Post #1: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Account Structure

During campaign creation, AdWords provides a number of settings to tailor a campaign to your advertising goals. Understanding these settings can make or break the success of your campaign. Google does offer recommended settings defaults along the way, but be weary. Don’t forget that the more you spend each month in AdWords, the more revenue Google collects. Are the recommendations in AdWords best for you as an advertiser or are they best for Google’s bottom line?

In this post, we break down the six major campaign settings so you can avoid spending your advertising dollars on unqualified customers.

General

After naming your campaign, the next option in the General category is ‘Type’. There are three types of campaign types advertisers can opt into: Search Network only, Display Network only, and Search and Display Networks.

What is the difference between the Search and Display Network?

The Search Network is a collection of search engines offering advertisers sponsored text ads. Ads are triggered by user search queries.

The Display Network is a group of websites which offer text and image ads. These ads are targeted contextually based on the advertiser’s preference.

Pro-tip: Use a descriptive name for your campaign. It will be worth it when you have multiple campaigns accumulated in your account. Then, opt into the Search Network only to give yourself the best chance for initial campaign success.

Networks

After opting into a Search Network only campaign, it’s time to determine your reach across Google’s Search Network.

By building a Search Network only campaign, your ads will be displayed across Google Search, Shopping, Maps, Images, and Groups.

The choice within the Networks section is whether to include your ads on Google search partner sites. Search partners are sites that have affiliated with Google, like aol.com and about.com. Electing to include Search partners will increase your impressions and click volume but may decrease the overall quality of your paid traffic.

Pro-tip: Start with Google’s Search Network only. If down the road you are working to build volume and increase your daily spend, employ search partners.

Devices

Are you a small coffee shop that customers want to find while running errands on a weekend? Think about increasing your bids on mobile devices to target customers who are out and about.

Are you a b2b offering a specialized software download? You may want to avoid showing on mobile devices all together.

The Devices section is where you make those decisions happen. Due to AdWords new Enhanced Campaigns format, completely excluding any of the three device types (Desktops/Laptops, Tablets, and Mobile) is not possible.

Instead, mobile bid adjustments must be made to shift your device preference.

Adjust your mobile bids by -100% to all but remove mobile targeting or increase your bids by a maximum of 300% to opt for a mobile heavy campaign.

Pro-tip: Understand which devices your customers use – not only to visit your website, but to convert on your site, and adjust your mobile bid accordingly.

Locations

By default, new campaigns are set to serve the entire United States and Canada. For many low budget advertisers, serving ads to all of North America will not be effective.

When first getting started in AdWords, think about where your core market is.

Geographic targeting can be broken down by country, state, Nielsen DMA region, city, zip code, and if you would like, congressional district.

In addition, advertisers can also set a targeted radius around a specific location.

Pro-tip: Understand the capabilities and reach of what your business delivers. If you don’t ship internationally, keep your targeting domestic. If you are a local business with a physical location, how far will customers realistically travel to visit you? 

Languages

English is the default language for all new campaigns. Leave it at that. Please.

Pro-tip: Set your language to English, unless you have a really good reason to do so otherwise.

Bidding and budget

The Bidding and budget section in the campaign settings allows advertisers to not only set their daily budget, but also to decide how keyword bid levels are determined in their campaign.

Since Conversion Optimizer will not be an eligible option when building your first campaign, advertisers must employ the ‘Focus on clicks’ bidding option. Then it’s time to choose between manual bidding (dictated by yourself) and automatic bidding (AdWords sets your bids based on a maximum CPC limit).

Once the campaign bidding method is set, it’s time to determine your daily budget. When determining a daily spend limit, keep in mind your actual spend per day can run in excess of 20% over what the daily budget is set at.

Pro-tip: Manually set your bids. Provide yourself the ability to fluctuate bids between which average position and average cost per click best fit your cost per acquisition goals. Think about setting your daily budget slightly under your budget limit to account for the possibility of excess spend.

After selecting your settings and saving your campaign, it’s time to move on to building descriptive keywords lists to populate your ad groups.

Watch out next Friday for our next post on best practices for building your first PPC Account!

And feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.

We’ve all seen it happen. An employee is doing killer work, initiating great ideas, and displaying a willingness to take on larger projects. The employee is quickly promoted to a manager position.

But while this top employee has excelled at the tactical parts of the job, he or she has never managed a team before. Letting these employees just sink or swim will be chaos – for you, the new manager, and for his or her team.

For growing companies like Portent, it’s important to guide even the smartest, hardest working employees as they transition into management roles.

As president, my role is to help new managers fully understand their roles and teach them how to manage teams properly. New managers bring a unique challenge, but with the right structure and procedures, they can succeed in their positions.

The key to setting your account teams up for success is to manage stuff and lead people.

Don’t treat your employees like products.

As your new managers wade into unchartered waters, they’re bound to ask questions and sometimes fail. If you see these challenges as problems that can be addressed and forgotten, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

Employees aren’t products; you can’t make one tweak or correct one problem and assume your work is done. Transitioning your team from workers to leaders is an ongoing process that takes patience. Even your more experienced managers may stumble along the way because some things are best learned through experience.

It’s all part of the process, but if you are there to answer questions and provide management council, your teams will be successful.

Help people find what they’re great at.

Great managers sit down with their employees to discuss their long-term career goals. If this initiative starts from the top – such as the president sitting down with a VP to set goals—it will trickle down and set an example for your new managers.

If you never ask what your employees are interested in, you may never know that your best copywriter has always been interested in developing client strategy. As managers, it’s important to set goals for personal and team growth and recognize the little things that show your employees progressing.

Motivate them to continue growing.

When great employees start at a company, they are motivated by the light at the end of the tunnel, which is often a managerial role. But oftentimes after they step into the manager position, they can feel as though they’ve hit a ceiling and lose sight of next steps for growth.

The president must find ways to encourage and motivate employees to continue to progress – otherwise they’ll find a new job where they see clear growth opportunities and feel appreciated.

Promote team culture and employee dedication.

As Portent grows, the people grow with it. Our employees know we’re loyal to our people. If we see an employee with potential, we take the extra time to help them excel and grow into a new position.

If a position opens up, our team members are considered first. If our employee is evenly matched with a potential outside hire, they’ll win the job every time.

Sometimes hiring outside the company is necessary, but we do our best to reward our loyal, hardworking employees.  We know our team is talented and when given appropriate coaching, they’ll succeed.

