Percentage of people who prefer pie charts to bar charts, as an info-graphic.

We can only control the type of content we write to a limited degree, after all my blog here is about online marketing and it would seem out-of-place for me to write about mortgages or medical insurance, regardless of the value of those keywords but what I can control is my Click Thru Rate (CTR) or at least I can influence it.

Why Getting a Better Click Thru Rate for Google AdSense Matters

Getting a better CTR for Google AdSense is critical if you want each click on your website to have a high value this is because Google uses a technology on their website to adjust the price of your ads if they feel your site is under performing. They call it SmartPricing but what it really does is lower your ad revenue based on their formulas.

Google's smart pricing feature automatically reduces greatest cost-per-click (CPC) bids for certain pages in the Google Network across both desktop and mobile devices with full internet browsers.

Google is constantly analyzing data across the Google Network. If our data shows that a click from a Google Network page is less likely to turn into an actionable business result - such as an online sale, registration, phone call, or newsletter signup - we may reduce the bid for that site. - Google AdWords Support

The result for your blog is dramatic, two similar blogs that are running similar content can receive revenues 10 times less from being placed in SmartPricing. That means that your site could be losing 90% of its revenues, simply because your CTR is too low.

With that in mind, what we know about online advertising is that new visitors are more likely to buy from advertisers than established, loyal visitors and that Google uses not only CTR but also business results (such as an online sale, registration, phone call, or newsletter sign-up) to measure your cost-per-click value. So, what we need to do is remove Google AdSense ads from two categories of people:

1. Our Loyal Readers - these are readers who have us bookmarked and come to the site repeatedly, since they don't click ads anyway they're lowering your CTR
2. Readers of High Volume Articles - these are readers who come in on a DIGG or StumbleUpon article, they're not likely to click ads and are also lowering your CTR

In fact, the only place we really want to show Google AdSense articles are on pages that are read less often but by new readers, such as those who find older content via search engines and that's exactly who we're going to target as our market.

The Code to Increasing Our Click Thru Rate and Ad Value on Google AdSense

What this code is going to do is place our Google AdSense ads on older articles (anything over 15 days), where users are coming from a search engine. At first it may seem counter intuitive to limit to such a small window of users but remember, that's exactly what we're trying to do. We're using this code to exclude anybody who is unlikely to click our ads (loyal readers and readers of fresh content).

Now the piece of code that I'm about to post here isn't mine, it's from Cats Who Blog's article 10 Tips To Finally Make Money With Google Adsense, all I've done here is combine two of their code samples into one and add an alternative to make sure that it works properly. To use the code below you'll need to copy the two functions form Cats Who Blog into your functions.php file (Place Adsense ads on old posts only & Display Adsense to search engine visitors only) and add the code snippet below to your website (mine is in the sidebar) and you'll automatically display Adsense ads only to people coming from search engines on posts older than 15 days.

php

if (scratch99_fromasearchengine() && is_old_post()) {

?>

// your adsense code here

php } else { ?>

// your non adsense code here
<?php } ?>

Mark Jaquith on WordPress.org had this to say "Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!"

This announcement won't be a pressing issue as WordPress 3.2 isn't scheduled for release until sometime in the first half of 2011 but for those users who will need to make upgrades to their web hosting, it's a significant consideration.

As of WordPress 3.2, the software will only support PHP releases 5.2 and above, while not the most recent version of the PHP release it is widely supported and the minimum requirements for running competitor packages such as Joomla and Drupal. PHP is the software language WordPress is coded in, and is required to run the software, the change is expected to affect around 11 percent of WordPress installations.

• 21 SEO Tips to Make Your WordPress Website A Marketing Powerhouse
• Four Quick SEO Tips
• How do I get a high pagerank?

... in fact, I did a search for PageRank articles on my site and it seems that I'm always telling you guys how vital a great PageRank is for your marketing efforts but today, I'm not going to tell you about it, I'm going to show you how to get a FREE Link from a PageRank 7 website, for doing nothing more than protecting your online image.

First, let's all agree that we've made mistakes. I make them all the time and the last thing that I need is some nancy-drew-do-gooder remembering that I can't spell Masistusis and that's the problem with the Wayback Machine. It's way too good at remembering the time I beaked off about Matt or bitched about the latest security flaw in a software package.

Second, let's agree that we don't want our mistakes published to the internet. I simply want it to forget and that led me to a great article on the SEO Buzz Box about removing my site from the Wayback Machine.

