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Configure WordPress Permalinks - SEO advices - Part 1

December 7th, 2009

In this article HOST-ED.NET team has collected the best practices and advices from internet for configuring in the right way Permalinks. Because if you follow advices of some “SEO experts” your permalinks should be with simple and “good-looking” pattern. But this could be very bad and dangerous practice!

Let us start by giving a nice big thanks to experts in the SEO community.  It’s likely because of them that there are literally thousands, possibly millions, of Wordpress installations that setup with less than optimal settings.  Many unsuspecting and uneducated users look to this group of experts for ideas and techniques to improve their search engine rankings and to gather more website traffic.  Little do these users know that even some of the most popular people in this group of experts are handing out bad advice regarding how to setup Wordpress systems.

Bad Wordpress Permalinks Advice
Most of the SEO experts on the net recommend that users setup their Wordpress permalinks in a very specific way.  Every article on the net I have seen written by an SEO expert regarding Wordpress permalinks suggests that users either use “/%postname%” or “/%category%/%postname%” for their permalink structure.  This is a bad idea for many reasons, which I will cover below, yet the SEO experts continue to promote it.

Why Are Those Permalinks Structures Bad?
Well to sum it up very simply it comes down to two things.  Speed and Reliability.  Thinking from the blog readers points of view these have to be the two of the three most important items that your blog can give them.  The third of course being content, but that’s not what we are here to talk about today.

Let’s start off with reliability and how these permalink structures affect that.  Both of these permalink structures have the first variable in the structure as a text based keyword.  The variables I am talking about of course are %category% and %postname%.  Unfortunately by using a text based variable you can cause Wordpress to get confused when the system goes to process the request from your users.

Let us start by giving a nice big thanks to experts in the SEO community.  It’s likely because of them that there are literally thousands, possibly millions, of Wordpress installations that setup with less than optimal settings.  Many unsuspecting and uneducated users look to this group of experts for ideas and techniques to improve their search engine rankings and to gather more website traffic.  Little do these users know that even some of the most popular people in this group of experts are handing out bad advice regarding how to setup Wordpress systems.

Bad Wordpress Permalinks Advice
Most of the SEO experts on the net recommend that users setup their Wordpress permalinks in a very specific way.  Every article on the net I have seen written by an SEO expert regarding Wordpress permalinks suggests that users either use “/%postname%” or “/%category%/%postname%” for their permalink structure.  This is a bad idea for many reasons.

In fact I was at SearchFest, a Portland SEO & search marketing conference, in March and I watched an SEO expert use this as his suggested permalinks structure to an entire room of people during a Wordpress SEO session. Now I just feel bad for anyone who actually wrote down or took that advice.  There are much better ways of setting up your permalink structures.

Why Are Those Permalinks Structures Bad?
Well to sum it up very simply it comes down to two things.  Speed and Reliability.  Thinking from the blog readers points of view these have to be the two of the three most important items that your blog can give them.  The third of course being content, but that’s not what we are here to talk about today.

1.SPEED

Let’s start off with reliability and how these permalink structures affect that.  Both of these permalink structures have the first variable in the structure as a text based keyword.  The variables I am talking about of course are %category% and %postname%.  Unfortunately by using a text based variable you can cause Wordpress to get confused when the system goes to process the request from your users.  The reason for this is that there are just too many possible items it can match.

When we look at a example URL of “/blah-blah-blah/”, Wordpress can run into problems when trying to match items to the request.  Does it match a category, a page name or a post name?  All of these text based variables use the same pattern matching so the system would have to run multiple database queries to figure out what the user is looking for. That’s not to mention the fact that the system also has to parse that request for attachments, tags, author pages and feeds which all use text based keywords as well.

Even then the system could get confused if you have a page/sub page combination that matches the slug of a category/post combination.  Which one should the system load?  These combinations of random keywords could easily cause Wordpress to load the wrong page or post for a user which in turn makes your site less reliable in the user’s eyes.

So now compound all of the above with the speed issues.  The most obvious of speed issues is that Wordpress has to run all of those database queries that I mentioned above.  Those are not lightweight and fast queries.  They take time and delay the loading of the page that the user is requesting.  How many times have you left a site because it loaded too slowly?

