Steve’s Blog

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

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.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