Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

Configure WordPress Permalinks - SEO advices - Part 2

December 12th, 2009

In the first part we have talk about how bad and dangerous could be configuring permalinks in WordPress blog. In this article we will show you solution for best configuring permalinks!

So What is the Solution?
The solution is to use a permalink structure that does not start with a text based variable.  By doing this you will drastically reduce your risk of the problems listed above.  Here is a list of variables you can use that are not text based:

  • %year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
  • %monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05
  • %day% – Day of the month, for example 28
  • %hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15
  • %minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43
  • %second% – Second of the minute, for example 33
  • %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have text based variables in your permalink structures, you just need to make sure the first variable is not text based.  One good solution we recommend “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%”.

Why Would The SEO Experts Recommend The Wrong Structure?
The reason SEO experts recommend the “/%postname%” or “/%category%/%postname%” structure is simple.  It makes the URLs easy to remember and it introduces keywords into the URL string that should match the content of your post.  Typically in SEO the shorter the URL the better as its easier for the users to remember.  The reason some SEOs recommend adding %category% to it is because categories normally include common keywords in the name that match the contents of the posts in that category.  Are these extra 2-3 keywords from %category% worth it?  Not in my opinion.

A better question would be why aren’t SEO experts recommending the permalink structure of “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%”?  A simple answer to that one would be because they think the URL might be too long or they are unaware of the issues I am writing about today.  After all some of these problems were not introduced until Wordpress 2.7 was released.  Hopefully some of the SEO experts will read this article and change their recommendations to their customers.

Why Blame the SEO Experts For This?
SEO experts are the ones who always are trying to optimize their pages to get the best search rankings possible.  They are likely the reason that these options even exist for the permalink structures.  Always wanting to get a extra 2-3 keywords in the URL out of the %category% tag or wanting to shorten the URL to just “/%postname%”.  It’s just insanity.

Of course there is always the fact that they are the only ones I see recommending this to people because of the optimization boost that it can give you.  If it wasn’t for SEO, there would be no reason to use one of those permalink structures except to make things look pretty.

How Do I Know This is Real and Not Just Your Crazy Opinion?
That is a very good question.  Unlike the SEO experts opinions, I happen to have the official Wordpress documentation on my side.  The Wordpress Codex page for Permalinks specifically states the following:

“For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.“

Really who is going to argue with the official documentation?  Just in case you still think I might be making it up, here is a link to a discussion on the Wordpress Testers mailing list thread that discusses these very issues.

Now as of the time of this writing there is a patch for part of the problem listed above.  A user has provided the Wordpress developers a patch via the Wordpress Trac site to make the generation of internal redirects faster when authors save a post or a page.  While I believe this is great, it still doesn’t solve the issue of those redirects needing to be there in the first place.  Even if you generate the redirects faster, you still have the problem of having to process them with every request from a user.  Seems like a band aid over a much bigger problem.

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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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Choose Cheap and Stable Hosting Provider for Blogging - PART 1

November 18th, 2009

Nowaday, Blogging is widely increasing in popularity. A lot of webmasters write blogs for either personal interests or business reasons. Also blogs(as the most popular WordPress) offer users more easier and intuitive interface and now it is very easy for everyone withi basic computer knowledges to have a BLOG.  And considering the important of a reliable hosting to the success of your blog, it’s very very important to take some time to find out what hosting is the best for it.

Server Type

The most popular and powerful blog software is WordPress, an open source application developed by php and running against MySQL database. So, from techinical viewpoint, Linux web hosting solution is the best choice for your blog, and it’s relatively cheaper than a Windows one as well. Also WordPress has very intuitive and user-friendly interface. There are a lot of FREE plugins, themes. In the internet there are a lot of advices about properly webmastering!

So as conclusion, please make sure it supports php(4+) and MySQL(4+).

Disk Space

Blog software itself won’t use a lot of space (less than 10MB for WordPress). And most of the disk space are used for the post you have written, and the image or video used by your blog. Let’s plan for 2 year first, think about how many posts you can write per day, and the average size of them. After it, you can make a calculation to know the disk spaces you will need.

Good hosting providers offers you a lot of disk space so here probably you will not have problems. The only point you should have in mind that if you want to add galleries and to store a lot of images in your Blog than you should get more attention about this point. Let’s make some calculation - one image for web is usually between 15~60 KB(it is possible to be more) - but average it should be around 35-40 K B - 40KB. As you see this will not be problem even if y0u add gallery in your blog.
For now as solution we offer you good and stable hosting with all features at very good price - VIEW OUR CHEAP WEB HOSTING PLANS
SOON - PART 2

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Posted in Blogs, Hosting and Hosting Types

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Basic SEO advices for WordPress Blogs

September 15th, 2009

In this article we will introduce you important advices for SEO in your WordPress Blog. All you need to get started.

You should consider WordPress if you are serious about your blog.  You get support and customisation by virtue of plug-ins that offers extra services which help interact with visitors.  You also get a unique site.

No programming needed

With any website it is better to start off on a good footing, you don’t want to start changing software once you get going.  WordPress offers ease of use for those who are not programmers.  As soon as it is installed you can start blogging immediately.  It is established and stable and offers a good variety of themes so you can change the look and feel to suit your tastes.

You are able to administer you own blog as the user management tools are fantastic.  Once you have designed your blog you have the satisfaction of knowing you will never have to tear it apart and start again.

As an SEO tool WordPress is invaluable.  You get linking structures already in place that are so necessary for spiders plus you get coding that contains no validation errors.  You do however need to put in a little extra effort if you want to make your blog more SEO friendly.

SEO principles

•    Firstly you need to ensure that your webpage URL’s reflect the name of your blog post.  Don’t leave them as a post number.   You can either write a rewrite rule into your .htaccess file or you can use the permalinks that come with WordPress.  When asked about your custom structure you simply type “/index.php/%postname%”.
•    Change the order of your page title so that your blog post name appears before either the name or the date of your blog.  Everyone practicing SEO should know that the very first words in your title carry weight.  They are what catch both readers and spider’s attention.   To do this you need to swap the order of your PHP tags so that the wp_title appears before bloginfo.  This is done by editing the header.php file.
•    If you find that your blog entry title has been automatically inserted into a tag or your blog name is in the tag you can edit them in single.php and in header.php.  You have the choice of choosing a format but it is possibly best to swap your blog name for an image.  This way you will be making the most of your header tags.
•    Avoid duplicate content issues by allowing spiders to follow links but not list them on the index.  To do this you need to use “index,nofollow” tags on tag pages, category pages or archive pages.  WordPress offers plugs-ins which makes this a simple process.
•    You need to pay attention to your linking structure.  Your blog needs to be accessible by the fewest clicks possible.  This means you need to remove unnecessary links and pages.  WordPress offers a plug-in called pagination that will help with this.

WordPress as a Blog platform

WordPress is open source.  It offers a high level of security, personalisation and flexibility.  You can customise your site to suit your niche audience with its host of themes, plug-ins and applications.  You need never worry about the dreaded “Your account has been suspended/deleted” message again.

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Find host for your CMS or find hosting with Tools Installer

July 1st, 2009

Unless you possess your own servers, you will need a web host in order to run a CMS package like Joomla, Mambo or PHP Nuke.  While most software do not require any fancy features to run smoothly, the actual results all depend on the host.  There are literally thousands of hosting providers out there and matching one up with your CMS needs can be somewhat of a challenge.   This article will provide a few tips to make your search a bit less painless. Host-ed.net and Zacky Tools installer offers clients one superb solution.

