, undercook, mis-match, or overspice. Then what? You do it differently next time, and eventually you learn. By Using Your Senses.

This week: cook a meal unlike any meal you have cooked before. That doesn’t mean it has to be extravagant, just something you don’t usually cook. Most of us cook the same couple of things over and over again. If you are in a habit of making hamburgers and pizzas, try making some Glazed Salmon. Always making Chicken? Make some Roasted Pheasant.

While you’re making the recipe, improvise a little bit. Maybe you don’t have some of the spices available, so smell and imagine the spices in your dish. How does it “taste?” If imagining isn’t enough, you might have to try it for real.

The important thing is that you get out of routine, and be forced to Use Your Senses.

PS Don’t forget to nomm your dish.

Fire photo by liber

Creativity Bootcamp: Express Your Thoughts

2010-04-13T19:09:18Z

This is week 2 of Creativity Bootcamp, based upon the Eight Life Hacks for Creative Thinking. Last week I told you to Move Your Body (how did that go?), this week: Express Your Thoughts.

Writing and drawing are extremely powerful activities for practicing your creativity. I often find that when I write or draw, I unlock ideas that I wasn’t even aware that I had. The main hurdle to overcome in this is just getting the motivation to do the expressing.

So, you need to do whatever you can to reduce the friction between your brain and a medium of expression (in this case, writing or drawing). For most of us, the problem is perfection paralysis. We become paralyzed by the fear that what we write, draw, speak, or dance will be just plain wrong. While you eventually have to create something lucid if you’re going to put it out into the world, this isn’t necessary at all in the creative process. All of these expressive functions are locked away from each other, and it isn’t until we exercise them that they can hone one another.

This week, write. Use whatever tool it is that makes it easiest for you to write. My favorites are a quality notebook with a quality pen, and a plain text document. Microsoft Word is your enemy. Too much friction.

Write about anything. If you can’t think of something to write about, then write about how you can’t think of anything to write about. It doesn’t even have to make sense. Make a nonsense string of words that pop into your head as you write, if that’s what you need to do to make it easy to write. What’s important is that you express your thoughts, and break down the barrier between the medium and your mind.

Do this for 10 minutes. Just 10 minutes this week is all you need. If you feel like continuing – then do! Do it every day if you can. But just do it at least once. For 10 minutes. That’s it!

Let us know how it goes!

Creativity Bootcamp: Move Your Body

2010-04-06T15:45:01Z

For the next eight weeks – if I can keep my own self disciplined enough – I’m going to give you actionable creativity tips that relate to the Eight Life Hacks for Creative Thinking. This week: Move Your Body.

Moving Your Body is important for your creativity not only because it gets your heart pumping, making your brain work better, but also because of the connection between your body movements and your thoughts and feelings.

So, this week, do this thing for your creativity. You don’t have to worry about anything else. Just this one thing…

Do a physical activity or sport that you either have never done, or haven’t done in at least 6 months. I’ve been taking Salsa classes, and, in the past, I have taken improv and acting classes. When first doing these new-for-me activities, it was amazing to feel my brain light up as it discovered new movements and mind/body connections. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, try one of these things:

Sign up for a (physical) arts class: dance, improv, or acting. You can also find low-commitment drop-ins in your city, just Google “[yourcity] [activity] drop-in classes”
Sports: play a racket sport such as tennis or racquetball, hit some golf balls at a driving range, go swimming, or go bowling. Have you tried Yoga yet? This week is the week to do it!
Just goof off: play catch with a friend, do a handstand, or find a pull-up bar to swing around on.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do this week. One physical thing you’ve never done before (preferred), or haven’t done in more than 6 months. You don’t even have to think about it, and you’ll be on your way to being more creative. Let us all know what you did, and how it worked out for you!

Flatmate Meetup Chicago is now HeyRoommates

2010-04-05T20:21:21Z

The ultimate Chicago roommates finder just got better with a new name, and a new platform. Almost four years ago, I started Flatmate Meetup as I was looking for a place in San Francisco. I found sending literally dozens of e-mails – and getting no response – to be utterly frustrating. Persuaded by a friend, I hopped on Meetup.com, and set up a mixer at a bar. It was an instant hit with all of the attendees. I later went to a housewarming party for a group of roommates that met at that event.

Since then, I expanded the idea as I moved to Chicago. Now, Kadavy, Inc. is taking a big step with this new name, and dedicated social network. The San Francisco events will remain Flatmate Meetup for the time being, but here in Chicago, (as announced on our new blog) it will now be known as HeyRoommates. This new name will make it easier for us to bring in people who are looking for roommates in Chicago, and ultimately make it easier for them to find a place to live. Our dedicated social network (powered by Ning for now) will give us tools and data that will help us market the service more effectively.

Best of all, the roommate-mixers (like speed-dating, but if it goes well, you sleep in separate beds) will still be FREE, and tons of fun.

So, if you’re looking for a roommate in Chicago, sign up, and come to a HeyRoommates mixer.

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