SitePoint has a great article entitled Web Site Optimization: 13 Simple Steps detailing some great ways to improve the performance of your site.

Inspired by Yahoo’s best practices for speeding up your website, the article details some more practical details for the average website as well as greater detail on implementing the changes.

To analyze your sites performance, get Yahoo’s FireFox/FireBug plugin YSlow.

In a nutshell, here are some of the best tips in the article:

1. Decrease file sizes - writing efficient HTML, CSS and Javascript will help to reduce file size, page load times, and often times SEO efforts
2. Optimize external files, such as CSS and Javascript - Combine multiple style sheets or Javascript files into one
3. Compress your HTML, CSS and Javascript - use Apache’s gzip/deflate to server compressed version of your pages to compatible browsers

One of the most critical steps in building a website that is often overlooked is quality assurance. It is critical to make sure that your web pages render properly in different browsers across different platforms. Understanding your target audience can assist you in determining if testing for more obscure platforms and browsers is necessary, but as a general rule of thumb, it is important to test the most commonly used browsers. After the top 5, the usage significantly drops off. According to W3 Counter, these are:

Each browser annoyingly has its own nuances. There are host of services out there to help you test. Smashing Magazine has an excellent write up on these different services. I have used BrowserCam in the past, and it is very good. It lets you pick and choose which platforms and browser versions to test and then captures screen shots for you.

Does anyone have any experience with these other services?

Research organization, Melcrum, announced the preliminary findings of a survey into social media adoption by large corporations worldwide.

• 63% Watching online video through video sharing services like You Tube.
• 55% Using blogs or planning to start in the next 12 months,
• 51% Using RSS/webfeeds
• 43% Listening to podcasts
• 73% of respondents having no intention of implementing 3D web tools like Second Life for their businesses.
• 41% Involved social networks like LinkedIn

Top reasons why people are so excited about social media

• 71% selected “improved employee engagement”
• 47% chose “creating a two-way dialogue with senior executives”.
• 59% said “improved internal collaboration”

For the full report, click here

Search Engine Land has some great tips on avoiding common blogging SEO mistakes. As this isn’t a full blown post, I didn’t think it deserved to be part 3 of the ‘Marketing Your Blog’ series.

You can check out the article here, and a follow up opinion of the article here.

The SEO Title Tag plugin mentioned in the article is part of ‘Marketing Your Blog Part 1′. Feel free to check it out along with some other great plugins.

Matt Cutts recently gave a talk at WordCamp 2007 on Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers. There’s some great information in here. The video is a bit long (over an hour), but well worth watching. You can also download the presentation. Thanks John Pozadzides for taping the presentation.