Steve’s Blog

May 2, 2007

Linking Famous Logos and Premium Domain Names

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve started to notice a new branding trend: companies with famous logos are leveraging their brand recognition to promote their websites. I first saw this watching a TV show on NBC (for those of you outside of the States, NBC is the channel that launched Friends, Seinfield and Cheers). Just before the commercial break, the NBC logo flashed up with .com beside it. They didn’t tell you what their web address was. They just assumed you’d work it out.

May 1, 2007

Joomla Extension of the Month – May 07

This month’s Extension of the Month has caused more excitement about a component release than almost anything else I can remember in the short history of Joomla. Fireboard has caused people to sit up and pay attention because it is the sucessor to Joomlaboard which had been the only fully-integrated forum for Joomla.

April 27, 2007

DIY WordPress and Drupal Themes

My friend Scott over at FishSEO, has pointed out that a new WordPress theme generator is available. The script gives you remarkable control over everything from the position and color of the sidebar to the color of almost every kind of text on the page. When you’re done, you can just click “save” and your finished theme will be downloaded as a .zip file.

April 27, 2007

Do you know what’s on your Joomla site?

If I could sum up Joomla SEO in the shortest possible way, it would be "control your URLs". Over the course of analyzing many Joomla sites, I’ve seen all sorts of wierd URLs. Sometimes it will be a third part extension creating them, sometimes it will be an internal Joomla flaw, sometimes it will just remain inexplicable. This is a problem, because if you have a lot of extra URLs, Google is likely to reduce its indexing of your site. Fortunately, knowledge is power and if you know what problems you have, they are not to difficult to solve. In…

April 25, 2007

Key Questions for the Joomla Project

For those of you that haven’t read it yet, there’s a fascinating post over on the Joomla forums, that touches on many crucial questions for the project. The thread started innocuously when one member posted a “Things I don’t like about Joomla” list. In trying to answer them, lead developer Johan Jansseens mentioned that, “Encryption of Joomla! extensions is a violation of the GPL”. This generated more questions than it answered, because many Joomla components are encrypted and thus potentially violating the Joomla! license.

April 25, 2007

Joomla Component Links Don’t Work

Yesterday we took a detailed look at whether having lots of links from templates can help companies to rank well in the search engines. The answer was "yes" in MSN, but generally "no" in Google and Yahoo. Today we’re going to take the research one step further and look and links from Joomla components.

April 24, 2007

Win SEO Book and SEF Advance at JoomlaJuice.com

Pete Russell over at Joomla! Juice! is running a competition where two lucky prize winners will win a copy of our Joomla SEO e-Book worth $37 US plus a copy of Emir Sakic’s SEF Advance Component valued at $54 US. To win this bundle of SEO/SEF prizes valued at about $91 US, just head over to JoomlaJuice.com. While you’re over there, don’t forget to subscribe to Pete’s excellent weekly podcasts from people in the Joomla community. I’ll be on in a future episode, announcing the winner of this competition.

April 23, 2007

Joomla Template Links Don’t Work

One of the most interesting things about working for clients is that they’ll ask questions I don’t know the answer to. This happened last week. The question was: "I have lots of incoming links from templates that we sell. That must help us to rank well…" Of course, lots of companies add a link back to their own site from templates that they sell or give away. For some companies, this can add up to 1000s of incoming links. However, my immediate instinct was to say "no". That gut reaction was based on two factors: If the links…

April 21, 2007

Download the Joomla SEO eBook

Please click here to download the book. Note: Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working hard to expand the book online. We’ve added 8 new chapters and dozens of new articles. Unfortunately that means that this PDF is not 100% up-to-date. As soon as we’ve finished this latest round of improvements, we’ll also update the ebook in PDF form. Click here to read the up-to-date online version of the book.

April 20, 2007

Why Do I Blog?

I’ve just been tagged by my friend Scott Fish over at FishSEO.com. The question is, “Why Do I Blog?” Its a simple question, and deserves a simple answer. Blogging helps me deal more successfully with three groups of people: