Steve’s Blog

February 14, 2007

February Update to Search Engine Optimization Test

As reported in earlier posts (launch post and first update) we’re running a test comparing the search engine optimization capabilites of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. We created three sites, Jabalpur.net.in (WordPress) Amritsar.net.in (Drupal) and Vadodara.net.in (Joomla). Each website was created with a similar amount of content, similar Overture results and a similar domain name. Within two weeks the WordPress site was so far ahead that it looked as if they competition was over. Slowly however, Drupal and Joomla have recovered until they now lead the pack. The Joomla site is now #1 for 6 of its 9 keywords in Yahoo…

February 13, 2007

Joomla Blogs Everyone Ought to Read

As today is Valentines Day I wanted to send love out to some of the excellent Joomla bloggers giving back to the community with news, tutorials, advice and opinions. Below is a list of Joomla blogs, all of which are worth subscribing to. The criteria for inclusion is that they focus primarily on Joomla, are largely informative rather than commercial, and that they are updated at least one a week on average. I believe those three are important factors in keeping a blog fresh and informative. Most but not all of these are available together in one place – the…

February 12, 2007

Changes to Alledia Blog Comments and Subscriptions

Hi All Thanks indeed to all of you for reading and providing so much positive feedback during our first six weeks of daily blogging. There are two changes we’ve implemented today that its good to be aware of: You now need to register in order to post comments. The upside is that theres no more moderation for member comments and you get your own profile page just like this one: There are new ways to subscribe in the right hand column. You can now subscribe to our daily blog via Email (Feedblitz), RSS (Feedburner), and if you click…

February 12, 2007

Interview with Patrick Gillock from Isara.org

This week, we’re delighted to welcome Patrick (PK) Gillock from Isara.org to the interview chair. Isara is a charity based in northeastern Thailand that uses Joomla as a platform for their innovative fundraising efforts. Instead of asking for money, they only ask that people use the tools they have online (such as bloghosting, short URLs and more) so that they can raise money from advertising. You have fun – they raise money for their humanitarian work. Currently their sites are: Isara – Main Portal IsaraPIX – Image Hosting IsaraBLOG – Blog Hosting IsaraURL – Short URLs IsaraCards –…

February 11, 2007

Joomla Statistics – Don’t Turn Your Database Into Another Statistic

During the last couple of weeks a new client has been complaining to us that their site was always running slow and timing out. The problem got so bad that they asked us to move it from their hosting company to ours in the hope that things would improve. Over the weekend I had the pleasure of moving the site. There was only one problem – it had had a Joomla statistics component running inside it for over a year. The database was, without exaggeration, about twenty-five times the normal size of a Joomla database. It took several minutes to…

February 9, 2007

What Everyone Needs to Know About SEF URL Components

One of the questions I get asked most frequently during SEO work is, "Which component should I use for search engine-friendly URLs with Joomla?" There are currently three available: Open-SEF from J-Prosolution.com (Free) Artio SEF from Artio.cz (Free) SEF Advance from Sakic.net (40 Euros) Its not easy for many people to understand the differences between them and to my knowledge no-one has currently written an adequate comparison of all three (if they have – I’ll be happy to link to it, if they haven’t – I’ll write one for an upcoming post). So, without a detailed list of…

February 8, 2007

The Verdict on New Joomla Template Clubs

Note: What follows contains no affiliate links, just my honest opinion: I recently stumbled across an affiliate site that had tracked down all the available Joomla template clubs and all the commercial Joomla template providers. By their reckoning there are now 14 clubs and 29 template providers. We have a membership to precisely three of these clubs: Rockettheme.com and Joomlart.com because they produce quality work that we use for in-house projects and one other because we wanted to learn more about a particular designer before working with them. Browsing throught the other 11 clubs, it really didn’t…

February 7, 2007

The 5 Best Joomla Tutorials Ever!

Yesterday, I read a tutorial by Copyblogger, explaining how to write attention-grabbing blog headlines. So excuse today’s exclamation mark and over enthusiasm in the headline – I’m still practising the secret of better blogging (#2)! Before your patience runs out, here’s a list of our favorite Joomla tutorials showing how you can get rid of frustration once and for all (#5) and how you can build a Joomla website you can be proud of (#9): Joomlart.com’s Understanding Joomla / Mambo CSS in 5 minutes. This is good enough to be part of the official documentation. I often give this…

February 6, 2007

Joomla SEO – Why Less is Often More

Today’s post could really be called Duplicate Content in Joomla Part 2. Yesterday, I blogged about duplicate content in Joomla and the damage it can do to your SEO efforts. Well, soon afterwards I realised that a follow-up was needed after reading a post on Aaron Wall’s blog about how he helped another blogger increase his Google traffic by 1400% in a month by reducing the number of pages he had indexed. Whats the Problem? As can be seen by this post on the Joomla forums, some components can produce thousands of pages that are useless but still get indexed…

February 2, 2007

MosTree and Search Engine Optimization Part 2

A while ago, we talked about how to make MosTree more Search Engine Friendly. Well, we have a Part 2 to that article, this time dealing with the way the word “Root” appears in the directory homepage and the titles for the inside page are simply the name of the category. Looking for something more descriptive and full of keywords? We have a small hack that may help. This will give you the ability to changes the page titles to something more Search Engine Friendly. A word of caution – you will need to open the mtree.php and make the…