Companies that provide employees with room for growth and exciting new challenges have more to offer than a salary and a cubicle.  They offer achievement and goals, which are the building blocks for success.

When I meet with clients or present at conferences, I am always asked: “How do I rank high on Google for (insert keyword-phrase-du-jour)?” I give the standard answer: “Only the search engineers and Google can tell you and they aren’t talking.”

Inevitably, the questioner looks dejected, mutters a slur on my credentials, and walks away.  I scream silently in my head: “Don’t kill the messenger because we are all hapless Wile E. Coyotes chasing the Larry and Sergey Road Runner with zero chance of catching them, no matter what we order from ACME!”

Thirteen years ago, before the Cone of Silence dropped on Google’s method of operation, we got a glimpse of the method behind their madness. This, combined with the common knowledge of the foundational tenets of all search engines, gives us some idea of what’s going on behind that not-so-simple box on the white page.

In this post, I am going to explore the 3 algorithms that we know for sure Google is using to produce search results, and speculate about the 200+ other algorithms that we suspect they are using based on patent filings, reverse engineering, and the Ouija board.

What is an algorithm (you might ask)?

There are many definitions of algorithm. The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines an algorithm as “a computable set of steps to achieve a desired result.”  Ask a developer and they will tell you that an algorithm is “a set of instructions (procedures or functions) that is used to accomplish a certain task.” My favorite definition, and the one that I’m going with, comes from MIT’s Kevin Slavin’s TED Talk “How Algorithms Shape Our World”: algorithms are “math that computers use to decide stuff.”

3 Google algorithms we know about

PageRank

The most famous Google algorithm is PageRank, a pre-query value that has no relationship to the search query. In its infancy, the PageRank algorithm used links pointing to the page as an indication of its importance. Larry Page, after whom the algorithm is named, used the academic citation model where the papers citing another were endorsements of its authority. Strangely enough, they do not have citation rings or citation buying schemes as with web links. Warning, scary, eye-bleeding computational math ahead.

Initial PageRank algorithm

To combat spam, a Random Surfer algorithm was added was added to PageRank. This algorithm “imagined” a Random Surfer that traveled the Web and would follow the links on each page. However, sometimes, the Random Surfer would arbitrarily, much like us thought-processing bipeds, not return to the original page and keep going or would stop following links and “jump” to another page. The algorithm steps are:

1. At any time t, surfer is on some page P
2. At time t+1, the surfer follows an outlink at random
3. Surfer ends up on some page Q (from page P)
4. The process repeats indefinitely

That’s the benefit of algorithms, no overtime and they never get tired or bored.

Hilltop Algorithm

Surf’s up Dude algorithm worked for about 10 minutes before the SEO community found the hole in its wet suit to manipulate rankings. In the early 2000s, processors caught up to computational mathematics and Google was able to deploy the Hilltop Algorithm (around 2001). This algorithm was the first introduction of semantic influence on search results inasmuch as a machine can be trained to understand semantics.

Hilltop is like a linguistic Ponzi scheme that attributes a quality to links based on the authority of the document pointing the link to the page.  One of Hilltop’s algorithms segments the web into a corpus of broad topics. If certain documents in a topic area have lots of links from unaffiliated experts within the same topic area, that document must be an authority. Links from authority documents carry more weight. Authority documents tend to link to other authorities on the same subject and to Hubs, pages that have lots of links to documents on the same subject.

Topic-Sensitive PageRank

The Topic-Sensitive PageRank algorithm is a set of algorithms that take the semantic reasoning a few steps further. Ostensibly the algorithm uses the Open Directory ontology (dmoz.org) to sort documents by topic.

Another algorithm calculates a score for context sensitive relevance rank based on a set of “vectors”. These vectors represent the context of term use in a document, the context of the term used in the history of queries, and the context of previous use by the user as contained in the user profile.

So, I know what you’re thinking. How can they do that for the whole web? They don’t. They use predictive modeling algorithms to perform these operations on a representational subset of the web, collect the vectors, and apply the findings to all of the “nearest neighbors.”

D’oh!

[Added May 16, 2013]
There are a lot of algorithms for indexing, processing and clustering documents that I left out because including them would have many of you face-first-in-your cereal-from-boredom. However, it is NOT OK to leave out the mother of all information retrieval algorithms, TF-IDF, known affectionately to search geeks as Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency.

Introduced in the 1970s, this primary ranking algorithm uses the presence, number of occurrences, and locations of occurrence to produce a statistical weight on the importance of a particular term in the document. It includes a normalization feature to prevent long boring documents from taking up residence in search results due to the shear nature of their girth. This is my favorite algorithm because it supports Woody Allen’s maxim that 80% of success is showing up.

The 200+ we don’t know about

All of the search engines closely guard their complete algorithm structure for ranking documents. However, we live in a wonderful country that has patent protection for ideas. These patents provide insight into Google’s thinking and you can usually pinpoint which ones are deployed.

Panda, the most famous update is an evolving set of algorithms that are combined to determine the quality of the content and user experience on a particular website. There are algorithms that apply decision trees to large data sets of user behavior.

These decision trees look at if this/then that:

• If the page has crossed a threshold a certain ratio of images to text, then it is a poor user experience.
• If a significant portion of searchers do not engage with anything on the page (links, navigation, interaction points), then the page is not interesting for searchers using that particular query.
• If the searchers do not select the page from the results set, then it is not relevant to the query.
• If the searcher returns to the search engine results to select another result or refine the search, then the content was not relevant and not a good user experience.

Complementing the decisions trees could be any one of a number of page layout algorithms that determine the number and placement of images on a page in relation to the amount of content in relation to a searcher’s focus of attention.

Following on the heels of Panda are the Penguin algorithms. These algorithms are specifically targeted at detecting and removing web spam. They use Google’s vast data resources to evaluate the quality of links pointing to a site, measure the rate of link acquisition, the link source relationship to the page subject, shared domain ownership of the linking sites, and relationships between the linking sites.

Once a site passes an established threshold, another algorithm likely flags the site for additional review by a human evaluator or automatically re-ranks the page so that it drops in search results.

