Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you enjoy it!

WordCamp NL Presentation is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

When you're logged in as an admin, this plugin now shows the following info in an HTML comment tag in the footer of your pages:

• the query that was executed
• the time it took to execute that query
• the function path that led to this query, with the last function being the most likely to have created the query

I've written down some of the things I encountered that you may encounter as well are the following:

Empty options

A lot of WordPress internal settings and plugin settings are stored in the options table. Values in this table take two forms: those which are autoloaded (which is the default) and those which are not. One of the first queries to the database that WordPress does once it starts loading a page, is the query that loads all options with autoload set to "yes". Hence, any call the an option after that, that happens on multiple pages, is weird. So when I saw this type of query happen a lot:

SELECT option_value FROM wp_options
  WHERE option_name = 'headspace_global' LIMIT 1

I was wondering what was happening. It turned out that that headspace_global option simply didn't exist, so it can't be autoloaded. This wasn't happening with just this option, but with several options. The solution is pretty simple: just add the option as an empty option to your database. This might break some plugins though, and if it does, you should contact the plugin author...

This is actually something plugin authors have to take note of: doing a get_option to check whether a certain option is set or not, is actually more expensive than just setting the option and leaving it empty...

Adding an option to the database is done like this in your MySQL database:

INSERT INTO wp_options ( option_id, option_name, autoload)
  VALUES ( '0', 'test', 'yes')

It should be noted that I've emailed John Godley, who has built and maintains HeadSpace2, and this'll be fixed in the next release.

Non cached queries

This happens, of course. If you see a certain query being performed more than once during the pageload, that's something to optimize. Check what is causing the queries, and then either solve them, or email the responsible plugin or theme author with what you've seen (be sure to copy all the queries you see).

Checking whether the blog is installed

The very first query WordPress does is a query to check whether the blog is installed, it's a pretty useless query if your blog is up and running, so I wanted to get rid of it. There's no pretty fix to this, so we'll do it in the not so pretty way:

1. open up wp-includes/functions.php
2. find the function is_blog_installed()
3. add return true; as the first line of the function, and you're done!

"Heavy" plugins

It turns out, that of the 16 queries my site now still does for a single post page, 7 are for the related posts plugin I'm using, YARPP, and if you're wondering: yes that's making me reconsider the plugin. I'm going to try a couple other plugins and see how good they do in both relevance and (database) performance.

Your experiences with WordPress performance optimization?

Have any experience in optimizing your WordPress performance by tweaking database calls yourself? Any cases I've missed? Let me know in the comments!!

Optimizing WordPress database performance is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So, to introduce you to the company and to Todd Garland, who runs the company, has been kind enough to answer a series of questions for me. If you've got advertising on your blog and it's either taking up too much time or you're not selling enough, you might want to give them a try! But don't do that before you read on and see how incredibly passionate and smart Todd is about all of this.

Hi Todd, could you introduce yourself and buysellads.com to the readers of yoast.com?

Sure thing, my name is Todd Garland, I live in Boston, MA with my lovely wife and smelly dog and I run BuySellAds.com. BuySellAds.com is a self-funded startup (so far) advertising network targeting the design and development community. We've been around now for almost a year and we are doing very well. Selling a ton of ads, helping publishers make money, and helping advertisers create killer campaigns to target the web design and development niche. I'm young, 27, and have been building websites for what seems like forever now (10 years) and was most recently employed at another hot startup, HubSpot where I was their designer/front-end engineer/SEO guru (one of many SEO guru's in the company I might add).

Why did you start BuySellAds.com?

I started BuySellAds.com because I was frustrated. I was operating two
hobby websites (csselite.com and 13styles.com) and selling ads directly to advertisers. I also bought ads to help promote and grow those sites too -so I was solving a frustration that I experience both as an advertiser and a publisher. None of the well known ad networks could solve my problem... they are a pain to deal with, they don't give publishers enough control, and they take too high of a commission.

