Blogging Fool

So here are some plugins and notes to stick in your pipe and smoke:

YARPP (Yet Another Related Post Plugin) by mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) is an absolutely amazing plugin evolved from the Related Posts plugin that essentially scans your blog’s tags, categories, articles’ titles and body content and then spits out a number of related posts to the one in front of the reader so that they can then browse deeper into your site.  It’s great for pulling up old stuff you have written that no one would ever find otherwise.  But unless you are very frugal with your tagging choices (which, one you are trying to grab all sorts of SEO attention you may not be) you are asking your server to run a search on your (MySQL) database and spit out the results in some kind of ascending or descending or whatever-scending order.

And this will happen every single time someone visits your site and reads a post!

If you use a plugin like Simple Tags, Tag Suggest Thing or Auto Tagger – all plugins that provide you, the author with recommended tags based on keyword searches they are running on your behalf based on your content – you could literally build a list of hundreds if not thousands of tags!

So first tip: be spare and concise.  Stop trying to grab EVERYONE’s attention.  Just be selective and to the point when tagging your posts.  Likely your blog is about something.  Stay on target.  If you are running a blog about Knitting, or Race Cars then stay topical, and keep those tags in check!  If you want to create posts about cooking, consider starting a new blog about just that.

Focusing your blog will help you in the end.  I won’t go into all the l33t speak about micro-niche targeting and all that yet, but trust me that the more you focus the content of your blog to a given overall subject, the happier everyone will be.

I have to admit – YARPP was actually the last plugin I suspected of putting the strain on my server.  The first place I looked was at the dynamic nature of my blog and all the widgets I was running.

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