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. Original forum post Bug tracker item Download the patch
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I’m delighted to say we’ve released a new section to the SEO Club today … Extension Guides. What you’ll find there are easy-to-understand explanations of how to use the most popular Joomla SEO extensions. We’ve started with 12 detailed articles on how to use sh404SEF and guides to Artio SEF, SEF Advance, the SEF Patch and others will follow shortly. Oh, and did I mention that during the next 5 days you can get a free 2 week trial to the SEO Club? Simply click here to?register and then choose your subscription.
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) What Does It Do? The mambot can add these tags to all external links: target=”_blank” (open the link in a new window) rel=”nofollow” (telling search engines to ignore the link) both 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.
Some July 4th holiday freebies for you guys today: Free names to any registered user who posts "I’ll take it" in the comments: DrupalBooks.net and JoomlaStudy.com Available names for whoever is fast enough to register them: JoomlaExtensions.net and JoomlaSecurity.net / .org I also have a cracking good domain, Joomlaplugins.com, that I’ll give away to the first person who signs up for an SEO Club membership and then contacts me to claim it. Requisite legal note: Joomla is asking people to get permission before launching sites with "joomla" in domain names.
This seems like a natural follow-on to our previous questions about major companies using Joomla and Joomla sites with great rankings. "Do you know of any famous people using Joomla?" I’ve decided to set the bar high again by looking only for official sites about truly famous people. A good rule of thumb is "do they have a Wikipedia entry?" Here’s what I’ve found so far:
Recently we’ve had to deal with a problem that faces a lot of popular sites … people have started ripping off our content, business model and even our slogan. Here’s a few ideas for dealing with this situation if and when it happens to you. Take it as Good Sign Would people copy what you’re doing if they thought it was irrelevant. The more popular you get, the more you can expect people to rip off your ideas. Embrace it as a sign that you’re doing well and are starting to dominate the conversation in your niche.
We use SEF Advance here on Alledia because it was the best option when we launched 2 years ago. It still does a good job but it does produce some strange URLs sometimes, particular when puncutuation is involved. Heres a funny example of a URL seen in Firefox 3, caused by a hyphen and quotation mark. It looks like Space Invaders have taken over our URLs:
We’ve run a couple of trial Joomla training classes in Chicago and Atlanta and overall things went really well with over 70 students in total. We’re keen to do some more sessions and so we’ve done some reorganizing here at Alledia. Things were getting a bit messy with as the number of projects on alledia.com. We’ve decided to keep Alledia.com for SEO-related activities and spin off the training classes to a new website called (appropriately enough) JoomlaTraining.com.
For a long time now I’ve recommended sh404SEF for most Joomla sites. Recently however, theres been a long post on the SEO Club Forum with users saying how much they like Artio SEF. Some reasons they gave: In Artio SEF you can search and filter SEF Urls in main ways such as by component which is awesome. In sh404sef, you can search…that’s it. In Artio SEF you can edit an existing SEF Urls, in 404, you can edit the text, but not the link itself. Artio SEF doesn’t have to have a specific plugin to at least attempt an SEF…