Let’s stop, guess, and go with what we know

As with the formula for Coca-Cola or the recipe for Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken, specifics on what Google uses to decide who gets where in the search results set are a closely guarded secret. Instead of speculating on what we might know, let’s focus on what we do know:

• In order to rank for a term, that term must be present in the document. Sometimes, a contextual or semantic match for a term will get you into the SERP swimsuit competition for placement. Don’t count on that though.
• Being picky and realistic about what you want to rank for is the best start.
• Text on the page drives inclusion in the results for a searcher’s query. Be about some thing instead of many things.
• Quality content is focused, fresh and engaging.
• Custom titles that describe the page using contextually relevant keywords are THE low hanging fruit. Pick it for your most important pages.
• Compelling description text in search results will draw clicks. Meeting the searcher’s expectations with rich content will keep them on the page.
• Pictures, images, and ads are most effective when used in moderation.
• Links are important, but only the right kind. For Google, the “right” kinds are links from pages about the same subject and place high in contextually-related searches.

Are there any major algorithms we missed?  Let us know in the comments.

In charge of building your first PPC account? Don’t have a lot of time or money to spend within AdWords? Well you came to the right place. Over the course of the next six weeks, Portent PPC Strategists Chad Kearns and Tim Johnson will be laying down the knowledge in a six-part blog series detailing best practices for setting yourself up for PPC success. Follow along to pick up tips on how to build your first PPC account like a PPC superstar.

Understanding how to setup the structure of your account is vital to PPC success. The account structure is the back bone of your account. Creating a layout with your initial campaigns and ad groups will not only keep your work organized and efficient, but will also help you balance your budget along the way.

Determining your Campaigns

First – a note on terminology. Google defines a campaign as “a set of ad groups that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings.”

Campaigns act as an overarching theme for a collection of ad groups; the makeup of your website’s navigation is a good place to look when building an initial campaign list.

Below is an example of a site navigation which lays out the breakdown of a site’s structure by the category of its products:

Using the red navigation example on the left, we want to breakdown our AdWords account into five separate campaigns – Steaks, Specialties, Gift Boxes, Gift Certificates, and Steak Spice.

Now that we have our list of campaigns mapped out, it’s time to determine the ad groups which will make up a campaign.

Shaping your Ad Groups

An ad group is a set of ads, keywords, and keyword bids grouped together under a common, more specific theme. Like campaigns, these ad group themes act as smaller subsets of our overarching campaign.

For the purposes of this blog series, we will continue to use our example from an online, mail-order steakhouse.

When traversing through the on-site navigation, visitors are provided a number of options to better direct themselves through the site. The following subset is displayed as you hover over the ‘Specialties’ section:

These individual products with distinct landing pages break down your list of ad groups. This same tactic can be used throughout the sites navigation to build out a complete list of ad groups.

Below is a quick chart displaying the overall look of your account structure after breaking down your list of campaigns and ad groups:

Once a structural plan is in place, it’s time to get to work and build your campaigns, ad groups, keyword lists, and ads.

Watch out next Friday for our next post on best practices for building your first PPC Account!

And feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.

We write about a lot of fancy stuff on the Portent blog, such as server log analysis, advanced keyword research, and Tom Cruise.

I want to address something that doesn’t have to be fancy: site speed. We’ve written two posts on how we configured Portent’s site: one is pretty advanced and the other is blindingly technical. They’re awesome, but what if you’re a small business owner without a geeky CEO or talented developer at your beck and call?

When talking to clients, I noticed that many conversations went something like this:

ME: HTTP compression is a breeze. Just have your dev team…

CLIENT: What is this “dev team” you speak of?

Even though Google’s PageSpeed Insights spits out a handy report, it doesn’t always translate to actionable recommendations for the beginner webmaster that updates a site on his or her own.

I’ll explain four simple ways to speed up your site without the help of IT support.

Image Optimization

Plan and simple: the smaller the file, the less time it will take for the browser to download and present it to the user. Images can be huge, so optimizing them is an easy place to start.

How to implement:

• Use software like GIMP to crop your images to the correct size for their particular application.
• Save it as the correct file type, which will likely be PNG or JPG.
• Compress it. You can use tools like jpegtran or PNGOUT; however, if you fear the command prompt, just use the compressed images Google provides in the PageSpeed Insights report. Click “See optimized content,” save the image, then replace your old, frumpy images with their slimmer counterparts.

Minification

Minifying a resource—be it a CSS, JavaScript, or HTML file—is simply the process of removing spaces, comments, tabs, and other unnecessary code in the file.

How to implement:

• There are many tools available for minification. Use Google’s Closure Compiler for JavaScript, YUI Compressor for CSS, and an HTML minifier for HTML. Again, it’s easiest to simply download the minified versions of the files PageSpeed Insights provides.
• If you’re running WordPress, you can take advantage of the minification settings in the W3 Total Cache plugin.

Compression

Compressing files also makes them smaller. Now that your site’s CSS, JS, and HTML are free of unnecessary code, compression is like putting them into a .zip folder. Most popular web servers have the ability to send the browser a compressed version of a file so it saves time loading the page. How to implement:

• If you’re using IIS, compression can easily be configured in IIS Manager; here are instructions from Microsoft.
• For Apache servers, you can utilize gzip encoding by adding a few lines to your .htaccess file.
  • First of all, messing up your .htaccess file can have devastating effects for your site if it’s not done correctly, so always have a working copy and edit with care.
• The .htaccess file lives in the root directory of your site and you can download it with your FTP client and edit it as you would any other text file. Your hosting provider might also give you access to it in your control panel.
• Add the following lines of code to the file:

<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>

When the browser tells the server it accepts compressed resources (excluding images), the above text tells the server to encode the content in a compressed format (gzip) and send the browser the smaller version of the file. Everyone is happy: the server, the browser, and the user.

• If you’re running WordPress and don’t want to get your hands dirty, I recommend using the WP .htacess Control plugin and enabling mod_gzip in the settings, which will add the relevant code to your .htaccess file for you.

Caching

Browsers are lazy and they don’t like to re-download files to render a site that it’s already seen before. So, it caches a lot of these files—images, CSS files, scripts—on the user’s hard drive in order to speed up the process of showing you a web page. Since files like your logo don’t change very often, you can instruct the browser to load the cached version so it doesn’t have to download the same image again from the server. We’ll do this by setting the expiration date for static resources up to a year in advance.

• In IIS, you can enable caching with the IIS Manager. Here’s a tutorial from Brad Kingsley.
• In Apache, add the following lines to enable mod_expiresthe .htacess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0

Then, define the file types it will affect:

<FilesMatch
“\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|js|css|txt|xml|flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$”>

Finally, set the time in the future it will expire:

ExpiresDefault A29030400
</FilesMatch>

The time is defined in seconds, so these files are set to expire a year in advance. AskApache offers a neat .htacess time cheatsheet if you hate counting.

