Steve’s Blog

Getting Your Joomla Site into Google News

Bleacher Report We had great news from one of our clients during November. BleacherReport.com is just over a year old now and is regularly updated by a team of over 400 writers. They submitted their site to Google News and after being accepted, found that on average, their daily traffic has doubled.

The boost in traffic from Google News has been a daily roll of the dice – some articles have brought several thousand visitors to the site, while others have garnered only a few dozen hits. Typically, this is a reflection of the topic’s general popularity. Articles about the New York Yankees are always hits, while the Cleveland Indians are less so.

So how do you get listed? There are technical qualifications:

  • Have a unique URL for each page. Joomla does that.
  • The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The best solution is to include the year, month and date in the URL. Joomla does that with SEF Advance.
  • The homepage URL can’t change. Joomla does that.
  • Make sure that you’re links are in static HTML rather than images or Javascript. Easily done with Joomla and a good template designer.

And there are also quality qualifications:

  • Articles need to be of a decent length. At least 300 words seems to be the minimum and Google seems to prefer 500-700 word articles.
  • Daily, fresh content.
  • If you do include press releases and non-unique content, rewrite at least the headline and first paragraph and include a photo.

Click here to see what Google News makes of their site.

Read MoreGetting Your Joomla Site into Google News

Good News for those with Duplicate Content

Some good news today for those of you worried about the search engine rankings of your Joomla sites. According to an inteview with Vanessa Fox from Google, there will be no penalty for having duplicate content (that is: having many URLs pointing to the same page).

Joomla and other CMS systems often produce several duplicate URLs. According to Fox, you can use a Google SiteMap to tell the search engine which URL you do want listed. Otherwise the Google bots will do it for you and pick just one of your multiple URLs. Either way, there won’t be a penalty. 

Watch the interview:

Read MoreGood News for those with Duplicate Content

Joomla and Drupal – Which One is Right for You? Version 1

During the last few months, we’ve had a lot of clients who are have been after picking up on the buzz around CMS systems and Drupal and Joomla in particular. With the upcoming releases of Drupal 5.0 and Joomla 1.5, both systems are poised to make a big leap forward. However those launches may not happen for several months and many companies need to make a decision now, balancing the pros-and-cons of both solutions.

After talking and developing answers for several clients, we decided to put all we’d written into one document to help other people with this decision. Some disclaimers before we start:

  • This is not an Drupal vs Joomla discussion, but an open acknowledgement that each choice is appropriate for different sites. Sometimes we have to tell clients that neither will work for what they want.
  • This is not a comprehensive list. Please feel free to tell us what we’ve missed or where we are wrong. Add your own thoughts by post a comment.

Continue reading “Joomla and Drupal – Which One is Right for You? Version 1”

Read MoreJoomla and Drupal – Which One is Right for You? Version 1

Joomla Extension of the Month – December 06

Joomla Extension PrizeEvery month we try to dig out a Joomla! addon that:

  • can be really useful to people in the day-to-day running of the site
  • has been overlooked compared to more popular extensions
  • is free!

Our last two prizes have gone to mambots that successfully did jobs that are often done by much larger extensions (backing up the database and collecting RSS Feeds). This month the "Extension of the Month" is also given to a script that simplifies a difficult task – making forms. The winner is PerForms.

 

I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this, but it really is the successor to the last simple and effective Joomla forms component, which was AkoForms. 

 

With PerForms, we know that we can sit down with a client and get them creating and publishing their own forms inside of 30 minutes. We've tried to do the same thing with FacileForms, Phil-a-Form and there really is no comparison. Both of those extensions work, but they sure do take work (if you know what I mean!).

 

PerForms: easy, stable and now, a winner!  Click here to download it.

 

Read MoreJoomla Extension of the Month – December 06

Adding Headline Tags to Your Joomla Site

This week has been SEO week here at Alledia, so Friday afternoon must be time for another tip.

This one is deceptively simple and comes courtesy of Veloniue Petros over at http://velonis.gr. Over at the Joomla! forum he posted a deceptively simple solution to Joomlas lack of h2 and h3 headings. Google automatically thinks that it you have text wrapped up in headline tags then it must contain more important clues to your page contents than whatever appears in lowly paragraph tags

Unfortunately, Joomla! comes out-of-the-box with headings that are wrapped up in long ugly code. By changing a few lines in the content component, Veloniue has come up with an easy solution which h1 allows you to present your headlines in h2 or 3 tags. All the better for Search Engine Optimization.

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Advanced Search Engine Optimization

Most of you with experience of running a website have the chance to dig into the world of Search Engine Optimization. Basic tasks include making sure your keywords are correct, trying to get more sites to link to you and checking to see where you rank on Google. However, with competition online becoming fiercer by the year, many companies see the value in a more detailed and advanced SEO strategy. In this month’s column we’ll discuss two of the most useful techniques, building more than one site and concentrating on your inside pages.