Another speed issue is for the Wordpress author themselves. When using a permalinks structure with a text keyword as the first variable you end up causing Wordpress to generate internal redirects to try and fix the issues mentioned above.  These redirects are stored in the wp_options table in the database and are generated when authors add and edit posts or pages in the system.

The system is semi smart and generates internal redirects for all the pages that are loaded into the system.  A simple page with a couple of attachments, whether they are displayed or not, can easily generate 11 internal redirects in the database.  This is because the system needs the redirects for the page, it’s attachments, the trackback URLs and feeds that go with it.  To make matters worse the system has to have a line for the redirect as it would show up in the request, the permalink for the item, and a line for how Wordpress is to understand that request.  So now we can double the number of lines in the database for that one post to 22 lines.

So by using the permalinks structure with the first variable being a text based keyword the system now generates these redirects upon saving a post/page and causes delays for the author.  In fact there have been reports where users with 200 or so pages, with random attachments, in their Wordpress installations actually causing server time outs during the generation of these redirects.  This causes them not to be able to post to their Wordpress installations at all.

Continuing with the speed problems, lets not give up on those internal redirects.  Those internal redirects also affect the users of the website and their page loading speeds.  With every page request the system has to load all of those extra redirects and process them.  That’s 22 extra lines of code per request that has to be processed before the page will load for the end user.  Imagine if you had a simple site with 10 pages, that’s an extra 220 lines of code.  That is of course is on top of the other 125 lines of code for internal redirects that Wordpress needs by default with no pages.

I took a look at one of my customers blogs who has 24 pages and compared that to his internal redirect list.  His redirect list had a total of 773 lines of code that needed to be processed for every request to his blog.  As you can see that 22 lines of code is a lower end figure when compared to his total number of pages.  On our blog we have 22 pages and do not use one of the permalink structures above.

Be advised that none of this touches on what kind of damage your doing to your server.  Since Wordpress is written in PHP and MySQL, all of the requests and code are processed on the server side rather then the user’s end of the connection.  By adding excess lines of code for redirects and increasing your number of database queries, you are also increasing the amount of work your web hosting server is having to do.  That also isn’t a good thing.

To be continued….

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Posted in Blogs, Knowledge base, SEO

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What is SSI?

November 6th, 2009

Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple interpreted server-side scripting language used almost exclusively for the web.

The most frequent use of SSI is to include the contents of one or more files into a web page on a web server. For example, a web page containing a daily quote could include the quote by placing the following code into the file of the web page:

<!--#include virtual="../quote.txt" -->

With one change of the quote.txt file, all pages including the file will display the latest daily quote. The inclusion is not limited to files. In this very example, on a server that can run fortune, the output of it, a randomly selected quote, can also be included.

Server Side Includes are useful for including a common piece of code throughout a site, such as a page header, a page footer and a navigation menu. Conditional navigation menus can be conditionally included using control directives.

In order for a web server to recognize an SSI-enabled HTML file and therefore carry out these instructions, either the filename should end with a special extension, by default .shtml, .stm, .shtm, or, if server is configured to allow this, set the execution bit of the file.

As a simple programming language, SSI support only one type: text. Its control flow is rather simple, choice is supported, but loops are not natively supported and can only be done by recursion using include or using HTTP redirect. The simple design of the language makes it easier to learn and use than most server-side scripting languages, while complicated server-side processing is often done with one of the more feature-rich programming languages.

Apache and lighttpd are the major two web servers that support this language.

Host-ed.net allows SSI for paid hosting plans - Personal and Business.

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Posted in General questions and answers, Knowledge base, basic knowledge

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Basic tips and tricks for phpMyAdmin

November 3rd, 2009

Host-ed.net is hosting provider which has a lot of information about beginners and also advanced web masters. In this article we will explain some basic tips and trick about phpMyAdmin - one excellent and very popular control panel for managing MySQL databases.

Quick Table Browse

The normal way to seeing the contents of a table is to click on the table name in the left pane and then click on the ‘Browse’ tab in the top. But there is a one click way to do this - click on the small icon next to the table name in the left pane.

Click icon to browse table

Default Table Selection

When you access phpMyAdmin, you get the main page - after that you have to chose from the drop down which database should be used. Wouldn’t it be useful if the database you use most would be automatically selected on loading? You can do this by accessing phpMyAdmin using the following URL.

http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/?db=my_fav_db

You will have to change the database name and the location to the one in your system - but you got the idea right?