• Again, if you’re using WordPress, I recommend W3 Total Cache. Just check the box next to “Browser Caching” in the settings menu and you’re good to go.

There are a bunch more ways to speed up your site, and many more resources than I have the space to list, but hopefully this will help get you started on your metaphorical journey to a faster site.

What are your favorite site speed optimization tips? Let me know in the comments!

Conventional wisdom dictates that working in teams is often the best way to accomplish a task. Many hands make light work, a bundle of sticks cannot be broken, etc.

Particularly with large, complex projects, there is just no way one person can accomplish everything on their own. We can’t possibly know everything, or be experts in everything, or be talented at everything. And believe me, I’ve tried.

A good leader pulls together their A team –people whose combined skills and expertise can achieve really big goals. But being a leader, and a good one to boot, isn’t easy. If you are an account strategist like me, or a project manager, marketing manager, etc., you know what I mean.

A lot of my leadership philosophy was forged by experiences in the backcountry. I’m a proud NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) grad, and have guided backpacking and hiking trips for various organizations, as well as spent many hours, weekends, and weeks on trips in the wilderness.

Leading groups in the wilderness is just like leading marketing project teams – only in the office, it’s unlikely my leadership mistakes will put anyone in grave danger.  But mistakes in the office can endure beyond those of a day or weekend hike, and can potentially result in lost revenue, lost clients, or simply lost credibility, internally or externally.

I’m happy to share with you some of the leadership pitfalls I’ve stepped into, both in the office and the backcountry, analyze why we often fall into them, and suggest some ways you can avoid them. But I’m sure you’ve never done any of these before:

1. Being too early out of the gate

At the beginning of a project, your team is often like a pack of racehorses behind the starting gate, chomping at the bit, raring to go.

They’ve received the SOW, creative brief, or project outline, and they want to dive in and get started on their work. But, oddly enough, your job as the leader is to hold them back. They’re not yet ready to function as a cohesive unit.  It’s also your job to paint the picture of  what the work will look like, what steps are necessary to achieve the goals, what role each person will play, and the ideal result. You’re selling the dream.

Business experts define the process teams go through as forming, storming, norming, and performing. Note that forming comes first, followed by storming, then norming – you’re not getting to performing for a while, get it? Allow for that. Build in time for that.

Forming is the critical stage where team members are figuring each other out and learning each other’s quirks (particularly with a new team).  This is also the stage in which everyone is generally being nice, but not saying what they really think. A leader needs to ask questions, motivating the team to open up and discuss their expectations.

Storming is where reality sets in – people realize they may not like the plan or each other; they may question the goals, or their role on the team.

Gradually, you’ll reach the norming phase – tasks have been assigned, roles defined, and goals set.  It’s beginning to look like everyone is on board. They respect your role as leader, and they believe the goals you’ve set are attainable.

Finally you can begin to think about opening that gate and performing as one amazing unit with a shared vision and goal.

During my NOLS training course, I had the opportunity to lead the first solo (without guides) trek in the backcountry. We’d had other opportunities to lead, but this was the first situation where no guide would be present to bail us out if something went wrong. The guides gave us our destination and two minutes later, I set us off on the trek.

I quickly realized I’d made one of the cardinal mistakes of leadership – I had allowed my team’s excitement to provoke me into starting prematurely.  We’d received training in map and compass reading, wilderness first aid, leadership, and traversing tough terrain, and with fantasies of Bear Grylls and “Survivor” in our heads, we thought we were hot stuff.

About twenty minutes into the hike, I realized we were going the wrong way.

Not only that, but the decision put my leadership in question, and mutiny (in the form of bickering about which direction to go) set in. We survived, but there were some tense moments that could have been avoided had I spent 10 minutes at camp getting the group’s goals in alignment and establishing myself as the team lead before setting out on our adventure.

2. Failing to check assumptions

One of the easiest mistakes for leaders to make is assuming everyone thinks like we do. Why wouldn’t they, right? Haha, hmmm…yeah.  Believe me, they don’t.

You might think everything is going great because the project is ahead of schedule, the client (or your boss) is happy, and conversions are way up – but meanwhile, your team may feel completely overwhelmed, stressed about expectations, and wanting to quit. How can this be?

You might think your client loves hearing the scintillating history of search engines on every single call – after all, it’s fascinating to you and they seem to be listening so attentively. But they may be thinking: “if she brings that up one more time, I’m going to go ballistic.” How can this be?

We are all unique creatures, with our own special take on the world. Assuming others think or operate the way we do will cause nothing but grief, and some (hopefully hilarious?) misunderstandings.

“Assuming” is one of the easiest traps a leader can fall in to, so how can you sidestep it?

Even if you think something is obvious, check the assumption.

Ask your client and your team (frequently) how things are going for them, and if they feel like their goals are being met. Do they have what they need? Is there anything going on in their organization or with other projects that you should know about? Do they feel like you are being responsive to their requests? Does your team understand your client’s goals?

Ask your client and your team what their biggest priority is. Reiterate your understanding of the objectives and blatantly ask if they are in agreement. The answers could easily surprise and amaze you. And what you don’t know CAN hurt you. People can quit (or complain to your boss), clients can fire you, and morale can suffer.

One of the mistakes I made in my debut as a trek guide on the NOLS course was assuming that everyone on my team valued speed over everything else. Why did I think everyone else felt that way? Because my friend and I both thought our trek should be more like the “Amazing Race,” where two teams compete to see which team can get to the X on the map first. We were two people out of seven in the group, but because we both felt this way, I assumed everyone else did too.

Consequently, as the lead of this group, I ran us at a breakneck pace over rocks, up steep terrain, through rivers, with 40-50 pound packs on our back, never once considering that this wasn’t fun for everyone else (particularly the guy who was recovering from a nasty cold).

I didn’t realize it until mutiny set in once again. Oh? Some people wanted to take a more leisurely pace, take pictures of wildflowers, breathe in the fresh mountain air, and chit chat as we strolled along? It never occurred to me.  How could this be? I never asked what anyone wanted to get out of this experience. I didn’t check the assumption that everyone thought like me, that a trail run would be awesome.  Humph.

3. Being too nice

This one is hard, particularly for those of us who are naturally social, as account strategists and marketing people often are. I really like people and I like being friendly – that’s why I have the job I do. I want people to like me back. The reality is, not everyone will, and particularly not those people to whom you assign tasks, direct work, or otherwise “order around.”

