Steve’s Blog

Virtuemart SEO 3 – Sitemaps

Virtuemart SEOToday’s Virtuemart SEO tip is short and sweet: how to set up a sitemap for Virtuemart.

First Choice

By far the best choice is the SEF Service Map in combination with its Virtuemart plugin. After installing the SEF Service Map, download the plugin and upload it to /administrator/components/com_sefservicemap.

This plugin provides quite a few options including the ability to show/hide products and categories, and show/hide product and category descriptions. It also includes a .txt site map for Yahoo.

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Virtuemart SEO 1 – Beware of the Modules

Virtuemart SEOEvery day this week we’re providing tips and tricks to help you improve the Search Engine Optimization of your Virtuemart shopping cart.

Tip 1:  Beware of Virtuemart’s Modules

We’ve talked often before about Duplicate Content and how it can cause searchbots to crawl your site less effectively. There are some major potential culprit in Virtuemart … the modules.

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Upcoming Virtuemart SEO and Joomla Books Posts

VirtuemartJust a quick teaser post today as we’re getting ready for another big series of articles.

Next week will be Virtuemart SEO Week as we focus on 5 tips and tricks to really get your Joomla Shopping Cart site ranking as well as possible.

VirtuemartThe following week will be Joomla Books Week as  we’re going to feature reviews of 5 Joomla books. We launched our Joomla Books site a few weeks ago and now its time to flesh it out with some good honest reviews of the latest Joomla titles.

See you back here next week 🙂

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Fair Play Response From SerrBizSEF Developers

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a new SEF extension called SerrBizSEF from Serr.biz.

I pointed out some holes I saw in their component and business model. They were kind enough to answer, replying several times in the comments section. Today they posted an extra long and detailed response including several juicy tidbits of news about their new component.

Especially after yesterdays post about bad news ranking well and good news disappearing, I felt it was fair to post their response as prominently as the initial criticisms. Here it is in full:

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Fascinating Article About Embarrassing Search Results

New York TimesSo much is written about SEO nowadays that its easy for great articles to slip by unnoticed. That happened this weekend with an article called "When Bad News Follows You" in the New York Times.

The article outlines how the Times has been opening up its archives – and at the same time uncovering a myriad of shameful or just wrong information that people want to stay hidden. Apparently:

"People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up. "

All of this is the "unhappy byproduct of something called search engine optimization, which The Times has been using to make money by driving traffic to its Web site."

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Are You Selling Fear or Solutions?

We received an email this morning from Phil-Taylor.com listing security holes in various Joomla components.

I have an awful lot of respect for Phil and his work developing Mambo and now his components. However, I think the tone of the latest email could have been improved. People are understandably jumpy when it comes to security and I think he could have done a better job of pointing people towards freely available solutions rather than to his new security site.

There have always been third-party components with vulnerabilities and I’ve not seen any evidence that security exploits are increasing. What may be increasing is the number of hacker attacks. Some major Joomla sites are being attacked every 60-90 seconds. However, thats not much different from a computer plugged in to the internet.

Its not that difficult to secure your site. Here’s how…

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In Defense of Search Engine Friendly URLs

Earlier this week I was tagged by Barrie North over at Compassdesigns.net.

He was talking about SEO improvements to Joomla and mentioned that:

“You?ll see much of the discussion about SEO revolving around various SEF components. These components allow for advanced manipulation of URL?s and meta tags. Neither of these was identified as a major factor in … SEO analysis. Turn on the default Joomla SEF, but I am not sure there is much evidence that its very influential after that.”

Barrie pointed to a long discussion we had about SEF URLs in the comments section at the end of our final Joomla URL Week post. I guess I’d better defend my viewpoint 😉 …..

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