Easy enough, I followed the instructions and added the code to my robot.txt file:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

then I resubmitted my site to Alexa as per the instructions and waited until they crawled my site again ... bam! Guess what?

A free, no questioned asked PR7 link from a respected website.

That's right ... a free link from a high ranking, well established and trusted service for doing nothing more than protecting your content from their archives.

Do you know anywhere else to get great, free high value links? Let me know!

When you think of Canada, you should think of our winters. Not that we're always in winter (in fact this week it's about 86* outside) but unlike our Yankee neighbours we're always acutely aware that in just a few months, it's going to freeze.

That makes us more conservative than some and not surprisingly, it makes us think about how our choices today are going to affect us tomorrow. The 'jump first, look second' mentality that makes America such a great place to live, quickly results in us freezing to death here in the North and because of that, I love that Macleans Magazine (Canada's best weekly news magazine) powers their website with WordPress.

It's not just that I think WordPress is one of the best platforms out there, or that other magazines such as the Christian Science Monitor choose to use it, it's that such an old and stable platform such as Macleans, with all it's typically Canadian hesitation to embrace anything radical uses it.

Their choice to use WordPress proves to me that the platform works and that it's a great, cost-effective solution for new magazines anywhere in the world.

So what impact (if any) did having the morning show broadcast live from the island have on marketing? Wouldn't it be cool if there was a definitive way to know such as a report from Google that would tell us the traffic pattern for specific keywords?

Actually there is. It's called Google Trends and it's just one more of the secret tools that Google has. I say secret, what I really mean is under used. When I searched Google Trends for Prince Edward Island and adjusted for only the last 30 days and only US searches here's what I saw:

Clearly, there has been a dramatic spike since July 11th which coincides with the shows broadcast on Prince Edward Island. Google Trends is just one more amazing tool from Google which allows business owners to understand and visualize the data which affects your business.

Who could use this information?

Clearly the increase in traffic will be a benefit to all of PEI's tourism but specific businesses could benefit tremendously from this huge spike in traffic by outbidding competitors for AdWords or placing effective Facebook ads for this island. Ideally, restaurants and hotels, chefs, tour companies, airlines and tourism operators could benefit from the sudden rash of traffic to the website.

Here's the link to PEI's Trends report.

1. Copy your page.php to a new file called page-gallery.php
2. Open page-gallery.php and loop for the Loop. It'll start with <?php if (have_posts()) and end with endif; ?>, delete it all.
3. Paste the follow code where the loop was:
   

   opendir ('../galleryimages/');
   while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
   if($file != "." && $file != ". .") {
   echo '<a href="'.get_bloginfo('<span class=">url').'/galleryimages/'.$file.'"><img src="'.$file.'" alt="" /></a>';
   }
   }

4. Save the file, upload it to your website.
5. Create a new page with the permalink gallery
6. Add a directory to your server called galleryimages
7. Upload your images to galleryimages

Now what this will do is simply loop through any files in the galleryimages directory and create a link to them, displaying each on a page for your website. What it will not do is resize or optimize the images, as I stated this is a cheap and cheerful way to quickly create a gallery.

php

foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {

$categorylist .= "".$category->cat_name.", ";

}

$categorylist =  substr($categorylist, 0, strlen($categorylist)-2);

if (substr_count($categorylist,", ")>0) {

$lastcomma = strrpos($categorylist,", ");

$categorylist = substr_replace($categorylist," and ",$lastcomma,1);

}

echo $categorylist;

?>

What it does is pretty straight forward, the code loads a posts categories into a variable and then adds a comma plus a space after each item to create a list such as subject a, subject b, subject c, .

Next, it strips the last common and space from the list so the last item does not include a comma. Finally it checks if there are any commas left and replaces the last occurrence with the word and.

The resulting string looks like  subject a, subject b and subject c with each category subject linked to it's category.

To list an external RSS feed you'll first need to add a small piece of code to your functions.php file:

function external_feed($atts) {

extract(shortcode_atts(array(

"url" => ''

), $atts));

include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');

$rss = wp_rss($url,$maxitems);

$items = array_slice((array)$rss->items, 0, 5);

foreach((array)$items as $item) {

$external_feed_list .= "<li><a href='";

$external_feed_list .= $item['link'];

$external_feed_list .= "'>";

$external_feed_list .= $item['title'];

$external_feed_list .= "</a></li>\n";

}

return $external_feed_list;

}

This code will allow you to call a new function from anywhere within your website, designed to display a formatted list of recent blog posts.

