Steve’s Blog

March Update to Search Engine Optimization Test

As reported in earlier posts (launch post, first update and second update) we’re running a test comparing the search engine optimization capabilites of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.  We created three sites, Jabalpur.net.in (WordPress) Amritsar.net.in (Drupal) and Vadodara.net.in (Joomla). Each website was created with a similar amount of content, similar Overture results and a similar domain name. Within two weeks the WordPress site was so far ahead that it looked as if they competition was over. Slowly however, Drupal and Joomla have recovered until they now lead the pack. The Joomla site now has 5 top ten rankings in every search…

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Is Social Networking Right for Your Site?

Five things to consider before adding social networking features to your site, or even more seriously, launching a 100% social networking site: It is absurdly difficult to monetize even a very successful social networking site. Facebook has a click-through rate on its ads of 0.04%. That means they need 1 million page views to generate 400 clicks. If those clicks bring in 40 cents each, they’re looking at 1 million page views just to earn $100. MySpace has a CTR (click-through rate) of 0.10%, which is equally useless. The problem is that people who spend a lot of time on…

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Free Joomla Templates and Great CSS Advice

Its great to see people in the Joomla community taking the time and effort to build free sites that are genuninely useful resources. Today, I’ll highlight two of the very best: Joomla24.com  Back in the Mambo days, when I was first investigating Mambo there was one place go to in order to find quality, free templates – Mambohut.com. I spent many hours learning how to design for Mambo by downloading and tearing apart designs from that site. Since the move to Joomla, that site hasn’t been update very regularly and so its great so see a new site provide such…

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Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 3

MoonRay, one of the developers over at Joomlaspan.com has been developing a lot of useful tools for Joomla. We use his Google Translation module on the right side of our site, and it really gets a lot of heavy usage.   He uses the Simple Machines-Joomla Bridge on his site and has been kind enough to publish a tutorial, explaining how to overcome metadata problems caused by the integration. You can see the results live at Joomlaspan.   Click here to read Moonray’s tutorial.   

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Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 2

 Yesterday we compared the metadata produced by three different forum setups for Joomla sites:   Simple Machines integrated with Joomla Simple Machines unintegrated with Joomla VBulletin   Today, we’re going to take that a step further and see how well these forums suceed in getting the posts indexed. We’ll also see how many of those posts end up in Google’s regular index and how many end up in Google’s supplemental index where most searchers will never find them. (Click here to find out more about the supplemental index.) How did we calculate these figures? Total Posts. We went to the…

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Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 1

Now that Joomla has been around for 18 months, some of its forums are starting to get pretty big. They are becoming potentially huge SEO assets for the accompanying websites. Although not comprehensive, this is a list of some of the biggest Joomla forums: Joomla.org: 720,130 Posts (SMF – not integrated) Joomla.de: 390,000 Posts (VBulletin) Rockettheme.com: 42,377 Posts (SMF – integrated) Joomla.fr: 27,035 Posts (VBulletin) Joomlashack.com: 17,166 Posts (SMF – integrated) Mosets.com: 16,166 Posts (VBulletin) J-Prosolution.com: 13,292 Posts (VBulletin) Joomlart.com: 9,109 Posts (VBulletin) One thing that immediately becomes evident is that only two of these eight forums are actually integrated…

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Dashes or Underscores? Setting up your Joomla SEO

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard the great news that the default version of Joomla 1.5 will produce more Search Engine Friendly URLs than the current package. The forum post has turned from happiness to suggestions about what the new URLs should look like. One of the key questions was whether underscores should remain in the URL or if dashes would be better. Should URLs be www.joomla.com or should it be www.joomla.com ? The answer is simple:  Dashes are better for searching. Matt Cutts, the Google engineer, gives a technical explanation of this on his blog. Dashes are…

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Why Does Google trust some Joomla Sites more than others?

Search for Joomla (click here to try it) and you get something that has been apperaring more and more in Google search results. Joomla.org is at the top with four extra links underneath: Obviously, this is a pretty good situation to be in for any site, not only in the number one position for a search term, but with top 5 results. So how do you get this benefit, which Google calls "Sitelinks". Well, there are certain requirements that your site needs to meet, which Google explains here. Basically, they say your site needs to be useful for visitors and…

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Why I’d Love Joomla Developers to Stop Encoding Components

Those of you who know me realise I rarely, rarely get worked up ….. I think this is the first time I’ve used this blog to blow off steam. Its so rare, I’ve even had to create a whole new blog category for this. Anyway, the last couple of weeks I’ve been frustrated one recurring problem – encoded components. This issue has come up in three different situations:

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