You've won me over as a publisher for BuySellAds by providing me with excellent service, and allowing me to do the transition with old advertisers on my own pace. Is that something you try to do for everyone?

Well, yes, everyone gets great service - regardless of how big/small the
publishers/advertiser is. Great service is something none of the other ad networks had (in my experience). It is important to me and I want people to feel like they're getting that great service every time they have a question or need a hand. In terms of helping with transitions, of course... we have transitioned many blogs over to our system who are already selling ads direct and I can proudly say that it's happened seamlessly every time.

What is, in your opinion, your added value to advertisers?

1. Our system is very simple. Fixed 30-day rates on a subscription basis. No other ad network does this, and I can't figure out why - it just makes sense.
2. They can trust us. We always do what is right and we're very reliable. When you buy direct from publishers who are not in a network you never know what you will get.
3. You can manage all of your ads in one central location. Many of our
   advertisers previously had to manage these ad buys individually, site by
   site, publisher by publisher. This was very time consuming. It's now very efficient. You don't have to contact anyone, you don't have to go back and forth on pricing, size, payment, etc. - it's all here in one place and when you are ready to pull the trigger it's done, the
   ads go live, that's it.
4. You no longer need to "discover" new placements. New sites that are
   worth advertising on are always coming into the marketplace and we're always recruiting new publishers. We keep our eyes out for advertisers and make good recommendations to them all the time.
5. We know our inventory. Too often advertisers are stuck dealing with
   people who have no clue where they should be advertising. We know our
   inventory very well and make honest recommendations vs. just trying to spend their money.

And to publishers?

1. Automated. They don't need to waste their time dealing with advertisers, remembering when to put up and take down ads, figure out how to get paid, etc. You install the ad code and you're up and running - it takes only a few minutes to get setup.
2. We don't get in the way. Our ad code is unobtrusive, flexible, and we don't plaster our brand all over your site like the other networks. We just blend in nicely - I bet visitors to your site didn't even notice a change when you switched over to BuySellAds.com.
3. We help you find advertisers. Like I said above, we know our inventory, and when an advertiser comes to us or when we seek out great advertisers we know exactly where their ads should be in our network. We are always sending out proposals, making recommendations, etc. Publishers in this niche NOT in our inventory are missing out these days. You, Joost, went from 4-8 advertisers in how many weeks? A couple I believe... ;) 3 weeks indeed, quite an achievement
4. You can trust us. We do what is right and we're always willing to help and give advice on pricing, placement, etc.
5. Highest payouts of any ad network on the planet. We pay out at 75%,
   which is unheard of and includes credit card processing fees (usually up to 5%), publisher payment fees, ad serving fees, support for the publisher and their advertisers, etc.

How is the online ad market doing at the moment, is it suffering from the recession?

Well, I think we're different. All of the ad networks you see that are
struggling right now are struggling for two main reasons:

1. They rely on targeting to produce results and their targeting is awful.
2. Their prices are inflated and they have been robbing clueless advertisersfor a long time and now it is catching up with them.

BuySellAds.com is very different. We don't do any targeting, the advertisers do this themselves by self-selecting the placements they wish to buy. Our prices are good - they're not inflated or anything, they make sense and are cost effective.

My best take away from all of this? Even in a market that might be shrinking, those who provide excellent service and a good added value will always prevail.

Interview with Todd Garland of BuySellAds is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

While last year was in many ways a very successful year, this year promises to be even better. While I've got a few ideas of my own for new years resolutions for this blog, I've decided that, in true web 2.0 fashion, I'll let you give your opinion on which topics I should focus on:

[democracy 3]

2009 will rock! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

If you decide to go on, you'll either go directly to another article, or you'll most probably hit one of two links: the blogs about page, or its homepage. This time, you pick the homepage. If the site you're visiting has a "default" theme, you'll see a listing of the last 10 posts and the same sidebar you already saw on the article you just read. That's it.

Isn't that a blatant misuse of the trust you've just given that site? Wouldn't it be way more appropriate if the site showed you the very best content it can offer you, and gave you a sample of what kind of content you can find on it?

