From the monthly archives:

October 2009

Search Marketing Conference

by Charles Grimm on October 21, 2009

I just got back from the SMX Conference – put on by Third Door Media and Search Engine Land. This conference provided a lot of updates to the Google, Yahoo, Bing scenario and brought all of us search marketers up to date regarding Google’s expectation of quality SEO and website development. After all they do own search; about 70% of the market.

Among the speakers was Vanessa Fox, (former Google master who built Webmaster Central), Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz and Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land. These SEO/SEM Pro’s along with many others brought all attendee’s a source of rich knowledge  of what is currently happening in the search marketing world as well as what we may expect to come!

Topics included SEO, Local Search, Web Analytics, Social Media, In House SEM  and much more. The neat thing about the search industry is that it spans the range of talent from In House Departments and Agencies to small business and large multi nationals. One thing that was evident, though, was that if you are in business today you will have to start embracing the search marketing industry.

The great news is that the level of metrics available now and developing is so much more superior to the old school tracking given by the direct mail, radio and T.V business. A small business owner can now really start to qualify and quantify his marketing efforts regarding return on investment (ROI).

There is clearly much to be gained by search marketing whether you are a small business or a large corporation. I am not prone to creating controversies just for the “media buzz” and back links however I will say, I think small business today is finally gaining a strong competitive advantage to those large branders who hold chunks of market share.

So my message to independent contractors and small business owners is dig in and put together a professional CMS website with SEO. Combine this with a basic Internet Marketing Plan and you will start seeing significant results in your internet marketing efforts.

If you have any questions on SEO (search engine optimization), search marketing or In House Web Development contact me or leave your comments below. I am always looking for feedback on how I can assist small business In House marketing efforts.

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The Science of Happiness

by Charles Grimm on October 20, 2009

A couple of great quotes I came across when reading the book “Healthy Aging” by Dr. Andrew Weil.

From the Greek philosopher….Epictetus a former slave who developed the Science of Happiness. He taught people to live in accordance with nature and to unlearn the habit of judging everything that happens as good or bad , and to distinguish what is within your power to change and what is not.

” Make the best use of what is in your power, take the rest as it comes.”

“The thing that upsets people is not what happens but what they think it means.”

A well known expression of Epictetus’s philosophy is the serenity prayer much used by alcoholics anonymous and self help groups….”God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.”

One final thought on  happiness relates to optimism and laughter as some of the best medicine; both can be learned. In fact there is there is a physician from Mumbai India who stated a practice called “laughter yoga” where people get together in large groups in order to laugh together as a form of physical and mental exercise. p. 277 Healthy aging. In fact, this doctor is traveling around the world starting laughter clubs.

Lets take some of the sooo serious out of business…..Hey sign me up, sounds like a blast!

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Joomla SEO – Duplicate Content & 301

by Charles Grimm on October 13, 2009

If you work in Joomla a fair bit as I do, at some point you will be considering the best way to eliminate duplicate content.

Within the Joomla.org site there are a couple of options for the Joomla Canonical URL Tag that you may want to consider. These are pretty simple to use, yet I find not the most effective way to deal with duplicate content in Joomla.

Joomla Canonical and SEO extensions in general are not as effective as the WordPress SEO plugins. If you have a choice in building a client site that needs more SEO ease and effectiveness out of the box then wordpress is your best product.

Joomla however is great product for more functionality and really has a much more sophisticated open source CMS platform for easily building and maintaining more complex business websites.

So if your are building a dynamic CMS using joomla, I find the best way to solve your duplicate content issues is by employing one or both of these methods:

1. Do a .htaccess rewrite and /or 2. Do a simple redirect within your cpanel

1 .htaccess rewrite

This file is located in your public html (www) folder.

What this does. It rewrites your domain from http://yourdomain.com to  http://www.yourdomain.com

This is a permanent rewrite that will also be reflected in the address bar of your browser.

Add this script to your .htaccess.

#  mod_rewrite in use
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ “http://www.yourdomain.com/$1″ [R=301,L]

2. The Redirect

Since Joomla doesn’t have any good Free plugins for this yet, here is a paid extension I found but have not yet tried…Joomla SEO 301 Redirect.

However if you have access to your cpanel you have two easy and better options:

1. Do a redirect under ‘Addon Domains’ and/or 2. Do a redirect under ‘Redirects’

1. Add-on Domains
Use this if you have a parked domain on top of your site domain and you want to make sure that Google isn’t indexing your parked domain. Just follow the instructions in ‘figure A’.

Figure A

2. Redirects

Use this if you want to redirect individual duplicate content pages.

i.e http://yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=photos&return=aHR0c

to:

http://www.yourdomain.com/user/Charles-Grimm/photos.html

I know I have cut to the chase here pretty quickly, but if you have any questions or comments on SEO for Joomla please let me know in the comments area. Cheers C.

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