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If you publish a blog on the web then you want to ensure it gets read, and so you will also be hoping that readers find it. I hope that you have optimized your blog for search engines and Google but you should also ensure you have it optimized for speed. Doing this ensures that – with Google Caffeine for example – your site will get ranked well, as its probably slower than a standard html site.

Implement these tips and your site will fly:

W3 Total Cache – Using caching on your blog will get certainly get you a big increase. WP Super Cache was the old favourite and it certainly does a good job. However I propose moving to WP Total Cache – this not only caches pages, but also minifies your content , adds gzip compression and automatically integrates with a content delivery network. Even if you don’t have a CDN account you can use your site as one and it will add all static content to it. Its a simple install from WordPress and so will be straightforward to implement. Just make sure you remove Super Cache first.

Get Thesis – Ok a new a theme might seem daunting, but if you want your blog to be clean and seriously SEO friendly then this is one to get. It completely distinguishes your content from your design – so what? – well this ensures that evey wordpress upgrade or customisation you do is totally supported and doesn’t bring your blog down. Then you can customise the whole site for colours, styles and fancy widgerydoos to your hearts content in a point and click interface. No Coders needed.

Google Webmaster Tools – Set your blog up in the webmaster tools and go into the labs section and check two things; 1) Make sure that the Google bot reads your site clearly and reports back what you want it to. This will pickup on any redirects or badly formed content you may have. 2) Check the site performance. This is what Google will be using as part of its caffeine algorithm, although its not clear where you need to be to be fully optimised in their eyes – just try and get it as close to the dotted line as you can. If its under then go and buy yourself a beer!

PageSpeed – Google seems to be using the PageSpeed algorithm and methods to judge the performance of the site and what needs optimizing. They list PageSpeed as a recommended install and I suggest you do it. Its very simple – find it from Firefox but make sure you install firebug first. Once you are viewing your site, you can run it via the Tools – firebug menu.

Get a VPS – Getting a website hosted is quick and easy nowadays. I use Hostgator simply because the support is amazing. I can go online any time of the day via chat and have an issue taken care of and believe me I’ve had issues. Most people use normal web hosting instead of VPS and cost-wise running an unlimited domain site should be well under a tenner a month. The problem is you are sharing the server with who knows what – and it could well be a spotty teenager providing info on the best hacks for Xbox – for which he’s getting millions of hits per day. The next logical upgrade used to be a dedicated server but now there is a step in between which is the future of cloud provisioning. A “virtual private server” – VPS is a slot on shared hardware that can be provisioned in seconds and to you its completely dedicated but most importantly the resources are dedicated to you as well. Being a virtual server allows you to grow it according to demand so if you become an overnight celeb by accidently twittering about the demise of Cheryl Cole you can recover quickly by extending the resources of the server to cope with the demand. VPS.net has a new service where its offering VPS nodes which are replicated so should one fail a new one can be provisioned instantly. This is what the larger companies do anyway and I run hundreds of virtual servers for my work. When I get setup with VPS.net watch this space, in the meantime I’ve gone with hostgator and you can too.

Content Delivery Networks – A CDN stores your static data on servers closer to your visitors than your website is. So to them in terms of performance, it looks like the site is next door. This will be a massive improvement on your overall site performance and something really worth doing. Most big blogs or sites you go to have this implemented (which is the main reason they’re so fast) Akamai are the leaders in the industry, but really focus on enterprise accounts. I use maxcdn as with W3 Total Cache it took less than 5 minutes to setup. Best of all they have an offer of $10 to get going for 1TB of data (thats a lot btw).

Want to find out more about SEO and Optimization, then visit Paul Bannister’s site on how to Optimize Blogs for your needs.