Ok, final chance to win our month-long competition here at Alledia.
Answer a simple question and you can win a free copy of our Joomla SEO Book .
Steve’s Blog
Joomla 1.5 Release Candidate 3 Out Now
Joomla! 1.5 RC3 (codename: Takriban) is now available for download and a stable version is "very close".
It’s been 10 weeks since Release Candidate 1 and five weeks since Release Candidate 2. That maybe a good guide to when we can expect the stable version (fingers crossed!).
The SEO is getting better with each version and hopefully the stable version will feature even more improvements.
Overall, if you’re serious about your sites SEO, I’d recommend patience when it comes to upgrading because quite a few important features are still lacking (unique page titles and SEF URL automapping being the two most important) but I’ve no doubt that they’re coming soon, either in the core or via plugins.
Joomla Templates Influence Drupal and WordPress
Lets be honest, the variety, quality and low cost of Joomla templates far outshines most other CMSs. More than anything else, its the reason I hear from people when they decide on Joomla.
No surprise then that Joomla’s templates are being imitated:
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What the Bleep is the Title Alias?
"What the bleep is the Title Alias? Do I fill it in? Should I leave it blank? Help!"
This is definitely one the most common questions I get from clients using Joomla for the first time. Theres nothing to indicate what its for, and if you click on the "Help" button you get something thats less than helpful:
"Title Alias: Enter a short name for this Item."
Thanks for that! So this is my best attempt to answer that question and save myself from answering it again too many times in the future… Just what is the Title Alias for?
Free Copy of the Joomla SEO eBook Part 3
This is the third week of our special month-long competition here at Alledia. Answer a simple question and you can win a free copy of our Joomla SEO Book .
This week’s question is in honor of the guy on the Joomla forums who managed to Google to index every year on his calendar up until the year 3500 A.D.:
Chinese Names Being Taken Back by Registry
It’s rare that I post about things outside of the Joomla world, but I’m a domain-addict who lived in Asia for several years and those two interests came together in this story.
Apparently the Chinese government, through its proxies, is taking back domain names that have already been registered and paid for.
The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) is responsible for Chinese .cn domain names. It is a private company but one with deep government links and its been responsible repossessing domains during the past month.
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The Impossibility of Hiring Good Staff
Is anyone nowadays keen to work for someone else? In the online world, I’m not so sure.
Scoreboard Media started me on this train of thought about six months ago by asking:
“If you can rank a site in lucrative markets, why would you do it for clients instead of for yourself?
Last year, we pointed out that very few Joomla companies employ more than five people, and don’t see anything changes this year, next or in fact any time soon. The simple fact is, there is a new business model emerging:
Companies have a core of 1 to 4 people, often equal in status. They specialize in a particular niche and then they rely on partnerships with other similar, small companies to cover their other bases. Actual hiring seems to be a thing of the past.
Do Search Engines Treat Joomla Sites Differently?
Recently I’ve seen people talk about the idea that search engines profile websites partly on the script they use. This idea makes some sense to me because it is possible to make reasonable accurate generalisations about some CMS systems:
Do search engines treat your site any differently simply because its built with Joomla?
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Review of the SE Keywords Module
A few people have emailed to ask what module we’re using to welcome people who visit from search engines. If you reach Alledia.com from Google and Yahoo, you’ll see the following text:
The module is SE Keywords, developed by Pietro Gallo, whose also developing search clouds and search modules for Sobi 2.
Free Copy of the Joomla SEO eBook Part 2
This week is the second week of our special month-long competition here at Alledia.
Answer a simple question and you can win a free copy of our Joomla SEO eBook. This week’s first question:
"Recently I’ve seen people talk about the idea that search engines profile websites partly on the script they use.
- WordPress = blogs, so they need to be updated regularly to rank well.
- OSCommerce = shopping carts, so may be short on text.
- Joomla = …..
Do you think that search engines treat your site any differently simply because its built with Joomla?"
Please post your answers in the comments section below. The best answer will win a free copy of the Joomla SEO eBook.
The winner and answer will be announced on Wednesday morning US Eastern Time (GMT minus 5).
New Mambot to Add Headline Tags to Joomla
One of the most important SEO tactics is to wrap your page titles in headline tags such as <h1> and <h2>.
Unfortunately Joomla doesn’t provide these out of the box and instead puts page titles inside a relatively meaningless table cell:
<td class="contentheading" width="100%">My Title</td>
There are some extensions that allow headline tags currently, including JoomSEO and sh404SEF. There are also some core hacks that achieve the same thing.
However, we needed a simple and easy way to apply headline tags to articles, without hacking the core and without utilizing any larger components.
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Free SEO eBook Winner and New Ping Component
On Monday we offered a free copy of our Joomla SEO eBook for the best answer to the following question:
“What’s the easiest way to tell Google what’s new on your Joomla! site?“
We really had some great answers, including;
- From Zorro: Have a working RSS feed on your site that can be autodiscovered. Click here to learn how to add an orange RSS icon to the address bar of your site.
- From Danilo Silva: Using Feedburner and pinging to notify blog services.
- From Zander: By submitting a xml sitemap to the Google Webmaster Tools. Joomap is considered to be best option.
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