SEO - Wiccle Search Engine Optimization Features

In the iWiccle/Wiccle Admin CP, you will find a section under System > Search Engines that allows you to select Smart URL rewrite methods, modify the global page metadata of your pages, edit the browser title bar prefixes and suffixes, set up newsfeed and sitemap exporting in different formats, activate automatic meta-tag generation for dynamic content (where post/product/etc. descriptions and tags are parsed into custom meta tags). From within the inline Wiccle Builder tool, you can further tune the meta-tags and title bar text for each content page.

Below are the Admin CP search engine controls of iWiccle 1.20, which will be extended a great deal further.

Beyond this, all content stored in the system is categorized and tagged with diverse meta-data that is used for cross-referencing the content and presenting it in different combinations, formats, and with approproate header markup and associated media tagging. This provides both an option-rich environment for your visitors, as well as ample food for search engines. In short, the iWiccle/Wiccle publishing system expands and amplifies your content in a user-friendly and search-engine optimized manner.

As we have been developing and experimenting with all of this this, our success with pre-release Wiccle customer sites and search engine positioning has been phenomenal so far — almost everyone has shot to the top of the charts in a matter of weeks (or in some cases days!) owing to our integrated search engine optimization environment that helps your site content get presented and cross-referenced with high efficiency while using a 100% white-hat approach.

The Future of Wiccle Web Optimization

During Q2 of 2010, keep your eyes and ears open for news on Wiccle Liquid Web AI technology that takes the concept of dynamic site optimization and performance tuning to a whole new level, topping off commercial solutions while fully integrated with our software and your Wiccle-websites. There will now be a direct optimization layer connecting your website content and the general framework with a set of analysis and efficiency improvement tools.

With the new technology rolled in, you will find a new Site Optimization Central in the Admin panel, set to give you analyzed suggestions on different options for improving your site performance in projected site paths and presentation to/towards conversion tracking for both commercial and non-profit sites.

This will be topped with an automatic and semi-automatic "content warping" feature that experiments with preset content configuration patterns by remodeling content unit combinations and locations, reporting on the successful performance of certain configurations and content paths for permanent storage and application, and giving you a great deal more general control over the success of your site.

Tracking iWiccle/Wiccle Resource Usage

This section continues from the topics in iWiccle/Wiccle Resource Usage.

If you want to see how much memory your iWiccle/Wiccle page configurations are taking and how fast they are processed, add &debug=on to the end of the browser's address bar on any URL on your site and look at the performance summary at the end of the debug "console" that will appear for you at the bottom of the page (and on all subsequent pages in your session until you switch debugging "off").

The details above represent the page-load of an "average page" containing five content units of different dynamic content types.

The average load per page with iWiccle 1.20 is in the range of 1.8 MB of RAM and 0.15 seconds processing time per page, ranging from 1.28 MB and 0.05 sec on a simple content page to 3.20 MB and up to 0.35 sec on a complex dynamic page on our demo server (running a medium VPS and hosting other live sites).

Be sure to check the resource usage values a couple of times per page when you are reviewing page usage, as they may vary depending on how busy the server is, and they will always be higher on the first page that is loaded when a user session is started. You may see odd loading times if the CPU is very busy – processing times going over 0.5-1.0 second are likely to be caused by reasons independent of code. If a page takes a very long time to process, consider reducing the amount of content units or decreasing the quantity of dynamic content per unit using Wiccle Builder.

There is also a related page history and diagnostics table in the database called w_page_history (as of iWiccle 1.20) that contains the following fields for tracking different aspects of resource usage on a per-layout basis (and in the future, separately and optionally for dynamic content):

There is currently no front-end to this feature, and it is disabled by default. If you enable page history tracking, you will be able to browse your pages' performance data (number of MySQL queries, script execution time and memory usage) and spot the bottlenecks (access the data with PHPMyAdmin or any other database tool). To enable page history tracking, edit /core/variables.php and change the following variable: $core['sys']['page_history_tracking'] = 1; from the default zero.

Enabling this feature will add one database query to each page load (which isn't that much), but it can result in a large database table if you have high volumes of traffic on your site. If you decide to enable this experimental (but essentially stable) feature, be sure to check the size of this table from time to time, until such time as we include an admin front-end for browsing and periodically truncating the history log.

If you do keep it on and keep logging your site history, you will be able to analyze them retroactively and review your entire site history across different tracking models when we release our extended Wiccle site monitoring, optimization and performance analysis tools in the coming months. Take advantage of this feature if you know what you're doing.

This feature is activated in our online demo. If you browse and participate there, we get useful (100% anonymous) information on iWiccle resource usage, and can better identify resource bottlenecks and other problematic areas (that may for example run unnecessary database queries due to sloppy code).

Other Performance Factors and Bandwidth Usage

If you estimate site speed and performance in evaluating a CMS system, be sure to also consider the following factors:

• Server location and latency. Connections within Europe are typically in 20-60 ms range on a decent DSL connection, and anywhere between 120-250 ms (0.12-0.25 seconds) for overseas. This will add to the "delay effect" felt in loading a page.
• Page and embedded media size. If a page has a large amount of HTML data or many images, even if the software processes it for output in a millisecond, a 1 Mbit DSL connection will take around a second per 100 KB to load.

Over the first aspect, iWiccle/Wiccle has no control whatsoever. On the second, we support automatically scaled images to minimize image loading time for all posted content, and you are free to strip the HTML templates to bare bones as long as you keep the necessary tags for content in place.

The default iWiccle Pro template HTML output without module content (which varies in amount) is under 40 KB. The rest of the HTML bulk you can control by selecting different size dynamic content formats to your preference, and so making the page HTML length as short as you wish.

The amount of default images and icons in use in the default Pro theme is a total of 128 KB. Not all of them are loaded at once, some of them are loaded for certain membergroups only, and they are generally also loaded only once into browser cache, posing no performance problems. If you want to eliminate the graphic load further, it's easy enough to replace the icons with HTML buttons or links, and the different rounded wrappers and other eye-candy with HTML/CSS boxes.

The total size of all CSS files for the default Pro theme (likewise cached by browser) is 62 KB, which is near the minimum of what can theoretically cover the CSS classes needed for a multi-content and multi-format CMS system of this size. Depending on what aspects of iWiccle/Wiccle you use on your site, you may also be able to trim that down further (and they will be shrinking by about 10 KB in next cleanup in either case).

As an sample summary projection, if a user visits your site and browses 10 pages, he will use (10 x 40 = 400 KB HTML base + 100 KB icons and graphics + 60 KB for CSS) = 560 KB bandwidth for the system for his 10 page loads. Then, 200 daily iWiccle users with 10 page views each would cost you 112 MB of bandwidth (or 3360 MB / 3.36 GB per month), plus whatever content you/your community choose to publish on top of that, which is up to you and completely under your control.