The list displayed here (Jobs in South Carolina) is created in real time, every time a page is loaded by querying Monster.com's free RSS feeds and displaying the results on the website.

Adding a similar function to any website is easy with the above function and a small addition to your sidebar.

For example, to add a list of my most recent posts to your sidebar, you could add the following text to your sidebar.php file:

<ul><?php echo  external_feed('url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/thisismyurl?format=xml&maxitems=5') ?></ul>

Picking a subject to write about

Let's assume for a moment that you're an expert on many things and that you can't determine which subject you'd like to write about. First, let's make a list of the five things that you have an interest in and then we'll talk about how to research and build proper content. In my case, here are the things that I enjoy writing about:

• website design
• cooking
• photography
• video games
• science fiction

It's important that before we start looking at how to write, we know what to write about and for that, we need to turn to Google to determine which of the subjects I've listed above are worth writing about.

Evaluating what to write about

To know which of my subjects are worth writing about, we need to find one that matches these characteristics:

1. The subject must appeal to somebody, either as a niche market or with mass appeal
2. The subject must be popular but can not be dominated by other players
3. People who read the subject must be receptive to advertising and advertisers must want to advertise to them

Now that third one is only important if you want to make money on the web.

Let's now turn to a special tool on Google called Google Keyword Tools, which allows us to view competitive data on a variety of keywords. By default, the tool does not display all the categories we need so let's open the Views tab and add Estimated CPC (cost per click) to the data, so we can see what each keyword is worth.

With each of our keywords above, we can test to see if there is a market for the subject and we can determine if there's value in us writing about it.

Here's what I found out about my content by looking at Google's results quickly.

• website design is valuable, with a CPC between $8.72 and $4.31. It is highly completive and accounts for millions of searches per month
• cooking is even more valuable with a CPC of $13.75 to $1.00. It is also highly competitive with millions of searches per month
• photography is less valuable with a CPC of $6.03 to $1.53. It is less competitive with millions of searches per month.
• video games are also competitive with CPC's ranging from $6.49 to $0.67
• science fiction has the lowest payout at $2.60 to $0.51 per click and is not as competitive as a result

To determine the true value, I download each of these keyword sheets into a spread sheet application and add a new column in which I multiple the total global searches per month by the value of each keyword (which gives me the gross value of the keyword per month) and then divide that number by the competition value. Since the most competitive phrases are displayed as a 1 and less competitive as a fraction, the items with a lower competitive value increase the gross value of those keywords.

Next, I combine the five documents into a single document and sort by my gross value column which returns a list of 500 keywords, sorted by the total value of ads, multiplied by the total number of searches. In my case, based on my five stated interests the top 20 keywords on the planet are wedding, kitchen, photography, nintendo, video games, web design, cooking, culinary, video game, website design, computer games, xbox games, digital photography, nintendo video games, sci fi, web designer, web site design, video games consoles, photography cameras and sell video games.

As you can see from this example, the top 20 list contains keywords from each of my desired subject areas and also adds the idea of writing about weddings or kitchens. Most likely, based on this research I would choose to write a blog about cooking, video games or web design (each had two in the top ten).

To fix the error was easy, all I needed to do was log into the website and edit a small file. The fix should have taken inside five minutes but when asked for her FTP details, the woman informed me that she'd not been given them because the developer felt she was more likely to do harm than good if she had direct access. To this, I would like to draw the parallel of a car salesmen not giving you the keys to your car because you might do more harm than good.

Let me be clear, there is never a moment in the entire history of the Internet in which it has been appropriate for a client to not have full and unfettered access to their files. In fact, if you think about it for a moment ... it doesn't make sense. The hosting company / developer (in this case it was the same company) claimed that they didn't want to let her have access to these files because if she damaged them, it would be costly to repair them. Following that logic, isn't in their best interest to let her have access to the files? After all, if she breaks her site she'll have to pay them more.

Problem two for her was that, even though she had clearly taken the time to educate herself and ask the domain name be registered in her name, the company went ahead and registered it in their own. In practical terms, this means that the web hosting company owns her domain name and it will be nearly impossible for her to ever get the domain back without their co-operation.

Who owns your domain name?

There's actually a wonderful (and free) service to find this out. Go to a company like Go Daddy and search for your own domain name. Of course, your domain is already registered but what we're really after is on the next page.

