Blogging better and blogging faster are two things that every blogger wants to do. I’ve been blogging for a lot longer than many people realize. It just happens that I’ve never tried to do it “professionally” until now. I’ve spent a long time looking and implementing tools, tips, and tricks to make my blog, and hopefully yours, faster, more searchable, and easier to read. You want an edge. Hopefully this series can guide you in the right direction.

Every blogger knows that there are some tools you have to use not only for publishing but also to make sure your site is in top performance shape. Everyone wants less bloat, more content, and fast load times. Over the past few weeks as I’ve been working to optimize T3xtual, I’ve come across some awesome tools to help you test, modify and achieve everything I just mentioned.

Let’s start with publishing. Writing and finding content can be the most difficult part of the whole game. Sometimes content comes to you, other times it doesn’t and you have to hunt for it. Not only that, but the place in which you edit your content matters too. Since most people do better in environments they like the default editor on your blog might not be that place. I’ve tried various blog editing software and have only come up with two that I thoroughly enjoy. The first is Windows Live Writer. I like the interface. It’s nice and easy to work with and connecting to almost any blog is a breeze. Next up, I’m an honest fan of the Wordpress Editor. I think that the full screen mode is amazing. It keeps distractions at bay until you’re done writing.

Readers don’t want to scroll for their content, so don’t make them! I’ve left numerous blogs because they have a billion ads before their content. It’s awful design, and the fact that they think it looks good appalls me. Your readers want their content up front and in their face. Put it there. This rule also applies anytime you want to link to a specific post. I’ve seen countless people link to their main page saying to read their awesome article, and I can’t find it. That’s not awesome. If you’re not using a blog/CMS that allows direct linking, it’s time to reinvest in different software (I’d suggest WordPress). Make your content easy to find and not only will you be happy with yourself, your readers will be happy with you too.

Page speed is one of the most important, if not the most important factors of your blog/website. The internet wants to be fast, and that means so does everyone on it. Testing your load speed from just your connection, while somewhat accurate, isn’t entirely accurate. You need to test it from somewhere else. After searching for a while, I discovered Pingdom Tools. Not only does it give you accurate load times for any page on your website, it shows you what files take the longest to load. You can see my latest test here. As you can see, my page time load time has almost doubled since I added the Disqus Comment plugin. This tells me that I should probably find some other commenting platform that loads faster and from a CDN. It also shows me that a few images aren’t there. Those are in red. I also need to work on that. [Update: I've temporarily disabled Disqus until I get something worked out]

While Pingdom gives you a good overall feel for your load speed, there’s still more you need to know. I’d suggest installing Firebug and YSlow for Firefox for this. You can see my YSlow report here. It shows you more specific problems and reference links on how to fix them. I’ve used YSlow for about a month now, and can honestly tell you, that it will help you out a lot more than you think. I’m a fan of Google Page Speed too, but YSlow just feels more complete.

Another common thing these days is SEO. Actually, it’s more than common, it’s huge and it matters- a lot. You want to be found because you want your content read, commented, retweeted, and shared across the Internet. It feels good. Until recently, I’d say there was no good way to test your site’s SEO. Now, there is. This nifty web tool, WooRank, looks at your blog just as a search engine would (sorta) and tells you what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s just “ok”. It also gives ratings on what’s easy to fix and what’s not. Of course, you can view the report for T3xtual here. You can run the same test on any website just by changing the website in the box up top.

Next up: Commenting Systems, Tagging, and Categorizing

[Image from Blogussion]