Steve’s Blog

Easter Egg

Easter Special: 20% Discount on SEO Club Memberships

Easter EggHere’s an Easter special for all our readers.

Over the Easter weekend you can use the coupon code “easter” for a 20%? discount all membership plans.

This offer works for new and renewing members. It starts right now and ends on Sunday night.

Note: Membership prices are going up by 30% on April 18th (the club’s half-year anniversary), and so now is a great time to get in for only 50% of next month’s price.

Click here to join the Joomla SEO Club today.

Continue reading “Easter Special: 20% Discount on SEO Club Memberships”

Read MoreEaster Special: 20% Discount on SEO Club Memberships
Google Adwords

Slow Websites Will Cost You More Money

Google AdwordsGoogle have just announced that the speed of your site will start directly affecting your profits. If you’re using Adwords, fast landing pages will lead to a better Quality Score. Slow sites may well end up paying more for their clicks. More from the Google Adwords blog:

Why are we doing this?

Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

?

Continue reading “Slow Websites Will Cost You More Money”

Read MoreSlow Websites Will Cost You More Money
SEO Wiki

Joomla SEO Wiki Open For Your Ideas

SEO WikiThree weeks ago some of the brighest SEO minds in the Joomlasphere took up the challenge to form a thinktank and bring together their thoughts for improving SEO in Joomla! 1.6.

Today this team is happy to announce the opening of a public wiki for the Joomla! community to get involved in this process. Over the next 2 weeks we would like to gather as many ideas, suggestions and concepts as possible.

Continue reading “Joomla SEO Wiki Open For Your Ideas”

Read MoreJoomla SEO Wiki Open For Your Ideas

Getting Started With Links to Your Joomla Site

One of the hardest things for a new site owner to do is start generating links. However, because you’ve built your site in Joomla, you have the chance to get? a good number of valuable links.

Earlier this week we talked about using Siteground’s strategy of dominating the search results with extra sites. This is an alternate strategy that involves building positive links to bolster your online reputation. It helps you fill the search results with positive mentions of your business and provides protection against negative news. I’d love to have a dollar for everyone who’s said “we decided to do business with you after searching through your results on Google”.

Continue reading “Getting Started With Links to Your Joomla Site”

Read MoreGetting Started With Links to Your Joomla Site
" title=

Joomla.org Changes Policy on Hidden Advertising

Good news over at Joomla.org – extensions with hidden advertising will be clearly labelled.

We’ve covered this topic two times on this blog and thoroughly support the decision. I think this will do quite a bit to protect the reputation of Joomla and 3rd party developers. Its embarrassing to explain to high-value clients why their Joomla sites contain hidden links to hotels,  apartments or random web developers.

This is the notice that will appear on guilty extensions:


Read MoreJoomla.org Changes Policy on Hidden Advertising
Siteground

Siteground.com and Search Results Domination

SitegroundLast year I wrote a couple of posts about how important it was to fill the search engine rankings with positive mentions of your company. Its one of the cornerstones of online reputation management and can help to filter out bad news about your company.

A few people have asked for examples of those techniques and I found a great one today. Siteground is a hosting company that targets the Open Source niche. They offer middle-of-the-road prices and like many other companies they manage servers at the ThePlanet.com. They do offer fast answers to support tickets, but generally they offer the same product as many other companies. So, how do they fill the search engine results with their company and drive more customers than their rivals?

Siteground’s Hosting “Review” Sites

One of their main strategies is to build a large number of extra sites that appear to be a neutral hosting review site, but are in fact simply lead generators:

How You Can Tell They Belong to Siteground?

  • Siteground are the (*cough*) best-reviewed host on each site.
  • There aren’t any live links to any other host.
  • They chose small, no-name hosts to list alongside their own ads. No big brand names to catch the visitors eye.
  • All the sites are on the main Sitegrounds servers: NS1.CLEV1.NET and NS2.CLEV1.NET
  • Each site is linked to all the others via the footer.
  • They used the same designer who does the Joomla templates distributed on Siteground.com.
Read MoreSiteground.com and Search Results Domination