Database Backup

There are many ways to take a database backup using phpMyAdmin - but my favorite way is to take an SQL Dump.

Select the database you want to backup and click ‘Export’ tab in the main frame. Now select all the tables in the select box. You can select the format of the backup - like SQL, CSV, XML etc. We will select the SQL option. It is recommended that you check the ‘Add DROP TABLE’ and ‘Add IF NOT EXISTS’ checkboxs. This will make sure that the existing tables will be removed when restoring the backup. Now check the ‘Save as file’ checkbox. Then click the ‘Go’ button. Now you should see a download option for the database backup. You can save this file to you harddisk and run it later if you want to restore the backup. If you did not check the ‘Save as file’ option, the SQL dump will be shown in a textarea.

This can also be done using the ‘mysqldump’ command in linux using the following command.

mysqldump --add-drop-table --user=root DATABASE> backup_file.sql

Table Backup

If you just need the backup of a single table, select that table from the table list in the left pane and click the ‘Export’ tab. Now do the steps described in the database backup section. Here only the selected table will be backuped.

This can be done using the following command.

mysqldump --add-drop-table --user=root DATABASE TABLE> backup_file.sql

Restoring a backup

Click the ‘SQL’ icon(SQL Icon) in the left pane - this will open a popup. Paste the SQL code you when you backuped the database in the textarea in this popup. Alternatively, you can chose the ‘Import Files’ tab in this popup and chose the location of the file you saved when backing up the data.

This is not a recommended method to restore large backup - if the backup file is more than 1 MB, don’t try this. A better method is to upload the backup file to you host and restore the backup using the shell.

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Posted in Database Management, Knowledge base, basic knowledge

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What is FTP?

November 1st, 2009

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) powers one of the most fundamental Internet functions: the transfer of files between computers. Prior to 1995, FTP generated more traffic on the Internet than any other service. Today, Web developers use FTP protocols to upload/update their web sites and download other information.

A basic understanding about the FTP process and software programs is important for every Web developer. You’ll use to post and modify your Web pages at your Web host’s server.

Terms to know

Let’s review some basic FTP terms.

  • Anonymous FTP: Transfers files from the public portion of an FTP server. “Anonymous” means that you don’t have to have an account on the server. In most cases, use anonymous as your user name and your email address as your password.
  • Archive: An FTP site that contains a selection of files for download.
  • Download: Also called “Get”. Copy a file from an FTP site to another computer. If you’re merely downloading shared files an anonymous account is usually sufficient. However, if you’re downloading Web pages for update, a password and user privileges is usually required.
  • FTP site: A Web site that stores files for download. You can access the sites with a Web browser by typing in the address. All FTP site addresses begin with ftp:// (instead of http://).
  • Upload: Also called “Put”. Place files on an FTP server. Upload privileges are usually password protected to keep unauthorized users from placing files that could contain viruses or other malicious code on the server.

What Kind of FTP Program Do You Need?

If your Web page editor doesn’t provide an FTP interface or if you code your pages by hand, you can choose from many FTP programs that don’t require extensive UNIX knowledge. They provide a drag-and-drop interface familiar to Windows and Mac users.

WS_FTP is a popular FTP package for PC’s while many Mac users employ FTP programs like Fetch and Anarchie. FTP is platform independent: you can use it to upload files from a Mac to a UNIX server without any trouble.

You may actually have already used FTP and never realized it. If you developed your site in FrontPage, the simple “Publish Web” option posted it using the FrontPage extensions installed with your account on your Web host’s server. If you have FrontPage extensions installed within your site, you should only use FrontPage to send and edit your Web files.

There are three basic ways to use FTP - your choice depends on how you plan to use it.

  • FTP using a Web browser. This is most commonly used for anonymous FTP - like downloading software. Always run a current virus scan program on anything you download! No extra software is required.
  • FTP using an HTML editor. Many Web page editors bundle this interface into their products. You don’t need to install a separate FTP program.
  • FTP using a standalone program. Use this if you’re administering a complex site with CGI programming or if you need to administer file permissions remotely. Very large, complex sites may require commercial FTP packages; otherwise, evaluate the freeware and shareware programs available for download.

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Posted in FTP & File Management, Knowledge base, basic knowledge

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What are Cronjobs

October 9th, 2009

What are cronjobs? This article is about main knowledgebase - suitable for beginners.

Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. ‘cron’ is short for Chronograph.

Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run automatically at a certain time or date. It is commonly used to perform system maintenance or administration. Although this is general purpose also it can be used for other purposes, such as connecting to the Internet and downloading email.

Cron has been recreated several times in its history.

Cron is driven by a crontab, a configuration file that specifies shell commands to run periodically on a given schedule.

Early versions of cron, available up through Version 7 Unix and 32V, made their services available only to the super-user of the operating system; this was the single-user version. With the release of Unix System V and the multi-user cron, these services were extended to all account-holding users of the system.

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How to Avoid Downtime When Changing Hosts

September 23rd, 2009

One of the major problems and greatest fears for many businesses when moving hosts is downtime. When your site goes down you can lose visitors, sales and potentially search engine rankings.

Moving web hosts should be a straightforward exercise, there should be little to no down time and your search engine rankings should not feel the pinch.

There are four main points you need to consider when moving from one webhost to another:

Check the IP range you are moving to - there are bad ‘IP’ ranges out there that have been banned or experienced trouble. The last thing you want to do is find your site sitting on one of these ranges. A quick way of checking is simply to see if they are in Google index. Your site’s natural search listings will suffer if found or associated with a bad IP range.

Take a full backup of the website - if anything goes wrong you can roll back quickly, your old host should have a copy of the site (better to be safe than sorry).

Always test - everything may look the same, but it is good practice to test all forms and applications on the site that could break, including the database.

Change DNS - once you have moved the site over to the new host, and everything is working correctly you need to “flick the switch”. This is a simple matter of changing your DNS. Updating your DNS can be done via your registrar, simply login and update the current DNS with the NEW IP of the website.

Finally, wait for the DNS to propagate, this means, wait for the rest of the internet to notice that the site has moved and that it must look at the new IP address for your web address. This process should take no longer than 48 Hours.

Dedicated or shared hosting, which is better?

There is an ongoing debate as to which hosting is better for search engine optimization, dedicated or shared / virtual hosting.

Dedicated hosting means that your website will receive its own ‘IP’, assuming it is easier for the search engines to identify your website.

Shared hosting means that your website will be sharing the same ‘IP’ as a number of other websites. Some people believe that there is a potential of your site being blacklisted due to another websites actions.

This is not true, search engines will not black list an entire IP unless of course this IP and the websites sharing it are clearly displaying typical spam activity i.e. link farming, link sharing etc.

From an SEO perspective, either hosting solution is suitable.

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Posted in FAQ for beginners

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Beginner`s Guide to Web Hosting

September 22nd, 2009

Not too long ago, I was a newcomer to the web hosting, and I can clearly recall the utter confusion and frustration I felt at how inaccessible the whole process seemed. With all of the options available in the web hosting industry these days, it is understandable that hosting newcomers often find themselves feeling lost and confused. Before you decide to give up, however, it is important to understand that web hosting is not an inherantly difficult venture, but actually a quite easy one, and in that sections we at Host-ed.net will provide you with the information you need to get your site up and running in no time!

Step One: Choosing a Domain Name
The first step in getting your web site ready for the web is selecting and registering a domain name. This name will serve as your online identity, and help your visitors remember what your site is about.

Step Two: Creating Your Website
Once you have successfully registered your domain name, the next step is to create your website to give it the look and feel you want. When coming up with a design for your website, it is extremely important to do a good deal of research to see what works for a website like yours, and what doesn`t. If you are a true beginner, you may want to consider hiring a design company to help you create your web pages. If you are on a tight budget we recommend you ready made template sites like freewebtemplates.com (free) and templatemonster.com (paid, but with better quality)

Step Three: Choosing Your Host
After you have finished your site, the next step is to choose a server for your site that makes the most sense for both your site and your budget. If you are reading this article you are most probably a beginner and would probably need to peak up from our shared hosting plans.

Step Four: Uploading Your Site
Once you have selected your plan of choice, the next step to getting your site up on the web is uploading your page, text, and image files to your server. With most sites, you will need to use an FTP program, which these days are relatively simple. The role of an FTP program is to upload your created web pages, text, and image files to your server. Once you have uploaded your files, your page files will then be served to users who enter your site. Some of the more popular programs are Cute FTP and Filezilla. Once you have successfully uploaded your files and pages to the web, your site will be up and running! Do not forget to update your domain name servers from your domain control panel. If you use our plan you have to adjust the name servers to ns1.host-ed.net and ns2.host-ed.net.

