Yes they do.
Over the last few months, I’ve run across quite a lot of companies who have avoided blogging on Joomla and instead posted on free blog sites such as Blogger.com, Blogster.com or WordPress.com.
Today’s post is a quick rundown of the reasons why you should only blog on your own domain.
I’m delighted today to be able annouce the launch of our Joomla SEO eBook.
It is the only comprehensive guide on to how to manage Search Engine Optimization for your Joomla website.
Other guides talk in generalities that may help you with a static HTML site, but our aim is to precisely target the problems and solutions you’ll face when trying to earn high rankings with your Joomla website.
Its not often that a brand new, really useful and completely free Joomla component comes on the scene.
Anthony Ferrara has managed that with his Page Cache component.
The point of this book is to get down and dirty with managing Search Engine Optimization on your Joomla! website. Joomla! is the Ferrari of Content Management Systems. It is wonderfully powerful and it allows you to create large amounts of search engine friendly content in a short period of time.
However, just like a Ferrari, it is easy to spin out of control with Joomla. This book will give you the tools and skills to keep your website on the road to search engine success.
The advice in this book is taken directly from our experience with clients in the field. We have worked on Search Engine Optimization for over 50 Joomla! sites, including some of the biggest names in the Joomla! world as well as companies in many, many different industries.
This book is a summary of many, many hard-earned tips and tricks we’ve perfected after troubleshooting and ranking so many Joomla! sites.
This eBook covers every aspect of setting up and optimizing your Joomla site to rank well in Google, Yahoo and MSN:
One of the questions I get asked most frequently is, “should I use an automatic metatag generator?”.
Should we leave our metatags for machines to create?
My answer depends on your website…
Continue reading “Should I Bother to Write Joomla Metatags?”
In the third part of our series on optimizing Joomla’s URLs, we’re going to take a look at Artio SEF.
Artio is the new kid on the block, having been in the hands of its current developers for less than a year. It has quickly earned a strong following with nearly 50 reviews on Joomla.org making it among the most talked-about extensions around.
Continue reading “Joomla URL Week Part 3 – Artio SEF Review”
Anyone like myself who spends all day online and browsing across many different websites, will be able to tell you one thing: “spotting an old-fashioned website is as easy as spotting an old-fashioned movie or car”.
Wheres an old movie may be in black-and-white and an old car may have a running board, its easy to spot old-fashioned websites because they contain something that looks like this:
These are hit counters, which increase by 1 every time a visitor comes to your site. They are the Ishtar and Yugo cars of the Internet. They are not only outdated but also a problem for your website. Let me give you three reasons why:
• The numbers only go up. If a website has 2 visitors in January and 1000 in February, that would be great. However, you could have 1000 visitors in January and 2 in February. That would be a big problem, in both cases the hit counter would say “1002”.
• They are ugly. See the picture for proof.
• They allow other people to see your visitor details. Your website data should be a competitive secret rather than being openly available.
Fortunately, there is are options that will allow you to collect information about your visitors in a much more detailed, unobtrusive and accurate manner. In this article, I’m going to talk about the most popular option:
Back in April 2005 Google purchased a small company called Urchin that provided data on who was visting people’s websites. Now Urchin was charging between $495 and $895 per website per month for it services. It took a while to Google to properly integrate Urchin’s software into its own setup but in August 2006, they announced that the previously expensive service was available for free, to everyone.
It really is great news and if you’re not taking advantage of this free service, you’re losing the opportunity to see a lot of valuable data about your website.
This is available from http://www.google.com/analytics/.
• Sign up for an account
• Click “Add Website Profile”
• Take the code that Google will give you and add it to every page on your website. The code will never show so people who not be able to see your visitor data.
There are over 80 unique reports available, showing everything from the location of your visitors from around the world, to which pages they used to enter and leave your site. It’s a powerful for everyone to learn more about their website.
Overall, we have installed the software on over 50 sites and have found these problems to be relatively minor in comparison to the usefulness and accuracy of the data that the program collects.
Flash is it allows a web programmer/designer to implement animated graphics, movies, and even sound at a website. It can be used to create an entire website or just small pieces. It is the tool used for some of the most creative websites yet seen by web users, such as LeoBurnett.com. However, its popularity has been challenged because of various problems experienced by users. In this article, I’ll talk about those issues and help you decide whether a Flash website is right for you.
This problem is not as big as it used to be. The number of web users who are able to view Flash has been steadily climbing. Currently around 95% of visitors will be able to see a Flash website.
True. Site such as LeoBurnett.com are such extraordinary endeavours that they can get some search engine traction simply because of the number of people admiring their work and linking to them. This is a problem with all but the best-designed Flash websites. Increasingly, cutting-edge designers are coming up with ways to enable search engines to index the content of Flash files. However, for most new Flash websites and for nearly all Flash websites designed more than two years ago, a good search engine ranking is impossible.
Also true, I’m afraid. Most people with Flash sites end up never updating them or relying on their designer to make all the necessary updates. On today’s Internet neither solution is really satisfactory, because fresh, regularly-updated content is the essential for a successful website.
Simply, because the content on a website is not that interesting, some people’s reaction is that Flash is the best tool to liven things up. However, boring information is boring information. Make sure that Flash is an extra bonus on your website rather than they key reason for considering your site “interesting”.
Normally, a well-designed Flash website will cost between $5000 and $10,000 which is about three times the cost of a static site. To me this is the key problem with Flash websites. A great Flash site can overcome almost all of the problems outlines above, but such websites are beyond the budget of all but the most wealthy companies.
Flash is a good tool to add dynamism to static webpages. However, unless you have deep pockets or very talented and generous friends, Flash should be restricted to playing a small role on your website.
As popular as Joomla is, its surprising how many gaps remain to be filled when it comes to having an extension to cover the needs of most normal websites.
We’re still searching for a decent jobboard, advertisment management and customer support component among other things. Until recently, we also lacked a good portfolio component. A quick browse around the Joomla world show that most designers have just been putting their site showcases inside of content items.
OK …. A very simple post today and a test to see how many people actually read this blog 🙂
One of my favorite things about working full-time with Joomla is that even though I spend 12 hours per day with my head buried in the software, there’s always another extension around the corner ready to do something so great that it expands what I think Joomla can do.
Continue reading “What’s Your Favorite Joomla Extension Discovery?”