Steve’s Blog

May 13, 2008

Huge SEO Club Discounts as I’m so Happy

The coincidence was too great to ignore … this must be the weekend for lovable losers. My hometown football / soccer team of Portsmouth have the chance to win their first competition for 57 years. I’m also going to be in Chicago for the JoomlaExpo.

If you’re not American or a baseball fan, the Chicago Cubs are famous for being biggest losers in U.S. sports history. This is their 100th year without winning the World Series. Close behind were the Chicago White Sox who recently ended their drought after a mere 88 years.

Portsmouth haven’t made it a century of losing yet but if your grandfather was in elementary school last time your favorite team won something … you probably support a loser.

Continue reading “Huge SEO Club Discounts as I’m so Happy”

May 12, 2008

GroupJive and How to Support GPL Projects

We’ve posted a few times about Group Jive, the only component available for Joomla that allows site members to create their own social networking groups. I’ve called it a vital extension if Joomla hopes to compete as a social networking platform, but the project has had a checkered history and unfortunately it seems that its stumbling again. They’re on MicroPledge.com looking for donations to help make the component work natively on Joomla 1.5.

Rocketwerx recently did something very similar and raised over $2500 towards finishing their Joomla 1.5 and phpBB3 Bridge. That caused a mixed reaction from members of their forum but its possible that this fundraiser may breathe new life into the Group Jive effort.

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May 9, 2008

Good and Bad Internal Linking

What are Internal Links?

Internal links to your site are the links that reside on pages that belong to your domain. So links to subdomain and subfolders also count.

Why Do This Automatically?

If you have a lot of content on your site it can be hard for search engines to work out which page is most relevant for a particular search term. You can help them by automatically linking from a keyphrase to a highly relevant page for that topic.

For example, whenever I type sh404SEF it automatically links to our review of that extension. The review is #5 on Google for the phrase “sh404SEF” even though we’ve written many articles about it.

Creating Automatic Internal Links with Joomla

There’s a great component called “Simply Links” which allows you to create internal links across your site.

Example of Good Automatic Internal Links

Here are two newspaper sites, each with very different tactics when it comes to their links and their landing pages:

The good option.

Links are underlined and easy to spot.
Links only appear once.
Links are to clearly defined, specific terms.

Example of Bad Automatic Internal Links

Where is this bad?

The links are hard to spot.
The same link is repeated dozens of times in the article.
The text of link isn’t specific … “hawks” could mean many things besides the sports team.

Different Kinds of Landing Page: #1 Information

The details option. This pages focuses on creating an authoritative list of all the actor’s movie appearances and co-stars. They do link to some articles about his work but only lower down the page.

Different Kinds of Landing Page: #1 News

The news option. All the latest news articles on the team. There’s little background information aside from a small box linking to some statistics and roster details.

Analyze Your Internal Links

You can find out how many pages on your site currently link to a particular page with a query like this:

link:http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-urls/review-of-sh404sef-url-extension/ site:alledia.com

This tells me that about 30 pages on alledia.com link to our review of sh404SEF.

You can also head over to Google Webmaster Tools. Go to Links >> Internal Links and you’ll see a list like this:

We Launch Our Joomla Training Classes in Atlanta

We’re delighted to announce that our first Joomla training class will be on Saturday June 21st in Alpharetta, Georgia.

The training will be in Alpharetta, just a few miles north of Atlanta from 9 am to 4 pm. We’ve chosen Roam as the location as it offers high-tech, comfortable meeting rooms equipped with wireless internet access, whiteboards, projectors.

Because this is the first class we aim to make it extra special. We’re limiting registration to 10 students and are providing a wide-range of extra gifts.

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May 5, 2008

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May 5, 2008

New Products from a Joomla Lead Developer

JXtended.com If you’ve been around the Joomla or Mambo projects during the last 5 years, you’ll have heard of Andrew Eddie. Currently he has the unwieldy title of “Development Working Group Coordinator”, but spend any time on the forum and you’ll see he’s hard at work in many areas of the Joomla project.

Last year we interviewed Andrew about extensions that he was developing. This week he launched his new site JXtended.com and with it over a dozen products.

Apart from making the owner of JExtended.com rich (I mistyped three times when writing this article alone) what can we expect from the new site?

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May 3, 2008

All Alledia Blog Posts Now Creative Commons Licensed

Quite a lot of people have written asking permission to translate blog posts here on Alledia, so it made sense for me to clarify the license for the articles.

As of today, all Alledia.com blogs posts are now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

That means you can copy, translate and mashup any and all blog posts. The only requirement is that you provide a link back to the original article.

May 2, 2008

Short Cuts for Great Google Rankings

Sometimes you just want a short-cut. Sometimes the idea of slogging away for months to reach your goal just doesn’t seem worth the effort. Take the woman on the right. My wife just went to Japan and found this “Dancing Cowboy” machine. Designed for people who want to get fit without effort, you don’t have to do anything. Sit there, and the machine will shake like a horse and do the exercise for you.

I’m sure theres a lot of people out there who’d like some SEO shortcuts. From an e-mail I got this week:

“4 months to do SEO seems like a long time to do anything. I mean what takes 4 months?“

Wouldn’t it be nice if there you could jump ahead of much older and more established sites? Here are five ways to leverage Google’s own features to your advantage:

Local

Read more: Click here to list your business in Google local search. There are several people on our forums who’ve founded their businesses within the last year and have used Google Local to jump ahead of people whose sites have been up since the 1990s.

Videos

Read more: Instructions for running video perfectly in Joomla. Your videos will need to be hosted on YouTube, which is good news because it also solves on hosting / bandwidth costs.

Images

Read more😕 Make sure to remove Disallow: /images/ from your site’s robots.txt file. Click here to read more about image optimization.

News

Products

Read more: Make sure your product is on all major sites in your niche. For books, that means Amazon.com, Overstock.com, BarnesandNoble.com. For golf equipment, thats OnlineSports.com, GolfLocker.com etc. Click here for tips on doing this with Virtuemart.

Find Out More

Google’s technical name for this move away from simple text results is called “Universal Search” and its been around for around one year now. Yahoo and MSN have their own versions of Universal Search. Ask.com took this further than anyone else with all kinds of search result delivered on one page.

April 30, 2008

Joomla Events No Longer a Rare Event

I’ve been in the Mambo and Joomla world for several years now without going to a Joomla event. Now I’m headed to two within the next six weeks (Chicago and Vancouver) and every time I look at Joomla.org theres a new event announced.

I did some research and in April alone there were Joomla events in Norway, Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, France and Spain.

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April 25, 2008

Joomla Training in Atlanta Starting in June

We’re delighted to announce that we’re going to be holding Joomla training sessions in Atlanta, Georgia starting on Saturday June 21st, 2008.

The classes are aimed at people who want to manage and build successful Joomla sites. We’ll be giving practical but not highly-technical tuition. Each session will run for a full day.

Update: Full classes details on our new Joomla Training site.