Source: Woosa Media :credits-caption:

If you're a blog owner, then there's no doubt that you've heard of Google Panda by now.  I've read countless articles on the subject so far and have a general understanding of why Google has instituted the Panda algorithms and how you can comply with them.  The rewards for being "Panda compliant" are huge because Google will then shower you with high ranking search results, thus bringing you a healthy share of traffic.

Because traffic is what we all are after in this game, since it's quite unfulfilling to blog to crickets, it's best to follow the new Google Panda protocols as closely as possible.  The following WordPress plugin will help you do just that.

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I wanted to take this opportunity to start a brand new series of posts designed to help all of my fellow bloggers out there.  When I first started blogging almost a year ago, I thought that all I had to worry about was creating interesting content and developing a relationship with my soon-to-be readers.  Boy, have I learned a lot since then!  I soon came to realize that unless you have the money to hire a VERY involved web developer to help you in not only creating, but maintaining your blog's happenings behind the scenes, you better roll up your sleeves and learn some serious computer jargon.

Now, I've always been sort of a computer geek in the closet, so to speak, and I must admit that this blogging journey has kept my intellectual juices going while staying at home with my daughter (which is a blessing)!  In this year of blogging, I've had many ups and downs, but if there's one thing that's remained constant, it's that I learn something new and important almost every day.  One of the most important things I've learned so far is that the speed of your blog is critical to its success.  Especially now that Google, the mother of all search engines, has integrated speed as a crucial factor in both page rank and pages indexed, it's time to share what I know about speeding up your blog.  It doesn't matter if your posts are as proverbially deep as the ocean or as polished as silver, if your blog is taking 20-30 seconds to load, you might as well be writing to yourself, for no one will take the time to hang around and read your posts.

I've already got about 10 posts planned for this series, but I am constantly open to new questions and ideas.

Do you have any questions concerning blog design and speed?  If so, please leave me a comment here and I will definitely do my best to answer them or write a corresponding post about it.

Remember, I'm not a full-fledged, official member of the Geek Squad, just a wife and mommy who has spent a LOT of time and energy researching and experimenting with the constant work in progress in my life...my blog!  (And I was the captain of my high school's computer programming team...now THAT'S pretty geeky!  :))

Every now and again I get asked a very important question by some of my readers regarding the pictures and images I have on my blog.  They are wanting to know exactly how I format my pictures to be clear and colorful without taking up a ton of storage space on my server.  More importantly, pictures that are small in size will help keep your blog page loading snappily and your readers happy and coming back for more.

If you're in need of a graphics tutorial so that you too can host a ton of images both on your home page and in your blog's posts, then keep reading to learn my step-by-step method for image resizing and formatting!

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I wanted to write this post tonight because it is a question that I get from a lot of my readers and it is a great tool for any blogger to use.  This is a very convenient way to squeeze as much content onto your site without having a blog that continues on FOREVER!  I want to try and explain in a few steps how you can turn your sidebar into a scrolling sidebar so that you can display an unlimited amount of graphics in a very small space.  Before we begin, I want to admonish the following:

PLEASE DO NOT TINKER WITH YOUR HTML CODE IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE DOING SO.

REMEMBER TO BACK UP YOUR SITE BEFORE PROCEEDING:

First, you should decide wherever you'd like to install your new scrolling image bar on your blog.  Most of the time, this will be done on a sidebar, but you could also easily use this code to create an image slide show in a post of yours as well as in the footer region of your blog too.  Next, you should insert the following code above the images that you'd like to scroll together:

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I guess the best place to start when trying to improve your current blog's speed, is to take stock in what its strengths and weaknesses are.  In order to truly know either of those things, you must know how to analyze your blog on several levels.  I will never forget what led me to realize there was much more to the health of a blog than the way it looked and the content of its posts.

I had a ton of cute little buttons, showing all of the many blog directories I was a member of, several scrolling image bars showing all of the other blogs I visited and liked and even a slideshow of my favorite family pictures.  I thought my blog LOOKED awesome and was a real representation of me...until, one day it took over two minutes to load the homepage and my blog literally slowed to a crawl.  I called my hosting company at the time and the guy gently broke it to me that I was using WAY too many resources.  This was a concept I had never once considered, which began my never-ending mission to streamline and speed up my blog.  This is a job that I monitor and maneuver daily, for I want to give my readers the best possible experience I can while they're here.  If I don't, I know someone else will and I want my readers to keep coming back again and again, enjoying my blog...not becoming frustrated by it.

If you are just beginning and want to really see how the changes you make affect the speed of your blog, you might want to start a spreadsheet detailing your loading speed, YSlow score, Google Page Speed, etc.  I wish I would have kept these records, for it would have made things much easier in knowing which changes I made worked for my blog and which ones worked against it.

Here's a sample of a spreadsheet that might help you get started:  BUILDING A FASTER BLOG SPREADSHEET SAMPLE

So, without further ado, here are the top 10 sites I recommend you bookmark when trying to optimize your blog's speed.  These sites all offer something a little different and are useful in different ways, but together they are an informational powerhouse!

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If you've read my previous posts about this newbie's experience at BlogHer '12, you may be asking yourself what my final impressions of the whole she-bang were.  What were the highs?  What were the lows?  Would I want to go again?

Well, I have to say unequivocally that the highs for me were talking and hanging out with the other fabulous bloggers I met while attending the private parties thrown by some of the sponsors I've previously worked with.  I've got so many new Facebook friends and contacts from these events that going to BlogHer was completely worthwhile for just this level of face-to-face networking.

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