Now, on the next page you'll see a tiny little link for Get Info, this link will open a new web browser which in turn will show you the current registration details for your website (if they're available).

Now, if you look at the Get Info registration details for thisismyurl.com, you'll notice that the domain name is registered to me. More importantly, you'll notice that the Administrative Contact is me and the my email address is correct.

This is important!

If your Administrative Contact email address is not your email address, you do not own the domain.

Let's try stating that in another way ...

The only person on the planet that ICANN recognizes as the legitimate owner of the domain, is their person whom they can email at this address. If it's not you ... you're not in control.

Charles Runyan has an interesting article on the subject, in which he states "A domain name is 'owned' by or licensed to the person or entity shown as the 'registrant' on the 'whois' database of the registrar.". He also offers some valuable tools to help you understand who actually owns your domain.

How I created a random post page in WordPress

First, I copied the singles.php page to a new file called page-random.php, this reveals a really cool (yet underused) feature of WordPress, the template system. By default when a page is loaded, WordPress uses the page.php file (as opposed to Posts which load the single.php file) but if there is a template file called page-[slug].php, it will load that page instead.

In the case of my new random page, the slug was random (as can be seen in the editor to the right). So I simply called my file page-random.php to ensure WordPress would load this specific template for the Random page.

Next, I opened the page-random.php file and searched for the lines:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Your file may be a little different but the important thing here is the <?php if (have_posts()) : ?> line which tells WP to retrieve the post details for this specific page. By default, it will query the database for the contents of the Random page, which in this case would contain only the tile (I didn't add content to the page) but what we want instead is for it to query a random post. To accomplish this, just before the <?php if (have_posts()) : ?> we add the line:

<?php query_posts(array('showposts' => 1), 'orderby' => 'rand'); ?>

This line tells WordPress to load the one random post. Now we just need to upload the file to our server and create a new page with the slug random for the page to work!

http://www.thisismyurl.com/random/

First off, don't panic. The image tag is a little more advanced than the others but it's still very easy and key to helping you promote your website.

How to use the image tag for search engine optimization

Whenever we place an image on the web, we use something called the <img> tag, it's a core element of the HTML tag library and one that anybody looking for web marketing advice should learn.

The Blogger logo to the right of this paragraph appears in my HTML because I use a basic piece of code which looks like this:

<img src='http://www.thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/round-blogger-logo-with-a-fold.png' />

That code isn't enough to let search engines know what the graphic really is because search engines are blind (unable to see graphics). Instead we have to add a special piece of code called an ALT attribute to the image, this shows the alternate text for people who are visually impaired as well as search engines and other computer programs. I'm also going to add a title attribute which is the text that appears when you hover over the image without clicking it, it's similar to an ALT tag but for visual surfing.

<img title="round blogger logo with a fold" src="http://www.thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/round-blogger-logo-with-a-fold.png" alt="round blogger logo with a fold" />

As you can now see, the image is easily viewable and contains key data for website visitors as well as search engines such as Google. It doesn't matter which order you place the attributes in, only that each image contain:

1. the path to an image
2. a title tag for mouse overs
3. an ALT tag for the visually impaired

Three easy steps to making your images searchable

There's nothing complex about this tip, but there are three fairly basic easy steps you need to take to ensure your website images are searchable from Google.

1. Make use of the image title attribute to give your files visual and accessible attributes
2. Use the image ALT attribute to ensure the visually impaired have a clear understanding of the image
3. Name your file using keywords such as round-blogger-logo-with-a-fold.png instead of filename.png to help search engines understand the content

When combined with SEO friendly page headers and the title tags, these images make for powerful search engine optimization helpers.

A hyperlink is a link between two pages, it's what allows us to link from one page of a website to another and allows web surfers to quickly move from document to document on a website.

Making Links SEO Friendly

Let's take a look at a standard hyperlink as well as the hyperlink to the image to the right:

<a href='http://www.thisismyurl.com/free-downloads/15-free-round-social-media-icons-with-a-fold/'>15 Free Social Media Icons</a>

As you can see, there are two basic parts to an anchor (<a>) tag, the first is the href or the document we're linking to. Take note that I've named the file using rich keyword friendly labels to start so that simply by looking at the file my visitors are aware that this link is to free downloads 15 free round social media icons with a fold, that's not an accident I want you to know what you're about to click on.

The second part to the basic anchor tag is the text or image your user will have to click to get to the page. In this case, you can click either the text 15 Free Social Media Icons which tells both your users and search engines exactly what they're going to click to or, you can click the image which makes use of an ALT tag to tell users they're about to click to icons for social websites free, which again clearly identifies the content.

