Steve’s Blog

February 28, 2007

Joomla Extension of the Month – March 07

Working with Joomla SEO on a daily basis, I’ve been through every SEO tool available. There’s only one that has proved to be indispensible – the Joomla Search Engine Optimisation Patch from Joomlatwork.com. What does it allow you to do? Have complete control over page metatitles Control whether Google takes a snippet from your page for the results page Easily add "follow" or "nofollow" links to individual pages Add custom meta fields Disable the Joomla meta generator tag All of these are key factors in giving your site a ranking boost. JPromoter from JoomlaEquipment.com does similar things. The disadvantage…

February 28, 2007

Make Sure Your Joomla Site Runs Fast – Part 2

A short and sweet post today, following up yesterday’s discussion about making your Joomla site smaller and faster. Someone over at Digg recently pointed out that if Digg made one small change they could save thousands of dollars in hosting costs ever year. That change is to send out webpages in a compressed format. When you get a Joomla component it is often contained in a zip file. This enables the file to be much smaller without damaging the content in any way. You can do the same thing with webpages. In Joomla you just need to click “Yes” in…

February 27, 2007

Three Ways to Make Sure Your Joomla Site Runs Fast

Over the last few years, we’ve seen revelations about the huge amounts of data that Google collects about us, our websites, our browsing habits and our lives in general. Wikipedia has a list of everything Google knows about you, and thats only what has been confirmed. Although theres a server full of information about you in Google headquarters, there’s only piece of data about your website that they consider important enough to put in their search results – the size of your website: For Alledia.com its 48k. Why might this be the single most important statistic about your website?…

February 25, 2007

Interview with Les and Andy from JoomlaStorm.com

1) Hi Les & Andy. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background? Well, I can tell you one thing is for sure, I don’t have a big ego, I’m way too cool for that! I guess that summarizes everything, so just click on JoomlaStorm.com. All joking aside, my experiences in this grand ole world range from having my diapers changed by my mother to jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. I’m a big fan of the outdoors, I love the Discovery channel (Man vs Wild), I wig-out to Pink Floyd,…

February 23, 2007

Joomla Weekly News Hits the Shelves

One of the most interesting Joomla developments in 2007 has been a new magazine created every week by one man – Brian Teeman, a former member of the Joomla core team. Each weekly release has the following features: A focus on a particular theme. Week 5 had the theme of "hunger" and Week 6 was "Africa". Brian hunts down and reviews around a dozen quality Joomla sites in each niche. An update of all the latest extensions released for Joomla. Five minute interviews with key figures in the Joomla world. An overview of the latest code changes in…

February 21, 2007

Make Your Joomla Search More Useful

The other day I’d been doing some testing on the search features for client’s site and I came up with some interesting results. This website, based around sports, was pulling up results headed “Mambo”, “PHP.net”, “MySQL.com”. I checked on Alledia.com and the same thing was happening: I’d forgotten something really simple … by default Joomla comes with the “Search Newsfeeds”, “Search Weblinks” and “Search Contacts” mambots published. If you never get around to deleting all the newsfeeds and weblinks, they’ll then turn up in the search results. So, I unpublished those mambots, and also those the called “Search Sections” and…

February 20, 2007

Solve the Most Common Joomla SEO Problem

What’s the one crucial Search Engine Optimization mistake made by many of the most prominent Joomla sites? Mistake: Mis-using Global Configuration metadata. In the last few weeks I’ve seen many websites harm their SEO chances by having the same description and same keywords for every page. Its tempting to fill in those boxes, but think about it this way….Is there really a description and keyword set that can apply to every page on your site? Does you frontpage really contain the same information as your site map? Does your "Contact Us" page really merit the same description as your…

February 19, 2007

A to Z of Hard-Earned Business Advice for Web-Designers

Accountant – get one. You build websites. The mathematics in your code doesn’t mean you can do your books. A good accountant can save your business. Backup everything. Backup your sites, backup your databases, backup every computer everyday. Take the backups off-site if you possibly can. Take them into the next room if you work from home. You’ll be surprised at how many years of work can disappear with one crash. Charge by the hour. You need to make sure you can pay your bills. Hobbyists can set a project price and stick to it. A business needs to…

February 19, 2007

Interview with Anthony Olsen from JoomlaBamboo.com

We’re delighted to welcome Anthony Olsen from JoomlaBamboo.com to the interview hot seat. Although it may not look like it, Joomla is a only one of the strings to Anthony’s bow, as he told us last week…. 1) Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background? I have a fairly mixed background actually – with a few different areas of interest. My main focus (read day job – although web design is fast becoming my other day job!) is in alternative medicine specifically Chinese Medicine and Feng Shui (Ive been an…

February 15, 2007

Top 6 Joomla SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Using your keyword list as a meta title. "Dogs, Boarding, Grooming, Pets, Pooches, Kennels, Food" is not a decent meta title because search engines see these as separate keywords. Dog Boarding – Dog Grooming – Dog Kennels is much better. Not redirecting the www and non-www versions of your site to the same place. Barrie North blogged about this recently and provided an easy .htaccess hack to avoid this. Not checking to see how many pages you have indexed in Google, MSN and Yahoo. This is a simple way to test for potential crawling problems. We had one client recently with…