Web Hosting Reviews

You need to learn more about different hosting providers before deciding on a service and one of the best ways to start is reading reviews.  There are numerous review sites online but you should be very selective on where you read them.  Some reviews are written by unbiased web hosting experts, some come from affiliates and some of the more unscrupulous hosts have been caught tooting their own horn.  You can get the best insight from a good mix of expert and consumer reviews as opposed to those that are hyping up companies like they can do no wrong.

When going over these hosting reviews, it is advisable to read them carefully and never put too much into one person’s opinion.  For instance, one customer may have had a terrible experience with a particular host while another may state that they are delighted with the service.  Everyone is picky in their own way and pleasing every single customer is simply not impossible.  Because of this, you shouldn’t get too alarmed when running across a few negative reviews.  You should however, start to get a little cautious once the number of negative comments begins to multiply.

Leverage Available Search Tools

Another good way to find a quality CMS hosting solution is to utilize your preferred search engine.  Google and Yahoo are both great tools that will help you move beyond reviews and delve further into the world of content management systems.  With the right search, you will run across sites and communities that can not only help you find a hosting service, but also a CMS that suits your needs.  Although the popular free systems get a lot of the spotlight, there is a lot more out there besides the open-source variety.  Content management is prevalent in many areas and a search engine can put you on the path to a wealth of relative information.

Chat with Prospective Providers

When looking for somewhere to host your CMS, it is never a bad idea to do a little conversing with the hosting provider.  After all, you will need to know what, if any scripts they have available as well as those they support.  There may be limitations that prevent you from running the CMS that delivers the most benefits.  Aside from making sure the host meets all the system requirements, you must also make sure they are able to provide you with a reliable service.  Content management can be a real drag on a server that is slow or constantly going down.

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Joomla Vs. WordPress

June 18th, 2009

Joomla and WordPress are one of the most useful and worthy CMS. In this topic we will give you advises which of these CMS to use and in which case.

Joomla vs. WordPress has become one of the hottest topics around the web.  In actuality, the comparisons aren’t all that fair because these platforms are designed with different purposes in mind.  WordPress is more of a website engine based on the premise of installing the software, running it and publishing basic content in a fast and easy manner.  Joomla is completely different, built for publishing and managing all types of content.  This gives Joomla many capabilities WordPress lacks.

Distinguishing the Two

A good way to compare the two systems would be to look at the fundamental differences.  With Joomla, you can place ten different menus on a web page in any position or style you like.  Much of this can be done from scratch in a few easy clicks.  Its functionality is ideal for multiple users who have their own roles on the site as well as the administrator who needs to control the whole operation with ease.

If it has to be a user-friendly publishing tool for simple content that only requires one administrator, WordPress is the way to go.  This platform covers the blog scene with more efficiency, which is exactly what is designed to do.  It is very useful for attracting search engine bots with features such as ping and tracks, tag capabilities, and optimized URLs.  Though Joomla can be configured to produce clean URLs, it does take a little more work.  The overall theory is that blogs are search engine friendly and WordPress makes up a good portion of the argument.

WordPress as a CMS

WordPress has many beneficial uses but the results aren’t always that good when using it for larger jobs.  When the page count starts to add up in different categories, you may start to experience management issues  Joomla on the other hand, is made to handle such jobs and does it with relative ease.  If you’re looking to use WordPress for something that was created with a true content management system, you could be in for a rude awakening.  This platform will support a couple of hundred pages and basic content but don’t expect more than that.  Try to over do it and you could find yourself spending time on things that wouldn’t have been an issue with the proper software.

The Last Word

If your goals call for a blog or even a more interactive website, WordPress could be a viable option.  This platform is highly regarded as the most streamlined publishing tool available, allowing you to get online fast with little to no technical knowledge.  Joomla is better for managing a larger amount of more complex content.  In the end, an expert user should be able to make the most of both solutions.  With all the available plugins, WordPress can be extended to the point where you wouldn’t know the site was power by a blogging tool.  If this platform can’t deliver the functionality you need, a genuine CMS such as Joomla makes a great choice.  The key is knowing what you need to get the job done and making the right choice from the start.

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