If you’re concerned about whether or not your team (or even your client) likes you, you’re probably ignoring something very important: the necessity of setting good boundaries.

Your role as a leader is to define roles, set objectives, plan steps to achieve those objectives, and motivate your team to deliver. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions regarding balancing the needs of your boss or client with the needs of the individuals on your team.  If you are worried about being perceived as being friendly, you’re not going to be able to do your job well.  And sometimes just the perception of being “too nice” can work against you. People may see you as a pushover, even if you’re far from it.

So how do you avoid this trap?

• Don’t avoid confrontation. Sometimes people will test your boundaries to see how far they can push you. If someone on your team is continually asking for more time to deliver a report, or continually making excuses for mistakes, call them out on it.
• Set a clear expectation for timeliness and quality of work and let them know what the repercussions will be.  There’s no need to be unfriendly, but setting clear boundaries can help minimize the perception that your friendliness can be taken advantage of. Sometimes your boss or a client will keep piling on the requests until you say no. Yes, confrontation can be uncomfortable in the moment, but clearly and concisely setting the boundary about what is permissible will work for you in the long run.
• And don’t apologize for things that aren’t your fault. The more you stand up and own your role as a leader, the more your team and others will perceive you that way.

As someone who prides herself on being physically strong and athletic, I often fall into the ‘being too nice’ trap by carrying more than my share of the weight on a trek.

On backpacking trips, your group often shares the weight of group equipment, such as parts to the tent, cooking equipment, first aid supplies, and food. This is generally distributed according to weight and bulk. Bigger people can generally carry more weight, so their packs tend to be heavier. If you’re willing to carry a heavier load proportionally than team members twice your size, and don’t speak up, don’t cry about it later when you are exhausted.

Know your limits, and speak up before you reach them. Being a hero won’t make you a better leader. Teaching your team members (and your clients!) how to carry their own weight will work better for everyone in the long run.

I hope you’ve learned a few tricks for avoiding some common pitfalls of leadership, or at least enjoyed watching me poke fun at my own errors. Often we don’t learn what TO do until we first learn what not to do.

And luckily I never actually lead my NOLS group off a cliff. I just created disharmony, exhausted them, and exhausted myself. And after that experience, I learned what traps to look out for in my marketing team leadership adventures.

It seems like every other day, some SEO technique that used to be accepted is now being devalued or, even worse, penalized. (Remember when meta keywords and nofollow tags were totally legit?  Ah, the good old days…)  And now Google is threatening to crack down on two staples of the SEO stable: anchor text and infographics.

With all of these changes it can be hard for businesses to know which search strategies are long-term and future-proof.

Business: “Sure I could invest a bunch of time and resources into this new strategy the weird search person is suggesting, but how do I know it won’t just change next year?”

SEO: “Err…”

Well, as much as things change, there are a few basic guidelines that are here to stay.  And while I’m not going to go into details on every nuance, as long as your SEO efforts keep with these general strategies, you should be in good shape (at least for a few years).

1. Page speed and efficiency

As a general rule, fast things are better, and in this case, the “better” means rankings.  Google and Bing have been saying this for a while now: page speed counts. Google even made a cool little tool for everyone to measure their website’s page speed. It even gives instructions on how to improve it. Why would they do that if they didn’t consider it important?

Image optimization, javascript and CSS consolidation, minification, caching, compression – the list goes on. We’ve given a few pointers in past posts, but the message is that improving your site’s page speed is a long term strategy.

Why is it so important? Because it’s one of the main things real people look at when they decide whether or not to use a site. Amazon has stated that every tenth of a second of increased load time resulted in a 1% drop in sales. That means people really, really care about this. And if people really, really care, you know all the little Ooompa Loompas and elves working at Google and Bing are trying to make their magic robots care as well.

2. Fixing duplicate anything

Duplication happens. Title tags get repeated, URLs accidentally get indexed with parameters, content gets scraped, mobile sites get indexed separately – it sucks. Like Oompa Loompas, the ways in which content can get duplicated go on forever.

Oompa Loompas are a result of a dynamic query parameter on a self referencing link.

The search engines are getting better at identifying duplicate content. But a search engine robot being 99.9% sure that your page is the one that should rank out of the 15 others indexed is still not as good the robot being 100% sure because it only has one page to choose from.

The best defense with duplicate content is to avoid it all together:

• Don’t use parameters in places where they’ll get indexed.
• Use consistent URLs for both mobile and desktop versions of your site.
• If you can’t fix a wrong link, use 301 redirects.
• If you can’t get rid of duplicate content and you can’t redirect, then use the meta tags like rel=canonical or noindex.
• If you can’t do that, then just fight it any way you can.

3. Resource and instructional content

Updates like Penguin have got everyone freaking out. “What makes a page good?” “What makes a page spammy?” “What makes a link good?” “Does Google like me or like like me?”

Well, here’s the thing – if you have a legitimately useful page for something, it will always be considered good. So, if you sell Frisbees, write a page about how to throw a Frisbee. If you’re trying to get more Renaissance Fair enthusiasts to visit your site, write something on how to care for jousting armor.

This goes back to Google’s humble beginnings as an indexing engine for academic documents.

It’s not your fault.

In academia, if you reference something, you’re doing it because it’s something that you found useful when writing your dissertation on Bigfoot or Jetpacks (or whatever it is smart people write about).

This is how search engines wish you used your links. Lots of SEOs complain about Wikipedia always being in the number 1 spot, but few can argue that it isn’t the most relevant result for most searches.

I realize not everyone can be Wikipedia, but as long as people are linking to you because you’re useful, you will be in good shape.

How do you do this?

• Create resource pages about your industry.
• Create some data oriented blog posts.
• Make an instructional page about how to use your product or a related product.

This is how links were always intended to be used and that’s why they were ever a ranking factor in the first place. These pages are naturally good content and links to these pages will tend to be good links.

4. Good site structure

Should I link to every page from the homepage or just the main ones? Should I repeat everything in the footer or should I cut the footer all together? Can I hide the homepage text?

Good site structure typically falls more into the UI/UX category, but it’s an SEO concern as well. You see, when you design a site with the intention of getting your user or shopper to the right page or give them information they’re looking for, you’re naturally creating a page that does the same for the search engines.

Search engines are complicated because the elves are trying very hard to make them emulate human factors when viewing a website.

Lots of links on a page is confusing. It implies that you consider them all equally important. If your homepage has a few links, on the other hand, it looks like you really care about those pages.

