Steve’s Blog

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…

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…

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…