Steve’s Blog

Joomla Site Making Worldwide Headlines

Ever wondered how a Joomla site would handle a Digging or Slashdotting? Pretty well it seems as one Joomla site has been part of the world’s biggest news story during the last week. The Chaser, the Australian magazine / comedy show which upstaged Bush, Howard, Hu and the rest of APEC in Sydney with their fake motorcade, runs Joomla on their main site: thechaser.com.au. They use Virtuemart, Performs, Blastchat and a Rocket Theme template.

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Virtuemart SEO 5 – Metadata

Some components to a great job of incorporating basic SEO ideas giving you the chance to add metadata, unique page titles and more. Other components are so stubbornly opposed to basic SEO thats its best to just tell Google to ignore them altogether. Virtuemart is somewhere in between. Its has been getting better of recent months, but one area in which it still needs improvement is metadata – it doesn’t allow you to add any at all. Whats the solution? ….

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Virtuemart SEO 4 – Analytics

Google Analytics is far and away the most common statistics package for webmasters to use. Thats particularly true for ecommerce webmasters who often appreciate the fact that it integrates with AdWords. There’s one problem: using GA in a mambot or placing the code inside templates doesn’t work well if you’re using an SSL Certificate. Sometimes the tracking is lost and sometimes it leads IE to produce errors (usually pop-ups saying "Some parts of this page contain unsecure information. Do you wish to continue?")

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Virtuemart SEO 3 – Sitemaps

Today’s Virtuemart SEO tip is short and sweet: how to set up a sitemap for Virtuemart. First Choice By far the best choice is the SEF Service Map in combination with its Virtuemart plugin. After installing the SEF Service Map, download the plugin and upload it to This plugin provides quite a few options including the ability to show/hide products and categories, and show/hide product and category descriptions. It also includes a .txt site map for Yahoo.

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Virtuemart SEO 1 – Beware of the Modules

Every day this week we’re providing tips and tricks to help you improve the Search Engine Optimization of your Virtuemart shopping cart. Tip 1:  Beware of Virtuemart’s Modules 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.

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Upcoming Virtuemart SEO and Joomla Books Posts

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 🙂

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Fair Play Response From SerrBizSEF Developers

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:

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Fascinating Article About Embarrassing Search Results

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…

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