Using this sort of user-oriented thought process is a future-proof strategy to predict what search engines will care about within your site. Sure, you still have to help the robots with filters and search boxes, but they are very good at finding links.

So remember to:

• Show off the links you want to show off.
• Use page hierarchy to group internal pages into categories and subcategories.
• Link to related products. These really make sense to your users and naturally lay out the relationship to the search engines.

5. Anything local

The bottom line for businesses and consultants is this: People who are actually looking for products aren’t changing their settings in Google or using a proxy to see the universal search results. They are clicking on those search results with the little letters next to them.

If searching for any of your keywords displays a local search result, you need to spend time on local. And if people can walk into a storefront, you really need to care about local.

Local search isn’t going anywhere; in fact it’s getting more popular. On mobile devices it pretty much dominates the search results. So if you have one store or one thousand stores, you need to spend some time in Google+ Local and Bing Local.

You need to:

• Claim your listings, check your NAP, and monitor your reviews.
• Create storefront pages and make sure they are associated with your local listings.
• If you don’t have a storefront, make some pages that talk about the area you serve.

Is that all?

No! This doesn’t mean don’t worry about any of the other things. Don’t ignore a social network today just because it might not be around in 10 years. If Google comes out with a hot new tag then you should absolutely use it, even if it may be ignored a few months later. Infographics still work!

But if you have limited resources, these guidelines can help you evaluate whether something is worth investing a ton of time and money in or if there is something more effective you could be working on.

Disagree? Totally agree? Not sure what level of agreement you’re feeling? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

Even if you have zero interest in programming or SEO, I’m convinced you’re going to be glad you decided to read this blog post.

And to make it a total no-brainer for you, I’m offering a 100% money back guarantee.  Sound good?  Keep reading.

Hello, I’m David and I’m a wanna-be geek

Sometime around Y2K, I decided to take an online class in HTML from the local college. When I learned HTML, it was ALL CAPS and the best-possible way to position page elements was using tables. Coders ought to get a chuckle out of that.

I thought I’d enjoy switching over to a career in web design because I’d had a lot of fun doing artsy types of things when I was younger and considered myself to be fairly creative.

But it turned out I sucked at web design, which was pretty deflating because I was sure I was going to be really good at it.

Over the ensuing years I’d mess around making crappy websites for myself just for grins and giggles – nothing serious, just flirting.

When I developed an unexpected, serious interest in SEO in 2008, I figured my background in HTML would come in handy – I could make my own sites and save on web designer bills – so I made some more crappy-looking websites.  I wanted to see if I could get them ranking highly, sell a bunch of stuff, and do that whole “get rich on the Internet” thing.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

After much studying, trial and error (mostly error), I did end up ranking some websites on the first page and even #1 for some keywords. I was pretty proud of myself despite the emotional roller coaster ride of watching rankings fluctuate.

This is when I first realized that high rankings do not equal traffic or conversions (or getting rich) and I figured it was because ugly sites were probably scaring people away.

A web designer friend of mine, after she got up off the floor laughing at one of my sites, turned me on to WordPress – which showed me how to create far better-looking sites than my DreamWeaver-created train wrecks.

How to master programing in one simple step

Fail.

Or better put, be prepared to fail… A LOT.

As I got into WordPress, I discovered that there was this thing called “PHP;” it was like the Wizard of Oz – making magic happen behind the scenes.  I wanted to know more about this thing.

So PHP is technically not a programming language because it doesn’t require compiling – it’s a scripting language – but stay with me here.

I hired a PHP programmer from my previous job to tutor me in PHP after work one night a week; for me it was like trying to learn Chinese – I was completely lost.

You see, my biggest mistake was thinking that I needed to learn PHP before I could do PHP.

Wait for all the traffic lights to be green before getting on the road

…And you’ll never go anywhere.

Road trips can be fun, and yes it’s good to have an idea of where you’re going and how to get there – but inevitably wherever you go you’ll have to deal with red lights, detours, or even road closures.

You don’t learn programming and then do it. You do programming and learn along the way.

The 5 Step Formula to Succeed at Anything

Sometimes it seems like I’m doomed in life to learn the same lessons over and over… and over again.

I think the best visual metaphor for our personal or professional development (or any context in life, really) is an upward spiral: you come around to and revisit the same things again, but from a higher level because you have more experience.

It’s the cumulative experience and upward movement that keeps us from chasing our tails – because if we’re not learning from our mistakes then we really are just running in circles.

When I wanted to learn SEO, I applied a process I’d learned some years before:

1. Know your outcome
2. Have a good strategy
3. Take consistent action
4. Observe the results of your actions
5. Be flexible and make adjustments

The unspoken 6^th step is “don’t quit,” by the way.

When it came to actually learning SEO, I figured why reinvent the wheel when I could just find an expert and discover what they knew? Shortcut to bigger bank accounts, here I come!

Amusing musings over presumptuous assumptions

Remember step two of the 5 Step Success Formula? Well, if someone else has already done it, why not copy that person’s success strategy?

I just needed to find someone who had The Secret Bag of SEO Magic Fairy Dust – then all I’d have to do is sprinkle it onto my websites and watch my bank balance grow like flowers in the springtime.

Just follow their recipe, right?

The flaw in that logic is there is no one-right-path, magic bullet to SEO success or winning at online marketing. There is no recipe for making the perfect SEO soufflé.

But I think there is a prevalent belief out there that looks something like this:

My website + SEO = Buckets of (fast & easy) cash

But SEO is not a “one and done” situation; just like you don’t go to the gym once and achieve all your fitness goals, you don’t “do some SEO to your site” and emerge victorious. Heck, even when you do achieve all your fitness goals at the gym, what happens if you stop exercising?

You must DIY

The ice cream diet: How’d that sound the first time you heard it? I bet you were skeptical, but also intrigued! Imagine skipping the gym for the ice cream store and still losing weight!

I’m no different. I have books with titles like “PHP Crash Course.” I like the sound of that – learn PHP in a single weekend. Yes, I also own “SEO for Dummies.”

But if you want to do PHP or Martial Arts or SEO, you have to be willing to hang in there and grind it out.

You have to go back to debugging your code when you’ve already pulled most of your hair out, and you have to go back to the Dojo when you’re still bruised from the last class. And, you have to make those iterative changes to your site and strategy SEO-wise.