That is your homepage! It's a showcase of your blog. Whether people went to it because they heard from someone "you should go to *****.com, it's cool" or because they've just read an article and want to learn more about your site, that page is probably your best chance of getting a new subscriber.

So what should be on your homepage? This is the bare minimum I'd say:

• An about text about yourself / about text about the blog.
• A big call to action, the action being subscribing, either through email or RSS.
• A listing of your latest posts.
• Your "taxonomies", either your category structure, your tag structure or both.

After that it's all about personal preferences. I like to show off some of my best content by having featured posts and plugins, and of course I show off my Twitter.

So, how does your blogs homepage do on these criteria? What would you do differently?

Your homepage: your blogs showcase is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

1. Do you know first when your blog is down?

I've had this happen to me in the past quite often, people emailing me or calling me telling me my site was down. A few months ago, when I decided that my blog was one of my most important business ventures, I started making moves to make sure I was the first to know when my blog went down.

That's why I've started using Pingdom. Pingdom checks my site every minute, and will tell me by email and SMS if it hasn't gotten a signal for 2 times in a row (you can configure that very easily) and on top of that, it gives me graphs like the one below, which measure my site's response time.

You can add checks for 5 sites in a normal account, so you can either share it with some other people, or use it for a couple of blogs. Of course you can add more sites, you'll have to pay more though.

2. Do you use reliable hosting?

When I wrote my last post on WordPress hosting, I was surprised by some of the reactions. The "yeah they're not that good but they're cheap" kind of comments made me wonder whether these people are really serious about what they do with their blog. Whether you're blogging for a profit, or to build a name for yourself, a lot of downtime will reflect badly on you.

It really is better to pay a bit more for hosting to prevent those 10 downtimes a year, and trust me, you'll sleep better too!

3. How do you treat your regulars?

Any business that can have the benefit of regular customers should be working hard to turn normal customers into regular customers and then treat those people well. For me there are three kinds of very important regular customers / visitors to this site:

1. Feed subscribers, through RSS or e-mail
2. Mailing List subscribers
3. "Normal" Regular visitors

Are you making sure these people get what they expect from you? Or, even better, are you giving them a special treat sometimes? For instance, my last plugin, a plugin that improves your posts slugs, is only available for subscribers to my mailing list. That turned out to work very well!

Another thing I do is thanking first time commenters, by using my comment-redirect plugin, and asking them to subscribe to my feed. This is both because I love the fact that they commented and gave their opinion or shared their wisdom (as should you when you've finished reading this post!), and because if someone is engaged enough to comment, that's also the perfect moment to ask them to sign up for your RSS or mailing list.

4. Do you know what people love you for?

The most important thing to know when you have recurring visitors, is to know why these people are coming back. Why? Well if for instance, you write a lot about cats and do the occasional post about dogs, but most people read your blog because they like your dog posts so much, maybe you should be doing a bit more of that, right?

How you know what people like you for? Use vanity searches everywhere. For instance, I have a vanity search on Twitter, that recently showed me this tweet:

Now that tells me that this person likes my WordPress tips, good, I've got loads of them! Now you should be making sure you know stuff like this too by using searches like this on Twitter and Google Alerts on your own name and your blogs name. You'll always know what people feel about you and your blog!

5. Is your blog well kept?

When your blog gets older, pages and posts will sometimes move, or other things may occur that lead to search engines having listings for pages on your blog that no longer exist. Or other sites might be linking to pages that no longer exist. Do you know if that's the case on your blog? Do you keep track of your 404 (aka "page not found) errors?

If you don't, now is the time to start doing that. If you use WordPress, my way of doing that is installing the 404 notifier plugin, and adding the RSS feed that provides to my feed reader. Any 404 that should be fixed I then fix immediately with Redirection.

