A very happy holiday season to all of you. We’re hard at work adding new features to Alledia.com and you can already start to see some appearing in the right-hand menu. Sharp-eyed readers will see some improvements appearing in the right hand column already. We’ll have the complete lowdown on January 1st. We aim to make 2007 an interesting year on the Alledia blog and we hope it will be great for all you readers too.
Ever get stuck in that situation when you’re too busy on other people’s sites to concentrate on your own? We did. Its been too long, but we’ve finally got a decent portfolio online. It doesn’t contain everything we’ve done but hopefully it will give you a good idea of what we’ve been up to and what we’re capable of. We used NeoReferences, the great new component from NeoJoomla.com to get up and running. Click here to visit the Alledia Portfolio.
A great blog post over at ModernLifeisRubbish.co.uk yesterday about how good hosting can really help your Search Engine rankings and about how bad hosting and site optimization can cause you a lot of trouble. Stuart Brown got onto this issue after discovering a little noticed set of statistics in Google’s Webmaster toolbox. Basically, Google is keeping track of how fast your pages load. Heres how to find those stats:
A quick little tutorial to show how to add a little RSS button to the browser bar when people visit your site. Go to Run-Digital.com to get their RSS Feed Manager for Joomla! (Click here to get it). Install it as a component. Take the url of your RSS feed from the component and go to FeedBurner.com. Sign up and register your feed. They should give you an easy to remember and customize URL. Ours is simply: Add the following code to the head of your template: If you want different RSS Feeds available on each page you will…
I was online looking for a printer the other today and took to browsing through Hewlett Packard’s search results. After flicking through for a while, something started to feel odd? Wasn’t there a big scandal in the news about HP recently? Where was it? Everything seemed rosy in the Search Engine results. If you search for "Hewlett Packard" you need to go to page 6 on Google to find even the first mention of the corporate spying scandal that hit the company in 2006. Yahoo is even kinder. You need to go to result #264 before you find the faintest…
Today we're building up to a little Search Engine Optimization competition we're going to be running over the next year. We're curious to see how WordPress, Joomla and Drupal stack up against each other in a fair SEO fight. The Study: Launch 3 sites: Amritsar.net.in (Drupal), Jabalpur.net.in (WordPress) and Vadodara.net.in (Joomla!) Make them as similar as possible. Each site has 8 articles of 500 words. Each site has had some keyword and title optimization. Each city is of a similar size and has comparable Overture results. Choose a relatively uncompetitive field (Indian cities) so that each domain has…
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…
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. …
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…
Every 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…