Building More Than One Site

A lot of companies are taking the view that they need to do more than concentrate on their main website. Google rankings are notoriously unreliable and prone to sudden changes, and so smarter and larger firms are moving to reduce their risk by building multiple websites. (Bear in mind that this technique is in for people with quite a lot of time to spend on their company’s website and for firms with a longer term view of SEO.)

Imagine that you are a Car Parts dealer. Ranking well in search engines for the phrase “car parts” is an intimidating prospect. You have over 85 million references online for that phrase and many huge firms to compete with. So what’s a small company to do? You might decide to build several small sites each of which focuses on a smaller and less competitive niche. For example, you can build a site with information all about “transmission in Dodge vehicles”. The domain name does not have to be expensive or easy to remember – it need only be keyword rich. As we speak www.dodgetransmissions.net is available for registration.

Your company would then fill the site full of articles and information about the topic. There is no need to write everything yourself because there are plenty of articles available online that are free to use. Then repeat the trick with other highly specific phrases related to your business. Finally, link the sites together so that they are easy for search engines to find. Many of the more successful online companies have between 10 and 50 mini-sites like this.

You can then turn these mini-sites into profits in two ways. One method is to fill the sites with advertisements for your own company. The other method is to wait around a year for the site to mature. Then you can put Lesson 2 of Search Engine Optimization 2001 into action:

Concentrating on Your Inside Pages

The first goal of SEO is obviously to get the front page of your website ranking well in Search Engines. However, its common to have a website where only the homepage is ranked in Google. The remainder of your site is not bringing in any customers at all.
Here are several common remedies to fix this problem:

  • Ask people to link to your inside pages rather than your front page.
  • Once one of your mini-sites has been around for a year or more, redirect it to an inside page.
  • Write articles that will be of interest to a wider audience and submit them to online article directories. People will be able to republish them but legally require them to provide a link to the original page.
  • Buy domain names that have expired but are related to your business. To continue our car example, www.carloanexperts.info expired at the end of November with a Page Rank of 3. These can then be forwarded to an inside page of your choice, brining traffic and incoming links.
  • Make sure you keep an up-to-date site map and that each page can be reached from your homepage in just 2 or 3 clicks.

Read MoreAdvanced Search Engine Optimization

The Open Directory Endures a Lingering Death

Love it or hate it, DMOZ.org has loomed large of webmasters heads for years now, but it seems likely thats its days are numbered.

 

By clicking here you can read our article from early this year about the history of the DMOZ and its importance, but technical problems are threatening to render years of credibiliy obsolete in just a month. No new submissions are being accepted and editors can’t login. In fact, they are not even being told what the problems are. A group are publicly venting on this forum thread.

 

For a centerpiece of the web, DMOZ always seemed arcane and territorial with sites submitted to it system appearing, or not, anywhere from days to years in thh future. That has been a core problem and one that has helped to erode its influence, particularly with allegations of bribery for listings.

 

However, no major website can be out of service for a month and expect to retain its credibility. AOL is not a particularly healthy company and we have to wonder whether they want to spend time and money fixing it.

 

Some of you will cheer and celebrate over DMOZ’s coffin. Some will wonder whether the project was doomed from the start. Some think it died months or years. The end result is that SEO is more in your hands and less in those of a faceless editor. That can’t be a bad thing. 

(I must declare a interest: I am (was?) an editor for DMOZ.)

Read MoreThe Open Directory Endures a Lingering Death

SEO Problems to Avoid in Joomla!

This is one of an ongoing series of blog posts about problems with Joomla and SEO, and more importantly – how to fix them.

 

As we find time we're going to expand and merge these articles into a longer and more comprehensive guide to Joomla SEO. Watch this space.

  • Joomla produces your site name first and then your page title. For example, see this search.

 

Many Joomla sites will look like this when the ideal situation would be to have everything reversed:  Datso Gallery User Tab Plugin Released. Joomlapolis – the home of Community Builder. That way people could easily read what the page was about and it would rank better in Google.

 

Solution: JPromoter, or if you don't want to spend the money, keep your site title and page to a maximum of 35 characters.

  • Duplicate Content. This is a huge problem. I would definitely recommend:
  1. Turning off Print and PDF buttons because Google indexes these as new pages with the same content. Email buttons can stay.
  2. Checking all your modules to see whether they cause similar problems. We have found that AJAX Recommend is one module that does this.

Read MoreSEO Problems to Avoid in Joomla!

What’s the Warning in my Joomla Global Configuration?

Among the new features in Joomla 1.0.11 was a warning that displayed on the Global Configuration page. Its also one of the most common things we are asked about.

 

The main issue is security. When you're running a PHP script you need to know where your variables are coming from. If you turn registerglobals off this prevents users to your site from inputing their own variables. By doing this they can override your password variables and login to the restricted areas of your site.

 

By turning registerglobals OFF you can ensure that your script is in charge and not the hacker visiting your site.

 

More information is available here: 

 

Read MoreWhat’s the Warning in my Joomla Global Configuration?