No ships or planes take a straight line directly to their destination. In fact, they’re off course more than they’re on course, often having to adjust for wind, currents, etc. Take a small sailboat out by yourself sometime and try to stay in a straight line to some destination.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t occasionally ask for help:  if I’m hopelessly lost and have tried everything (and I mean everything) then it’s not a bad idea to reach out to others. It’s not a sign of weakness. But if I can figure the issue out for myself, I’ll be better off in the long run because I’ll learn more.

The Zen of Almost Everything

A friend of mine said the other day, “I learn more about myself playing a round golf than I really want to know.”

I can relate. Currently it’s PHP that’s re-teaching me things like humility, patience, and persistence.

I thought I already possessed those traits to some decent degree, but after the fourth time I threw my computer out the window, I realized I’ve still got a ways to go on that front.

Up the spiral we go. If you happen to overhear any sudden outbursts of expletives along the way, it’s probably just somebody trying really, really hard to progress and learn. Don’t hold it against me, er, them.

What about you? What pull-all-your-hair-out experiences are teaching you more than you wanted to know about yourself? What made you say “yeah!” out loud or “hmm” inside your head in what you’ve been reading here?

I can’t wait to hear about it.

Oh, and if you’re looking for that refund, remember this: 100% of zero is still zero.

So you’ve realized the benefits of having a kick-ass blog. Now what are you going to say on that blog? You could go the route of taking all that carefully-prepared corporate branding, and using your blog to put out press releases about things that you want your customers to care about (but really only matter to shareholders).

Don’t.

Remember the real reason you’re creating a blog is to connect with your customers readers. You may think it’s to educate customers about your brand and to get them to buy your stuff—that’s true (to a certain extent) but none of that happens without a connection. The best way to do that is to…

Be human

You want readers to trust you. That means you have to let them know that you share their values and beliefs and that they know what to expect from you and your brand. Potential customers need to know that you are in it for them. Then, when they are ready to buy, they will come back to you—that friend they made on the Internet that one time.

Don’t sell products, tell stories

People relate to people, not to companies. The more your writers can tell specific stories about real people, the easier it will be for the customer to empathize with the stories and thus the brand. Kate Spade uses their blog to introduce readers to the people behind the brand.

Be a resource

Sometimes a consumer doesn’t even know the solution you offer exists. Be the friend they need. For example, MomAgenda, a company that provides organizing solutions for busy families recently wrote a post about how to create family time. Notice that the post doesn’t mention their products at all. Friends give before they ask.

What about the blog voice?

Companies often worry about how much the blog should reflect the established company voice and how much should reflect the employees’. My vote is for the employees (and not just because I’m a writer). Remember, relationships are all about the personal connection. Introduce your employees, use bylines, and establish Google Authorship for your writers. You hired good people who believe in your company. They might need a few editorial guidelines (see below), but let them surprise you (plus, this is a great way to not sound just like your competitors).

Create a style guide

About those guidelines… think of a style guide not as a rigid set of rules that confine your writers to a corporate voice. View it instead as a strong platform that makes sure your writers are all playing on the same field. Once everyone knows the rules, set them free to find new levels of excellence.

You’re going to want to include nitty-gritty grammar quirks and also some fun stuff.

Grammar choices to make

If you aren’t a copy editor, this bulleted list might read like gibberish. Trust me, it’s not. Many people who do know what all of these are care less about which camp you choose than that you are consistent.

• To Oxford comma or not to Oxford comma?
• En dashes or em dashes?
• Smart quotes or straight quotes?
• One or two spaces after a period?
• How do you spell industry-specific jargon (e.g. e-book, ebook, or eBook?)

Find a good copy editor and let them help write your style guide. Your blog will achieve a level of consistency and organization that 99% of readers will only appreciate subliminally, but it’s worth it.

Lexicons and other fun topics

I’m not kidding. Building a lexicon (a list of words you will commonly use) is really fun and can be a great tool to get your writers to stick to a consistent tone. Consider the difference between a blog that refers to weddings as the “big day” “celebrating you and your beloved” and one that uses phrases like “ball and chain.”

What else do you need to consider?

• Pick three things your blog is about and insist that every blog post include one of them. In the above wedding example, I’d suggest wedding etiquette, fashion advice, and planning tips. David’s Bridal covered planning tips by adding their voice to the “do wedding websites make for generic weddings?” fray.
• Create a persona for your ideal audience member(s). For weddings, write for the bride, bridesmaids, and ideally, the groom too. Not all posts will speak to all people, but make sure your content targets the right people. A “How to Do a Bachelorette Party Right” post appeals to a very different readership than one providing event set-up tips for caterers.
• What can’t be said? Some writers respond best to knowing exactly how far they can push things. Will your bridal blog acknowledge shotgun weddings? How about gay weddings? The idea isn’t to make a list of every prohibition. Instead, you are providing parameters for success.

You’ll be amazed at what a good writer can do with these little tidbits of information.

The bottom line

Because you’re a business, it ultimately comes down to money. Here’s how that works. You use the blog to connect with your customers (readers) as human beings. Once they learn to trust you, your name is top-of-mind when they need the services you offer.

Don’t believe me? Use Google Analytics to see how many people convert after visiting your blog once, twice, or many times. Which posts keep people coming back? Write more of those.

What are your favorite blogs written by humans? Tell us about them and dish about corporate blog fails in the comments.

As you may already know, we’re a little obsessed with page load speed. We wanted our home page to load in under 1 second, and we were close. But close isn’t good enough.

So, with some guidance from Ian, I started out on my quest for sub 1 second page load times. The journey took me about a month, filled with research, converting and building configurations, trial-and-error, performance, and load testing. In the end, it was all worth it because portent.com is now screaming fast:

Portent.com site speed

Since re-launching in the new environment, portent.com averages .4 seconds/page (fist bump).

The New Environment

Our old environment was a 2-server setup: 1 dedicated web server with Apache, PHP, and APC and 1 dedicated database server with MySQL. It utilized keep-alives, compression (gzip, image, code), expires headers, a CDN, and caching provided by W3 Total Cache coupled with APC. This setup held its own for quite a while, but it did not accomplish our goal and with big traffic growth in 2012, there was plenty of room for improvement.

Bring in the new players: Varnish, NGINX, PHP-FPM, and APC

We spun up 3 Ubuntu 12.04 servers with help from our new friends at Rackspace:

• dedicated web server with NGINX, PHP-FPM5 and APC (4 GB RAM)
• dedicated MySQL database server (4 GB RAM)
• dedicated Varnish server (4 GB RAM)

NGINX

First, we setup NGINX. NGINX is an HTTP server with modular architecture that serves static and index files, supporting accelerated reverse proxying with caching, simple load balancing, autoindexing, gzipping, FastCGI caching, and much more. It wins high praise for its performance and scalability.