In addition to these basic anchor tag rules, I am also going to add a title to my anchor which helps identify the content further:

<a title='Link to download 15 free social media icons' href='http://www.thisismyurl.com/free-downloads/15-free-round-social-media-icons-with-a-fold/'>15 Free Social Media Icons</a>

By adding this simple attribute, I've added not only another means for Google to figure out what I'm linking to but also more, beneficial content for my website visitors to make effective use of my content. As with most SEO tricks, the best way to get better rankings is to make sure your visitors can make the most out of your website.

SEO Friendly Links

As you can see, there are three basic elements to making your links SEO friendly:

1. Ensure your file names are keyword friendly
2. Add a title tag to your anchor to improve search results
3. Link rich, descriptive text or images with ALT tags whenever possible

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Included in these sets are 15 icons for the most popular social media websites including: Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Google, MySpace, Reddit, RSS, StubleUpon, Technorati, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo, YouTube.

Click on any of the icons below to link to the style you would like to download.

The power of the title tag

At it's most basic level, the title tag is the equivalent of a filename on your computer. If you created a copy of your resume in MS Word, you've most likely call it resume.doc or resume-june.doc or something similar right? Well on the Internet, the title is used in a similar fashion, to help people find your document by searching (just like you do on your computer) for the page name.

The title of your document appears in a couple of key visual places:

• The header of your browser, above where you type the URL of a website
• The history menu of your browser
• The tab of your web browser
• The Search Engine Results Page for Google and other search engines

Obviously then, this single HTML code is critical not only for your website visitors but also for search engines to gain a better understanding of your website.

How to use the HTML title tag

The HMTL title tag is located in the <head> region of your webpage, this section of code is used to tell web browsers and robots such as Google what the page is about. You'll find the title of your document stored between the tags <title> and </title>.

Here are some helpful tips to optimize the page title:

• Length matters, keep the page title to 90 characters whenever possible but more than 60 characters;
• Order matters, make sure your ideal keywords are towards the beginning of the title tag;
• Relevancy matters, the title should be different for each page on your website and accurately reflect the content of the page

The title tag is so important that you may wish to try to replicate it on the page itself, or at least part of it in the SEO Advice for the Header" href="http://www.thisismyurl.com/tutorials/search-engine-optimization/simple-seo-advice-your-headers/">primary header tag of the page using the <h1> tag. This works because search engine's look at more than just the title and consider headers to be of very high value as well.

Today, we'll talk briefly about headers and in particular how and when to use them.

A webpage header is defined as content held between the <h#> and </h#> tags of a website, for example <h1>Hello World</h1> or <h2>My great header</h2> in the HTML of a document. These headers work to identify what content on a webpage is important, just like they would in any other document.

Let's take a look then at how to use headers to help your SEO.

• First, keep your headers reasonable. The fewer you have on a page, the more weight each header holds.
• Second, keep your headers fairly short. Headers are for short, single sentences, not for paragraphs!
• Use your keywords in your headers when appropriate but don't force it, remember it's about great, readable text.
• Use headers in the right order. <h1> tags represent the most important or title content for the document, <h2> for less important sub titles, <h3> is for content below the <h2>, etc. all the way down to <h6>

Using headers for SEO without visual impact

One reason people struggle using <h1> tags is because it creates such a visual impact on a page but with CSS styles, there is no reason your headers need to look any difference than the text itself.

Remember, search engine optimization is about helping search engines understand what's on your page and one of the most power tools to do that is the HTML header tag!

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Combine Files

The first rule of making WordPress scream like a banshie is to get rid of countless file loads. Web servers are just fancy computers that are often built on similar technology as your desktop. The more files you load, and the more often you load then, the more often your hard drive has to struggle to keep up with file loads.

CSS Sprites

By minimizing your HTTP requests, your website can load dramatically faster and one of the fastest ways to do it is to use CSS sprites for common page items.

Image Maps

Back in the old days, it was common for a website to use image maps  to speed up websites, but with massive bandwidth capacities came massive waste. The result for low volume websites was negligible but for high volume sites, it was a disaster to abandon the classic image map to save load time.

Optimize Files

As I eluded to in the previous section, one of the reasons modern websites suffer from slow speeds is simply that modern web designers fail to design for the lowest bandwidth. If you want to speed up WordPress and you've already combined your images into as few files as possible, the next step is to look at your output.

