Well currently 12 16 ways but with your help we will make it 101! I’ll update the post as and when we get more ways to speed up your joomla site.
What with Matt Cutts recent (ish) interview with Web Pro News, he mentions that google will be taking page load times into consideration when they rank your website. What does this mean for all the joomla users? Can joomla keep up?
One of the confusing things for anyone optimizing a Joomla site is that there are so many options out there.
We ran a Joomla SEO class in Atlanta last week and one thing became clear … it was easy to grasp that there are several SEO extensions available and several issues that they fixed with Joomla.
The problem was … which extensions fixed which things? This chart is an attempt to make that much more straight-forward:
If you haven’t done so already, you need to head to Joomlacode.org and download Andrew Eddie’s presentation on Joomla 1.6. Its also on video at Vimeo. After reading, I’m more encouraged about Joomla’s future than I have been for months.
The presentation has 39 detailed slides, so I won’t try to recap them all – look for that in a blog post next week. Today, I’ll focus on what’s important from an SEO perspective:
At the beginning of March 2009, we migrated this website from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5.
We discussed some of the technical issues involved in this blog post, and I’m now going to talk about the Search Engine Optimization angle. I’ve had quite a bit of experience in moving sites to new platforms and my experience is that the traffic drop can vary from 0% to 75% depending how well its done. For example, the only other Joomla person to publish their data was Barrie from Compassdesigns.net who reported a 20% drop in traffic after his move to 1.5.
OK, indignation might be taking it a little too far, but pagination is annoying.
I’m catching a flight in a couple of hours but had so many emails about this that I’ll try to sum up my thoughts:
Google made a major change overnight, allowing people to vote and comment on listings. You can vote websites up or down using the arrow buttons and remove a site completely using the X button.
The project is called “SearchWiki” and is another stage in their attempt to personalize search results. So if I searched for “Mambo, I’d get the software, if a dancer did the same search they’d get the dance and if the surfer did it, they’d get the clothing company. That’s the goal anyway.
Quite a few people have been asking lately about the benefits of using Google SiteSearch.
In theory, it’s great idea because people can use Google’s own search engine to search your site without leaving it. There’s even a slick module that allows you do this easily on Joomla 1.5. This should produce more accurate results, right?
Wrong. Here’s six reasons why you’re better off using your own site search rather than relying on Google:
If you don’t want pages to indexed by search engines, it’s standard SEO practice to add rel=”nofollow” on links to that page. Pages you might not want indexed include “Terms and Conditions”, “Privacy Policy” and other pages that contains content you don’t want to rank for.
However, inside Joomla core, nofollow is not an option for menu links. At the request of some SEO Club members, and with some smart help from Brian Teeman, we’ve modified the Joomla menu module to allow no-following of links.
Simple – to make it easier to upgrade. With hack attempts rising lately, its important to upgrade as smoothly and easily as possible.
No. They add the no-follow to the metadata of the page being linked to. This actually adds no-follow to the menu link itself. Click here for more details on the differences between no follow, meta no follow and robots.txt.
If you’re serious about getting repeat visitors and building your brand, sending out newsletters is a vital tactic. Sometimes its hard to get started with a subscriber base, but there are tactics that work well – surveys are my favorite.
Prospect Magazine carred out a survey to rate the "world’s top 100 public intellectuals". A pretty boring subject, but it caught on with newspapers running campaigns to vote for local heroes in Indonesia, Canada, India, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey. This story about the results on NPR really got my attention with a quote at the end:
Interviewer: "Do you have many subscribers in Turkey at this point?"
Propsect Staff Member: "We’re hoping to get a lot more. We quite cleverly made it compulsory for people who are voting to enter an email address into the system. Our email newsletter list is now made up of about 95% Turks."
Some very good news from the Joomla 1.5 world today … Google Website Optimizer now works with Joomla 1.5.
If you haven’t tried it yet, Website Optimizer is a tool for testing different versions of your site to see which one produces a higher conversion rate.
Thanks to Anthony from Joomla Performance and Barrie from Compass Designs for their work on this.
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)
The mambot can add these tags to all external links:
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.
Continue reading “Make All Your External Links Open in New Windows”
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.
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: