Last year Google said that load times would become a factor in determining your page rank. I have been toying with Joomla load times trying to speed things up and found two things that are very effective (and easy):

1. In the  >Global Configuration panel under >Server,  enable gzip compression (duh!)
   Using this, the content the server send the info to the browser compressed so bandwidth isn’t as big of an issue.
2. Install a CSS/Java compression plug-in. I used a plug-in CssJsCompress to great effect, be sure to configure Css/JS compression and enable the plug-in after you install it.
   Using this, the CSS and Java scripts are compressed.

The sites I have on godaddy have had no issues with these changes and I have measured significant improvements in load times.

More technical details can be found here: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

To test performance, I recommend using a combination of Firebug and Page Speed plug-ins in Firefox.

I am still investigating ways to speed up WordPress, if you have some recomendations let me know!

SEM Huntsville Joomla, page rank

Matt Cutts at the 2009 WordCamp. In this video he discusses terms like google juice, page rank, and back links, but don’t get overwhelmed by the jargon. The central theme is creating content that is relevant and reputable. Worth watching.

SEO Huntsville content, matt cutts, page rank