Another question to ask yourself about your blog:

6. Is your sidebar there for your readers?

I see so many cluttered side bars these days that I'm getting sick of them. There's a couple of things I might be slightly interested in, like your FeedBurner stats, your Twitter followers and your Technorati authority, or your ranking on any major blog list, but you have to keep asking yourself: do I add yet another button because I like it, or because I think it will benefit my readers?

If your answer is "it's only for me", consider making a small page on your blog for yourself that keeps track of those things, and don't annoy your readers with it!

6 Serious Questions for Serious Bloggers is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Upcoming events
We've got a couple of cool events coming up, and one thing I want to make sure is that all of you register for A4UExpo as soon as you can. For affiliates, search marketers and other online marketeers, it's one of the best conferences you'll ever see in Europe. Period.

In other news
I'm going through my feeds and want to share some of the cool stuff I've seen with you:

• First of all, Authority Blogger "soft-launched". For all corporate bloggers who read my blog, this would be a great way too get training from one of the best in the business, Chris Garret.
• My buddy Aaron Wall wrote a short e-book for WordTracker with "50 kick-ass keyword strategies", and I have to say: it's well worth the mere $39 they ask for it.
• Christian Hockenberger, the guy who did the logo for Yoast, launched his new site, Princeofdune, and it looks pretty cool.
• Smashing Magazine had a huge post called WordPress Developer's Toolbox, which is well worth the read.

I'll be working on some plugins in the coming weeks, and will try to get my WordPress newsletter out this week as well. See you all soon!

Back in business! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Sociable 2.6.7

• Renamed Sk*rt to Kirtsy
• Added designfloat
• Fixed the descriptions

Slideshare 1.1
I recoded the SlideShare plugin to make it use the Shortcode API, which made the code 25% smaller.

Permalink Redirect 1.0
This plugin had an issue where it made it impossible to look at preview pages, which I've fixed. I've also uploaded the plugin to WordPress.org.

Blog Metrics 1.1
Fixed a few divisions by zero when authors had 0 posts, or when there weren't any trackbacks.

Comment Redirect 0.1
No fixes, but I did upload this plugin to WordPress.org for the first time, so auto update should start working for this plugin as well.

Robots Meta 3.0.3
Thanks to Henryk Gerlach, a noarchive option was added to Robots Meta.

New: Email Commenters 0.1
Sometimes you want to email all people who commented on a certain post. This plugin gives logged in admins an easy way to do that by adding a mailto: link to do just that underneath each post.
Update: this plugin has already been added to the WordPress plugin repository as well!

Several plugin updates and a new plugin! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• redesign to a more professional look
• move to a .com domain and US based hosting
• 301 redirect the entire old domain to that new domain

Now those of you who are unlucky enough to have me in your IM list have been spammed a lot by me the last few weeks, while I was doing all the redesign work, and deciding which domain I was going to use. In the end, I decided to go with yoast.com. This name was created when at SMX Stockholm last year, I tried to explain to Rand Fishkin and some other people how to pronounce my first name, Joost, properly. Rand spoke the great words "ow that's easy, just toast with a y", and then: yoast was born.

It took some time (and money) to acquire yoast.com, but I succeeded in that too, and then went on to pick a designer. I chose to work with Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe, who not only creates great designs, but can code them to my, very very high, XHTML and CSS standards too. We worked together for a couple of weeks, with me getting feedback from some of my very good friends like Ben Jesson of Conversion Rate Experts, Jennifer Slegg and Roy Huiskes.

In the new design, I wanted to do a couple of new things:

• Create a better homepage, which had to be more than a blog index page.
• Create a separate blog index page, while keeping the URL's for posts the same.
• Make a better distinction between utility pages, like contact, advertising etc., and the "really" important pages: SEO tools, WordPress plugins and Articles.
• Clean up the template for single post pages and pages.

And preserve a couple of others:

• Make the RSS button still stand out as much as it did in the old design.
• Keep the tag cloud.
• Make sure the comments stayed as important as they were in the previous design.

Alen did a great job, as you can see in the new design. Now the last thing I had to do was get a new logo and tagline. I'd always called this blog an SEO blog, and in some sense, it is. But a lot of what I write about has hardly anything to do with SEO. So I started discussing a new tagline with the above mentioned friends, and Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips.

