Steve’s Blog

July 14, 2008

New sh404SEF Documentation and a Free Trial

I’m delighted to say we’ve released a new section to the SEO Club today … Extension Guides.

What you’ll find there are easy-to-understand explanations of how to use the most popular Joomla SEO extensions. We’ve started with 12 detailed articles on how to use sh404SEF and guides to Artio SEF, SEF Advance, the SEF Patch and others will follow shortly.

Oh, and did I mention that during the next 5 days you can get a free 2 week trial to the SEO Club? Simply click here to?register and then choose your subscription.

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July 10, 2008
9 Comments

Make All Your External Links Open in New Windows

Mike at Simbunch.com has created a very useful little mambot that forces all external links to open in a new window. (free registration required)

What Does It Do?

The mambot can add these tags to all external links:

target=”_blank” (open the link in a new window)
rel=”nofollow” (telling search engines to ignore the link)
both

Personally I don’t agree with people who want to add nofollow to all their external links. It seems overly paranoid and contrary to how the web works. However, opening other sites in a new window is increasingly a good idea.

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July 2, 2008

Free Domains for Alledia Readers

Some July 4th holiday freebies for you guys today:

Free names to any registered user who posts "I’ll take it" in the comments: DrupalBooks.net and JoomlaStudy.com

Available names for whoever is fast enough to register them: JoomlaExtensions.net and JoomlaSecurity.net / .org

I also have a cracking good domain, Joomlaplugins.com, that I’ll give away to the first person who signs up for an SEO Club membership and then contacts me to claim it.

Requisite legal note: Joomla is asking people to get permission before launching sites with "joomla" in domain names.

July 2, 2008
74 Comments

Open Question: Famous People Using Joomla

This seems like a natural follow-on to our previous questions about major companies using Joomla and Joomla sites with great rankings.

"Do you know of any famous people using Joomla?"

I’ve decided to set the bar high again by looking only for official sites about truly famous people. A good rule of thumb is "do they have a Wikipedia entry?"

Here’s what I’ve found so far:

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July 1, 2008

Dealing With People Who Copy Your Site and Business Model

Recently we’ve had to deal with a problem that faces a lot of popular sites … people have started ripping off our content, business model and even our slogan.

Here’s a few ideas for dealing with this situation if and when it happens to you.

Take it as Good Sign

Would people copy what you’re doing if they thought it was irrelevant. The more popular you get, the more you can expect people to rip off your ideas. Embrace it as a sign that you’re doing well and are starting to dominate the conversation in your niche.

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June 29, 2008

Funny SEF Advance URL

We use SEF Advance here on Alledia because it was the best option when we launched 2 years ago. It still does a good job but it does produce some strange URLs sometimes, particular when puncutuation is involved.

Heres a funny example of a URL seen in Firefox 3, caused by a hyphen and quotation mark. It looks like Space Invaders have taken over our URLs:

June 26, 2008

New Joomla Training Website

We’ve run a couple of trial Joomla training classes in Chicago and Atlanta and overall things went really well with over 70 students in total. We’re keen to do some more sessions and so we’ve done some reorganizing here at Alledia.

Things were getting a bit messy with as the number of projects on alledia.com. We’ve decided to keep Alledia.com for SEO-related activities and spin off the training classes to a new website called (appropriately enough) JoomlaTraining.com.

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June 26, 2008

Open Question: Artio SEF or sh404SEF?

For a long time now I’ve recommended sh404SEF for most Joomla sites. Recently however, theres been a long post on the SEO Club Forum with users saying how much they like Artio SEF. Some reasons they gave:

In Artio SEF you can search and filter SEF Urls in
main ways such as by component which is awesome. In sh404sef, you can
search…that’s it.
In Artio SEF you can edit an existing SEF Urls,
in 404, you can edit the text, but not the link itself.
Artio SEF
doesn’t have to have a specific plugin to at least attempt an SEF url
for a component. If you have a link to an unsupported gallery component
and your link is called "Gallery", JoomSEF will at least call that link
/gallery.htm

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June 25, 2008

URL Changes in Joomla 1.5

Joomla 1.5 has really taken hold in recent months, overtaking 1.0 to become the more popular system. The aim of this post is to compare the URLs in 1.0 and 1.5 so that you know what to expect in the new version.

Some Background

Joomla has always shipped with two different URL possibilites, the “Default” setting and the “Search Engine Friendly” setting. In Joomla 1.0 the phrase “Search Engine Friendly URLs” probably wasn’t accurate. Google and Yahoo never found much to love about them. It would be fairer to just call them “Shorter URLs”. Joomla 1.5 offers the promise of better URLs. Lets see if thats true:

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June 25, 2008

2000 Comments and a Special Prize

Last week I mentioned that we were approaching 2000 comments on the Alledia blog and that whoever posted number 2000 would get a free lifetime SEO Club membership.

Søren from notwebdesign.com in Spain is the winner after leaving a comment on our post about big companies using Joomla. He’s also the developer of Linx (for reciprocal links) and Linkback (which shows the most popular incoming links to a page).

We’ll be offering this same prize every time we add another 1000 comments, so look for more free lifetime memberships when we reach 3000, 4000 etc.

Thanks to everyone who has posted over the last 18 months! We have some big changes coming up at Alledia in the next couple of months and we’ll be running more competitions alongside the new features.

June 20, 2008

SEO Plugins for Firefox

I’m sure most of you have heard the trick question for webdesigners: “which browser do you use?”.

(The correct answer is “all of them”, because designers need to check their work in every major browser.)

SEO people will give you a different answer: “Firefox”.

It so many great plugins available that it really is the best browser to use. In honor of Firefox 3’s huge launch, here’s a rundown of the best plugins available for SEO work:

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June 18, 2008
11 Comments

Joomla Day Vancover Recap

Just got back from Joomla Day Vancouver at around 3 this morning, having enjoyed every minute of it.

With over 300 emails to answer and our monthly Atlanta Joomla meeting to organize for tonight, I hope you don’t mind if I leave most of the recap to other people.

Here’s an online roundup of the conference:

Presentations: Live blogging was done by Raul who has a substantial summary of almost every presentation.
Publicity: There’s a write-up on Linux.com which also talks about Joomla Days in general.
Photos: Rastin, one of the organizers, has a good number of pics from the event.

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