With some help from Tobias Baldauf’s article, I configured NGINX for our WordPress install. I added gzip compression to common file types in /…/nginx/nginx.config, including the custom fonts our site uses. In our domain-specific configuration (ie. /…/nginx/conf.d/portent.conf), I implemented pretty heavy caching for static files:


# Defined default caching of 24h
expires 86400s;
add_header Pragma public;
add_header Cache-Control "max-age=86400, public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate";

# Aggressive caching for static files
location ~* \.(asf|asx|wax|wmv|wmx|avi|bmp|class|divx|doc|docx|eot|exe|
gif|gz|gzip|ico|jpg|jpeg|jpe|mdb|mid|midi|mov|qt|mp3|m4a|mp4|m4v|mpeg|
mpg|mpe|mpp|odb|odc|odf|odg|odp|ods|odt|ogg|ogv|otf|pdf|png|pot|pps|
ppt|pptx|ra|ram|svg|svgz|swf|tar|t?gz|tif|tiff|ttf|wav|webm|wma|woff|
wri|xla|xls|xlsx|xlt|xlw|zip)$ {
expires 31536000s;
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
add_header Pragma public;
add_header Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public";
}

I also added in the necessary directives to utilize PHP-FPM:


set $my_https "off";
if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = "https") {
set $my_https "on";
}

#Added for php-fpm.
location ~ \.php$ {
# Customizations for PHP-FPM
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(.*)$;
#fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_pass php5-fpm-sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
fastcgi_ignore_client_abort off;
fastcgi_connect_timeout 60;
fastcgi_send_timeout 180;
fastcgi_read_timeout 180;
fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
fastcgi_buffers 4 256k;
fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
fastcgi_param HTTPS $my_https;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $http_x_cluster_client_ip;
}

In the above code, the last two lines defined FastCGI parameters configure SSL terminating load balancing. In order to get the proper value for PHP variables like $_SERVER['HTTPS'] and $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], these definitions were required with our load balancing setup.

PHP-FPM

Next, I configured PHP-FPM for our environment. FPM stands for FastCGI Process Manager and is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation and its features can be found here. Getting these values required performance tuning research. Please note that you should do your own research and testing. Here are some of the main definitons in /…/php*/fpm/pool.d/www.conf:


pm.max_children = 25

php_flag[display_errors] = off
php_admin_value[error_reporting] = 0
php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/php5-fpm.log
php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on
php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 128M
php_admin_value[date.timezone] = America/Los_Angeles

APC

Next, I brought APC into the fold. It’s a HUGE performance booster. APC stands for Alternative PHP Cache. And it works wonders. APC heavily optimizes and caches PHP code, storing it in shared memory and reducing the load on the web server. You can read all about its awesomeness here.

Again, you will want to do research and testing for your own environment, but here are the APC settings at the bottom of our PHP.ini file, /…/php*/fpm/php.ini:


[apc]
apc.max_file_size = "2M"
apc.localcache = "1"
apc.localcache.size = "256"
apc.shm_segments = "1"
apc.ttl = "3600"
apc.user_ttl = "7200"
apc.gc_ttl = "3600"
apc.cache_by_default = "1"
apc.filters = ""
apc.write_lock = "1"
apc.num_files_hint= "500"
apc.user_entries_hint="4096"
apc.shm_size = "256M"
apc.mmap_file_mask=/tmp/apc.XXXXXX
apc.include_once_override = "0"
apc.file_update_protection="2"
apc.canonicalize = "1"
apc.report_autofilter="0"
apc.stat_ctime="0"
apc.stat = "1"


You can boost your performance even further by setting apc.stat to “0″, but it will require you to flush the APC opcode every time you upload a new version of a PHP file. Because we are constantly working on our site, this wasn’t a very practical option. When apc.stat is set to “1″ (on), it will check the file/code being requested against the cached version and update the cache automatically if there is a difference. A slight performance hit, but in my testing, not enough to warrant the hassle of turning it off.

Varnish

Lastly, we setup Varnish on its dedicated server. Varnish is a reverse proxy HTTP accelerator developed for dynamic, content-heavy web sites. Varnish caches pages in virtual memory, leaving the operating system to decide what gets written to disc or stored in RAM. Varnish becomes the top layer of the web stack. All traffic routes through it. Because Varnish keeps static content stored in RAM for fast access, the web server makes many fewer PHP and MySQL calls.

Challenges

Converting our Apache .htaccess file to NGINX configuration syntax nearly drove me nuts. This was my first time working with NGINX so there was a lot of research and trial-and-error testing, but NGINX config can handle anything that Apache can, so it was a matter of problem solving.

Another challenge was getting PHP to properly define variables in the new load balanced environment — mainly HTTPS and REMOTE_ADDR. The definitions for PHP-FPM found in our site-specific NGINX configuration file did the trick.

The last big challenge was getting the hang of Varnish. After a few days of testing we came across an issue where some of our pages were being cached with our mobile styles, regardless of being viewed on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device. When a page’s Varnish cache had expired, the next request would get cached. Occasionally, that first post-expired request came from a mobile device, thus caching the request with the mobile settings. The solution is to configure Varnish to keep your mobile cache separate from your main cache. I added this vcl_hash function to our Varnish config located in /…/varnish/default.vcl:


sub vcl_hash {
hash_data(req.url);
if (req.http.host) {
hash_data(req.http.host);
} else {
hash_data(server.ip);
}
# ensure separate cache for mobile clients (WPTouch workaround)
if (req.http.User-Agent ~ "iP(hone|od)" || req.http.User-Agent ~ "Android" || req.http.User-Agent ~ "SymbianOS" || req.http.User-Agent ~ "^BlackBerry" || req.http.User-Agent ~ "^SonyEricsson" || req.http.User-Agent ~ "^Nokia" || req.http.User-Agent ~ "^SAMSUNG" || req.http.User-Agent ~ "^LG") {
hash_data("touch");
}
return (hash);
}


The function above will add ‘touch’ to each data cache being requested if the user-agent meets the conditions of the if statement, thus keeping mobile cache separate.

In Conclusion

It was a lot of work. But our new configuration loads twice as fast, and it doesn’t bog down if we have a big traffic day. We upped our speed to plaid.