Step Five: Promoting Your Site
Ok, so now your site is up on the web, you can sit back and relax, browsing your beautifully crafted web pages, right? Wrong. Simply having a functional web site on the Internet is only the first step down the long and winding road to web success. In order to make sure your site enjoys the best chances of success, it is essential that you do your fair share of promotion. Before you go out and start passing out flyers or putting up billboards, make sure you register you site with the major search engines. For more information about web promotion and serarch engine optiomization vizit our SEO articles section.

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Posted in FAQ for beginners, General questions and answers

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What features should I look for when choosing a web host?

September 20th, 2009

The more you know about what you need, the easier it will be to find the right web host for you. For starters, you should determine the following:

1. Do you want a shared or virtual private server?
Depending on what your requirements are, you may be better off with a virtual private server (VPS) than a shared server. Virtual private servers are typically used in cases where there is a high level of traffic, there is a strong need for security, or you wish to run your own customised software and applications rather than the standard ones supplied by the host. Host-ed.net offers VPS packages with root access and Linux operation system installed. Basically you can install all aplications you need and run every software you need, which may not be possible on the standart shared hosting platform.

If you do not have a big site that will be receiving a lot of traffic, then shared should be fine for you.

2. Are you a good match?
Is your host’s server, software and support services compatible with the skills and software that you (or your design team) are using? If, for instance, you are working in a Linux environment, then it makes little sense to choose an Linux host. We provide the VPS with root access and Linux, PHP, MySQL and etc. installed. Please note that if you need windows hosting we could provide you with a VPS, but you should be responsible for finding, installing and managing the software. In that case we can just provide the hardware and you do the rest.

3. Are You Flexible and Can I Upgrade?
It is much easier to upgrade your current hosting plan than to start looking for a new one. With our hosting plans, there will be some features that you need and some offered that you don’t need. Be sure to focus on the essentials that are required to launch your website. It’s a good idea to choose a host that will allow you to expand and upgrade your plan as and when your website grows. We have 3 options of VPS upgrades our Starter VPS, Pro VPS and Advanced VPS. We also have custom upgrades from which you can upgrade single options like disk space, traffic, RAM or CPU. You can also upgrade from a shared hosting to a VPS in the hosting control panel

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What is Virtual Web Hosting?

September 20th, 2009

Servers are directly connected to the Internet backbone on fast communication links (much like phone lines, only these lines are bigger, and carry digital data, instead of voices). Your Web site will reside on one of servers at a web host’s facility, yet you can view it and work on it from your own PC. This is virtually like having a computer of your own, hence the term Virtual Web Hosting. A web hosting provider hosts your Web site by placing it on this “server” (since it “serve” content up to Web surfers) which are designed specifically to host Web sites.
Often, virtual private servers (VPS) are just like a dedicated server only that it is part of it. Each VPS has its own operation system and log in credentioals. host-ed.net virtual private server plans are suitable for everybody, who has a higher ranking websites that needs more server resources. The difference between web hosting shared plans and virtual private server plans is that on the VPS the resources (disk space, traffic, CPU, Ram, etc) are guaranteed where as on the shared hosting these resources depend on how loaded the shared server is. The other advantage of the our VPS packages is that they are fully upgradable and if you need more disk space and less traffic for your site you can only ungrade your disk space with out having to pay for expencive predefined VPS or even dedicated server plans. For more information on our VPS packages do not hesitate to contact us

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What types of shared hosting are available?

September 13th, 2009

Although many different types of shared hosting are available, UNIX/Linux and Windows hosting dominate. Which type of hosting you choose depends on what technology your web site will utilize. Web sites that will utilize PHP programming and a MySQL database (as many Open Source Content Management Systems do) should use a UNIX/Linux based platform. Sites utilizing technologies like ColdFusion, IIS, VBSCript, Windows Media, .ASP or .NET programming, an MSSQL database, or a range of Microsoft solutions such as Frontpage, should use a Windows based platform (Windows 2003, Windows 2008). If you have doubds on what kind of hosting you need feel free to contact us at our web hosting contact page.

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