AddThis Buttons Cost 15 Points in YSlow Score
photo credit: kyz Last night, after working for several hours to boost the load-time of pages on the popular economics blog MarginalRevolution, I was at a loss for what else I could do to boost the site’s performance as indicated by Google’s PageSpeed and Yahoo’s YSlow evaluation tools. I had only managed to boost its ...
Read MoreLearn SEO Basics from Google
While ReadyMadeWeb works hard to provide you with a knowledge of best practices for SEO, the folks at Google are certainly better equipped to tell you how to best interact with their own search engine. Check out the SEO for Beginners Guide at the Google Webmaster blog or watch the very comprehensive video below on search-friendly web devlopment to get the real insider perspective on SEO.
Read MoreSEO Best Practices: Submit Your Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
Even if you're using a sitemap generator that automatically submits your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing, it's more than worthwhile to manually submit your sitemap to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. Though automatic submission does make Google aware of your sitemap, manual submission will allow Google to verify your ownership of the site, allow you verify that your sitemap is being indexed, and will give you access to Google's many diagnostic tools to help you keep your site in top shap ...
Read MoreHow-To: Create a Google XML Sitemap in WordPress
Like I've said in previous posts, which you can find below, sitemaps are a vital part of any site. Thankfully, like so many other things we talk about here at ReadyMadeWeb, generating a sitemap is easy. Today, I want to take a look at creating a sitemap in WordPress, which should only take you a few minutes.
Read MoreSEO Best Practices: Make Your URLs “Pretty”
As I said in the previous post in this series, a lot of what used to be regarded as very potent SEO magic simply doesn't have the same impact it did even a few short years ago. For example, Google now completely ignores the keywords meta tag because it has been abused to the point of being totally useless. Instead of paying attention to gimmicks, search engines are focusing on getting better at analyzing the real content of a page as well as in the quality of the incoming links to that page.
Read MoreSEO Best Practices: Title Tags
Most "SEO Experts" will try to convince you that only they have the magic mojo to make your website a high-traffic success, which is why they're entitled to gobs of your hard-earned cash. Unfortunately a lot of what these consultants do amounts to little more than digital trickery—payed links, keyword gaming, micro-sites setup for the sole purpose of linking to your site, and other shenanigans that hurt everyone's online experience by filling the web with links to things in which users are se ...
Read MoreSpeed Matters: Use PageSpeed & YSlow to Streamline Your Site
As tech writers like PC World's Juan Carlos Perez and Chris Crum of WebProNews among others have noted, the monolith of Mountain View, the all-powerful Google has become obsessed with speed, which means you should be too.
Read More242 Ways to Ping: How to Stay on Search Engine Radar
If you're running a WordPress blog, you may not know that there's a really simple way for you quickly generate more traffic without changing how much you're writing, paying for advertising, or implementing some complicated SEO trickery. Instead, you can use "Update Services" a feature found in the "Writing" sub-menu under the "Settings" tab.
Read MoreHow-To: Generate a Sitemap in WordPress
There are several plugins for WordPress that will create a sitemap, but my favorite is Google XML Sitemaps created by Arne Brachhold of Kernen im Remstal in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Though Mr. Brachold's name and city are difficult for me to pronounce, his plugin is exceptionally easy to use. It's also very frequently updated—2009 alone saw over 10 updates to the plugin—which means that bugs are frequently being identified and fixed and the plugin is kept up-to-date with changes at Googl ...
Read MoreSEO Best Practices: The Importance of Sitemaps
Whatever platform you're using—Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc.—it's vital to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to generate a sitemap and regularly submit it to Google, Bing, and Yahoo! A sitemap serves as a sort of table of contents for your website. This table of contents can be submitted to search engines so that each page of your website and their relationship to each other is clearly comprehensible.
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