Every day this week we’re providing tips and tricks to help you improve the Search Engine Optimization of your Virtuemart shopping cart.
We’ve talked often before about Duplicate Content and how it can cause searchbots to crawl your site less effectively. There are some major potential culprit in Virtuemart … the modules.
Just a quick teaser post today as we’re getting ready for another big series of articles.
Next week will be Virtuemart SEO Week as we focus on 5 tips and tricks to really get your Joomla Shopping Cart site ranking as well as possible.
The following week will be Joomla Books Week as we’re going to feature reviews of 5 Joomla books. We launched our Joomla Books site a few weeks ago and now its time to flesh it out with some good honest reviews of the latest Joomla titles.
See you back here next week 🙂
A couple of weeks ago I posted about a new SEF extension called SerrBizSEF from Serr.biz.
I pointed out some holes I saw in their component and business model. They were kind enough to answer, replying several times in the comments section. Today they posted an extra long and detailed response including several juicy tidbits of news about their new component.
Especially after yesterdays post about bad news ranking well and good news disappearing, I felt it was fair to post their response as prominently as the initial criticisms. Here it is in full:
Continue reading “Fair Play Response From SerrBizSEF Developers”
So much is written about SEO nowadays that its easy for great articles to slip by unnoticed. That happened this weekend with an article called "When Bad News Follows You" in the New York Times.
The article outlines how the Times has been opening up its archives – and at the same time uncovering a myriad of shameful or just wrong information that people want to stay hidden. Apparently:
"People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up. "
All of this is the "unhappy byproduct of something called search engine optimization, which The Times has been using to make money by driving traffic to its Web site."
Continue reading “Fascinating Article About Embarrassing Search Results”
One of the best things about running a blog is the opportunity to read comments posted by people who are smarter and more experienced in many areas.
Today, I’m going to dig back into the Alledia archives and pull up and some great tips and tricks posted by readers.
We received an email this morning from Phil-Taylor.com listing security holes in various Joomla components.
I have an awful lot of respect for Phil and his work developing Mambo and now his components. However, I think the tone of the latest email could have been improved. People are understandably jumpy when it comes to security and I think he could have done a better job of pointing people towards freely available solutions rather than to his new security site.
There have always been third-party components with vulnerabilities and I’ve not seen any evidence that security exploits are increasing. What may be increasing is the number of hacker attacks. Some major Joomla sites are being attacked every 60-90 seconds. However, thats not much different from a computer plugged in to the internet.
Its not that difficult to secure your site. Here’s how…
Earlier this week I was tagged by Barrie North over at Compassdesigns.net.
He was talking about SEO improvements to Joomla and mentioned that:
“You?ll see much of the discussion about SEO revolving around various SEF components. These components allow for advanced manipulation of URL?s and meta tags. Neither of these was identified as a major factor in … SEO analysis. Turn on the default Joomla SEF, but I am not sure there is much evidence that its very influential after that.”
Barrie pointed to a long discussion we had about SEF URLs in the comments section at the end of our final Joomla URL Week post. I guess I’d better defend my viewpoint 😉 …..
Continue reading “In Defense of Search Engine Friendly URLs”
Recently we’ve talked about how Google’s Webmaster Console has been getting better, although it still needs a lot of work.
Today it got a stiff kick in the backside from Yahoo who keep rolling out neat new features for on their rival to Webmaster Console: Site Explorer. What is Yahoo’s cool new tool?
Continue reading “Yahoo Site Explorer Deals with Dynamic URLs”
Wednesday night should a lot of fun because its the first meeting of Joomla South East, one of a growing number of Joomla User Groups around the world.
We’re meeting from 7.00 to 9.00 pm at the 5 Seasons Brewing Company in Alpharetta. Their website is 5SeasonsBrewing.com and you can get a link to the site here. We have a conference room reserved over the brewery. It has an overhead project, wireless internet, plenty of power sockets for laptops and great food and beer.
Continue reading “Joomla South East Meets Wednesday in Atlanta”
Sometimes a comparison can confuse more than it can explain.
One of most common is domain names are "21st century real estate". A quick search of Google reveals nearly 2 million results for the phrase, coming from companies as big as Yahoo, USA Today and Fox News.
That the phrase was just plain wrong hit me while reading Tropical SEO’s recent claim that there’s a slump in the domain market … just about the same time as old-fashioned real estate sinks in the United States.
Continue reading “Domains Names as Real Estate? Don’t Make me Laugh”