Boost Your Blog #6: Optimize Menus and Sidebars

Continuing our discussion of things you should be doing right now to improve your blog, today’s tip is:

One task that I think many of us could benefit from on a periodic basis is a critical review of menus and navigation areas on our blogs.

I include myself in this—recently it hit me that on my photography blog I wasn’t promoting my ebooks in my menus. I just had one menu item pointing to a very dated page that was no longer relevant. I swapped the photography ebook sales page link in and again saw an increase of traffic to that landing page.

Ultimately, it’s about working out what actions you want readers to take when they visit your blog and then making sure that you’re calling your readers to those actions in prominent places on your blog.

Are you doing this? Can you optimize your menus and sidebars further?

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Boost Your Blog #4: Optimize Other Key Pages

Continuing our discussion of things you could be doing right now to improve your blog, today’s tip is:

Yesterday, we talked about pages on your blog, and it might also be worthwhile looking over some of the other key pages on your blog. For example, the About page is one that, on many blogs, is read a lot by new visitors. It’s also a page that many bloggers forget to keep up to date with new developments.

I recently looked over my own About page and realised that while I linked to my first ebook, I had made no mention of subsequent ones. As it’s such a highly trafficked page, I was potentially missing out on sales as a result.

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Boost Your Blog #3: Optimize Your Advertising Page

Continuing our discussion of things you could be doing right now to improve your blog, today’s tip is:

When I mentioned I was writing this post on Google+ (connect with me here), Nick Roshon suggested auditing your advertising page.

If monetization through selling advertising is part of your business model, then this one should be a task you build into your regular schedule of pages to update.

Keep your advertising page up to date with the latest options for advertisers to advertise, update your stats so that advertisers know what reach they’ll have, and make sure that this page is prominent on your blog so that they can find it.

Do you have an advertising page on your blog?

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How to Optimize Your WordPress Database for Better Performance

This guest post is by Lior Levin.

Optimizing the databases of your WordPress blog sounds like it might be a difficult task, but it’s a lot easier than it sounds. In most situations it can be done in just one or two clicks—no need for complicated steps or terminology.

You’re probably wondering why you would even want to optimize your database tables. Well, that’s easy: it can drastically speed up the load time of your blog. On top of that, it can help you with SEO and improve your rankings because “Google, along with the majority of other search engines, continues to place a high value on user experience.” We have seen this profound impact at a psd to html company I work for. No matter how old your blog is, there is sure to be some clutter in your MySQL database tables. If you’re not cleaning them on a regular basis, the backup can have a huge effect on your blog and slow it down drastically.

So, we’ll briefly look at five simple ways that you can quickly optimize your WordPress database for better performance.

This is a WordPress plugin that helps you clean up your database tables and optimize them within a few clicks. It does all of this without the use of phpMyAdmin (a program used to handle the administration of your MySQL servers). It will show you which tables are already optimized and the ones that need to be optimized.

WP Optimize

With TentBlogger Optimize, you can quickly free up space and optimize your databases for faster loading, with just one click. It will let you know how much space you can free up and you can even view your databases if needed. That’s all there is to it. Additionally, it will also let you know if you ever need a “tune up” with a quick message.

TentBlogger Optimize

This is another plugin similar to WP-Optimize and TentBlogger Optimize, but with the addition of automatic scheduling. You can go in and set WP Database Optimizer to automatically optimize your tables every certain number of days. You’ll be able to see all of your tables and whether or not they have any overhead (in other words, whether or not they need to be optimized).

WordPress Database Optimizer

The WordPress Experts has a great tutorial on optimizing your database tables using phpMyAdmin. While the plugins above focus on not using this method, it can be done without having to install any plugins on your blog. You’ll need to sign into phpMyAdmin and check your tables for overhead.

Many users are not aware of this option, but you can repair and optimize your database right from within your blog’s dashboard. This is done by going to /wp-admin/maint/repair.php on your blog and inserting the code shown at that page into your wp-config.php file.

WordPress Database Repair

Once you do that, you’ll see two options on that page: repair database, repair and optimize database. Simply click the option of your choice and WordPress will do the rest. If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide on this, you can find it on WPveda.

Now that you have five different ways of optimizing your WordPress tables, you’re well on your way to even faster blog. As a reminder, be sure that you always backup your databases before optimizing them. This way if something goes wrong, you can restore your databases back to the way they were before you changed them.

This was a post by Lior Levin who is a marketing advisor to Internet startups and companies. Lior advises to a neon signs store and many other business online.

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