According to this article, 80% of the time fetching external components including scripts, stylesheets and images. That means that the vast majority of the time your users are waiting for your webpage to load is spent on files other than your HTML.

Compress and Minimize Your CSS files

CSS files are used to design your site, they almost always end in .css, so you can open your website in a browser and view the code to search for how many are loaded. A lot right? Yep, most plugins add CSS to your website as unique files.

The first step then is to open each of the CSS files found in your necessary plugins and copy that CSS code into one huge styles.css file  in your theme directory, then delete the CSS code calls from each plugin so that the excessive HTTP calls are not being made.

Next, run a CSS compression on your styles.css file to minimize the file size.

In a recent case involving a popular online magazine this process decreased the number of HTTP requests from 27 to 1 and the total file size loaded from 180kb to just 12kb per viewer. The website averaged 150,000 page loads per day, which resulted in an overall savings of 25GB (that's gigabytes) of data savings per day and over 4 million HTTP requests per day.

Lower the number of JS calls

The only thing more terrifying than CSS to an efficiency hound like me is excessive JavaScript calls. These files call kill a website, not only because they take time to process their functions (luckily this is done client side) but also because they sneak into WordPress websites without little forethought.

The same website I mentioned earlier had 17 external JavaScript files called each time a page was loaded, that was 150,000 times a day or more to the point ... 2.5 million JavaScript files being called via the HTTP protocol every day. Simply combining these 17 files into a single JS file decreased the calls to 5.8% of their previous server load.

Optimize your images

We're all guilty of being lazy when it comes to optimizing our images but on a busy server, that 600 pixel wide image that you're dynamically resizing to 300 pixels via CSS is probably killing you.

Here's a snap shot of the directory for thisismyurl.com, the first file in this list is 339.9kb, simply converting it from a 32 bit PNG to an 8 bit PNG shrunk the file to 79kb a savings of over 75%!

This goes to show that a lot of the problems with speed in WordPress has more to do with sloppy web content developers than the system itself.

Fix your files

The HTTP/1.1 specification limits browsers to no more than two files in parallel per hostname, that means that your website can only download two items per domain at a time so if your website has 36 image files, 17 JS files and 27 CSS files to load .. it has to cue those files and complete one file load before starting on the next.

Move JS to the footer

Assuming you've already optimized your JavaScript files as suggested, now it's time to move them to the footer of your website. While this won't technically speed up your site, it will allow the client to load all other content prior to loading the JS file, which will give the appearance of speed.

Move files off your server

Another key method to speeding up your server is to get around that pesky two files at a time rule by simply moving your files onto alternative servers or if you want to be a real jerk, leave them where they are but map subdomains to pickup the files from your server.

Either way, you've now convinced client web browsers to load data faster by bypassing the web browsers built in speed limit be careful however, the more host names your client has to do a DNS lookup for, the longer it can take.

Flush Your Code

We'll get into a few key things you need to do with your theme itself in this section but before we do, let's take a look at the <?php flush(); ?> function because if your theme's not using it, you're wasting my time. Literally.

flush() is used to force a PHP script to return results to the browser. In most cases, the webpage loads, renders and then returns all code to the browser but on a huge site this can take seconds, so why not send the data as soon as you have it? Try adding the <?php flush(); ?> tag just below your <head> as well as after complex commands to speed up delivery of your data.

Replace dynamic elements

WordPress, by it's nature is a dynamic website tool but most themes are designed to be used across a multitude of websites, not just yours. That means that every time a page is loaded on your website, the site has to ask the database what your website name is. In fact, it has to ask the database a ton of things that it should know automatically.

Let's start by assuming you know what your website name is and search all your files for <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> and simply replace it with your site name. In fact, let's go crazy and replace all the <?php bloginfo('[variables]'); ?> found in your website theme with static values, the fewer database calls WordPress has to do the better!

Strip it to the bones

Next, let's take a look at the plugins and theme elements your website uses and strip everything to the most basic elements. Better yet, if you can do it with a function then just get rid of the plugins altogether because they're bogging you down

Cache it

Finally, let's configuring apache for maximum performance, activate the Mysql Query Cache, use a PHP compiler tool such as  eAccelerator on the server side to really push every ounce of power out of WordPress.

Add the WP Super Cache" href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/" target="_blank">WP Super Cache Plugin, ensure the settings are optimized (they're not by default) and you're off!

Best of luck on your website.

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