Over at TAONAW JTR has a nice post on a couple of tramp tricks. They’re pretty simple and don’t require any heavy duty configuration or setup. The first is to set dired-dwim-target to t. The variable is a bit more configurable but just setting it to t will change the default dired target (for copy and rename commands) to the directory of another open dired window, if there is one. This is particularly useful if the other dired window is pointing to a remote machine. It’s a fast way of copying a list of files from one machine to another.
The second tip is very simple but, according to JTR, can make transferring files from one machine to another with tramp much faster. The tip is to use scp rather than ssh when connecting to a remote machine. That’s simple a matter of connecting to /scp:user@machine:/path rather than /ssh:user@machine:/path. Tramp is smart enough to connect over ssh and do the right thing if your path points to a directory.
Take a look at JTR’s post for a few more details and for some further advice on bookmarking remote directories. It’s a short post so it’s easy and quick to read.