In the end, I decided to go with "Tweaking Websites", as that's what I do. For the logo, my buddy Brent Csutoras pointed me to a site called 99designs. This site allows you to launch a contest for a design. I set a $400 price, and got a massive load of designs submitted, check them out.

In the end, a German guy called Christian Hockenberger won. He came up with this design. I'd like to thank all of my friends for all of their help in this move! Now on to what is basically a very big experiment: a 301 redirect of an entire site to a new, US hosted domain.

Some stuff won't be finished today, some moving still needs to be done. But do look around and share your feelings about the redesign in the comments!

Meet Yoast! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I've also:

• Fixed the StumbleUpon issue which multiple people have been dealing with
• Removed the auto-update stuff because that's now dealt with by WordPress itself
• Nofollowed all links
• Added the plugin to the WordPress plugin repository, find it here.

You can download it here: Sociable - Social Bookmarking for WordPress.

If you have any suggestions, social bookmarking sites I should add or other stuff: drop them in the comments!

Sociable WordPress plugin take-over is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

[code lang="js"]
javascript:(function(){var%20r=escape(window.location);document.location='http://technorati.com/ping/?url='+r;})();
[/code]

Now you can easily ping those blogs linking to you, and increase your Technorati ranking!

Technorati Ping Bookmarklet is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now I make it a habit to try and comment when someone links to me in a post, have a bit of a look around the site, and if I like it, I'll throw it in my feed reader. You get that chance only once though, since in the statistics program I use to track that, Mint, you'll only be a unique referrer once.

I might notice you through other channels too: you might show up in my vanity Google Alerts, Technorati blog reactions feed and Google Blogsearch feeds. And still, people manage to stay hidden for a few weeks. So here's the deal: if you know you're a low traffic blog, or you're linking to someone and for one reason or the other you're not sure people will click that link within 24 hours, click on it yourself! Make yourself and your link known to me, and that goes for any other blogger too.

Every blogger likes getting links, and there are more bloggers who use the same policy towards the people linking to them as I do, make use of that, make sure we notice you!

Linking out? Make sure people notice! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• Post: New Tool - Simply Advanced Google Search!
• Post: Google Chart API
• Tool: Simply Advanced Google Search

I hope you enjoy them (too)!

Blogging at Google Tutor is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

A lot of my time goes into my own company, AlthA Web design, in which I do some WordPress coding and web design stuff.

All the time outside of doing those things goes into my family, first and foremost my lovely Marieke and our son Tycho (see the picture on the right). During weekends, we usually spend a lot of time at her parents and my parents, as both of them live near by.

Lastly, I love going out for a beer with some friends, but to be honest, I've not done a lot of that lately due to an extreme workload...

Now for tagging three other SEO's (and I'll pick people who aren't at conferences this week):

• Dave's new colleague Dan Horton
• SEOIdiot
• Dennis Goedgebuure (that should give me some time to answer your hard questions ;) )

Blog Tag: When I’m not doing SEO… is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

More SEO Blog tips is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Technorati redesign is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Moved the blog to the homepage is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

1. I believe in giving back, blogging for me is a way of giving back to the community I learn so much from.
2. I love to hear myself speak and/or see my own words in writing (hey sorry, it's true, I won't deny it :P).
3. I'd like to make a bit of a name for myself and my knowledge.
4. Writing things down for others to read makes me grasp them a lot better too.
5. I like doing it, and I usually relax while doing it!

That's it... Now it's time for me to tag some people: Jaimie Sirovich, Johan Terpstra, DaveN, Patrick Gavin and Matthew Inman!

Why I blog is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

What's in it for you? Well, a blog wide link to start with,  your name and link on the, to be created, about page, and the right to use it as a reference in your "portfolio".

So think out of the box, and "create" something nicely brandable for me!

Help me brand this blog! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Short note: switched to full feeds is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!