Steve’s Blog

February 20, 2008
11 Comments

Open Question: SEO Changes in Joomla 1.6

Joomla recently announced that they’re looking for white papers, proposing ways to make the next version even better than 1.5.

So, together with some of Joomla’s brightest SEO minds, we’ve taken up the challenge and are writing a paper with our suggestions for improving SEO in 1.6.

We’d love to hear ideas from the community to include in the proposal:

What SEO improvements would you like to see in Joomla 1.6?

Already on the list are ideas such as improving control over metadata. What else should we do to make Joomla the most search-engine friendly CMS available?

February 19, 2008

Congratulations to Some Joomla Fans

A big congratulations today to one of our former clients. We mentioned Bleacher Report back in 2006 when we explained how we helped them get accepted to Google News.

They have a very smart business model that we’ve seen several times recently:

Continue reading “Congratulations to Some Joomla Fans”

February 19, 2008

5 Joomla Components Harmful to Your SEO

An entirely subjective list of five components that I’ve found to cause SEO problems on Joomla sites:
Continue reading “5 Joomla Components Harmful to Your SEO”

February 13, 2008

Review of SmartSEF

Richard and his team from Joomlatwork have been busy. Just a couple of weeks after releasing the SEF Patch, which greatly improves Joomla 1.5 metadata, they’ve launched SmartSEF, which greatly improves Joomla 1.5 URLs.

Here’s our review of the beta version:

Continue reading “Review of SmartSEF”

February 11, 2008

Joomla Extension of the Month – February 08

Our Extension of the Month for 2008 is a very worthy winner, because it overcomes several important limitations in Joomla’s core. Joomla’s default search component has several issues:

You can’t enter a query of more than 20 characters
You can’t search only in one part of the site (for example content, forum, comments)
Its hard to customize so that results appear in the order you desire

The new "Advanced Search" from anything-digital.net solves all those issues.
Continue reading “Joomla Extension of the Month – February 08”

February 8, 2008

Review of the SEF Patch for Joomla 1.5

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few days, you’ll know I strongly recommend two components to improve SEO on Joomla 1.0:

sh404SEF from extensions.siliana.net
SEF Patch from joomlatwork.com ( winner of an "Extension of the Month" award last year )

The good news is that one of those has just been updated for Joomla 1.5. This is our review of the new SEF Patch.

Continue reading “Review of the SEF Patch for Joomla 1.5”

February 4, 2008

Joomla 1.5 and SEO Components

Joomla 1.5 is now two weeks old and more compatible components are being released every day. For those of you interested in SEO, I thought I might write a short post about the status of SEO components for 1.5:
Continue reading “Joomla 1.5 and SEO Components”

January 30, 2008

New Recommended Providers Page

Here at Alledia, we specialize in design and SEO work for Joomla and are available for custom work in those areas.

However, we often get requests from people who are searching for experts, particularly when it comes to PHP / MySQL coding and server / security work. To make referrals easier, we’ve added a "Recommended Providers" page.

The list is currently small, but it will grow with time and these are people we’ve worked with before whose high-quality work we can vouch for.

January 28, 2008
7 Comments

What is sefRelToAbs and How Do I Use it?

Its fairly common for a new Joomla site to have a few bugs when Search Engine Friendly URLs are turned on. Examples I’ve come across in the last few weeks have included a "Go to the Top" link breaking, and several links breaking in old versions of GroupJive.

One culprit was to blame: sefRelToAbs.

Continue reading “What is sefRelToAbs and How Do I Use it?”

January 26, 2008

Comparing Joomla 1.5 and Mambo 3.0

Want to get your head around how far Joomla has come since the early days of Mambo? Download and install one of these 5 and 6 year old versions.

Mambo 3.0.4, released in May 2001:

http://mirror.in.th/sourceforge.net/m/ma/mambo/mambo3.0.4.tar.gz

Mambo 3.0.5, released in June 2001:

http://www.linuxwebmasterfree.com/software/1270.html

Mambo 4.0.6, released in December 2002:

http://mirror.in.th/sourceforge.net/m/ma/mambo/

Continue reading “Comparing Joomla 1.5 and Mambo 3.0”

January 24, 2008

Open Question: How Will You Survive a Recession?

Open Question Thursday again:

Most people reading this blog make some money from the internet. For some, perhaps even a majority, its your largest source of income.

Continue reading “Open Question: How Will You Survive a Recession?”