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joomla

Joomla Training-Setting up a Banner

by Charles Grimm on April 30, 2010

If you work in Joomla CMS , at some point you may want to set up a banner in your website.  Below is short video done sometime ago when we had a social small business training community named QuestSocial.com. This community has since been reshaped and re branded as eMediaPlace; a community for Search Marketing and eMedia people to connect.

I had some feedback the other day that suggested it may be a good idea and useful to some to add more training videos to this blog.

If you work in joomla or word press and are have some challenges let me know and I may put up a short training video that addresses those focus areas.

Your comments or remarks will help give suggestions as to future training videos. Thx C

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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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Top Rated SEO Tools for Joomla

by Charles Grimm on August 3, 2009

If you like this Article… Cast your vote on Sphinn Sphinn

These are some of my must have tools to be installed for Joomla 1.5. If you are small business building an IN House CMS website or a web developer, using Joomla, I suggest looking at these top Rated tools to get your site optimized, verified and tracked quickly.

These are pretty much straight out of the box with very little configuration or modification necessary.

1.       JoomSEO

Developed by Phillip Brown – JoomSEO is a Search Engine Optimization BOT making Joomla content more Search Engine Friendly. JoomSEO dynamically creates meta keywords, meta descriptions, changes the title on the fly, adds heading tags to content titles and more…..

2.      Google Verify

Developed by Michiel Bijland – Small Plugin to make Google Webmaster Tools site verification a bit easier. Works with the Meta Tag method and no template adjustments are needed. This is ideal for website with multiple templates or demo sites, no templates adjustments needed when you add a new template this plug-in ….

3.       Missing Meta data Module

Developed by Dan Rahmel - Missing Metadata module adds a panel to the Control Panel of the Joomla Administrator interface that lists any published articles that have empty meta description or meta keys fields. Search engines (particularly Google) use the meta description text as the summary text for site-listings displayed in search results. Any articles that fail to include this metadata will suffer…..

4.       Big Shot Google Analytics

Developed by Kenneth Crowder – This Plug-in will add the Google Analytics Tracker Code to your site automatically.

5.       JoomlaWatch

Developed by Matej Koval – JoomlaWatch allows you to watch your website visitors and bots in real-time from the administration menu. Especially their IP addresses, countries they come from, geographical location on a map, which pages they are viewing, their browser…..

See more resources and links on optimizing your Joomla ROI

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In House web development for small business

by Charles Grimm on July 21, 2009

Can you build a professional website and manage your own SEO in house?

Yes. I can say this because of the great free enterprise system we live in. There are those that believe that information should be available and not controlled by large software corporations. Mentioning no names here! The small guy should have a chance especially since the small bootstrap startups in this country are the very ones that take the risk to create the good ideas. So, they need a break – thus open source technology and content management systems. Used by multinational corporations and small business alike. Open source is freely available for use by the General Public under the (GNU) General Public License. Great technology built by smart people donating their talents from around the world.
So do not delay. The site builder website that you have through one of those mass market hosting companies will not do your time justice. Plus you don’t really own it and it will never have the professional reach that most people really want.
If you want to find out more register in the QuestSocial community and start accessing tools, website training, SEO videos and lots more. ?

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In House SEM & Content Management Systems

by Charles Grimm on May 23, 2009

I find I am having a lot of conversations these days about cutting costs to the bone. People are giving up a lot of personal conveniences and little luxuries (like the morning latte) to save money.

I’m finding, with businesses especially, the smaller companies and self employed individuals; want more control over their costs.

Business owners as a rule have a lot to juggle; sales, marketing, purchasing, overhead and more. They need to have a basic working knowledge of how these systems work in order to know whether they are working correctly, or if the person in charge is doing a good job.

One persistent theme though, is increasing sales and maintaining or lowering costs.

Thus my point, website development, maintenance and the ongoing marketing to make this new medium work is a perplexing decision for most business owners. There are just too many options to get a handle on the ongoing development of a website and Internet marketing. I have been doing this for 10 years, and getting to understand the “nerd department” (I have become a bit of that myself) and there culture has been a challenge to say the least. Heck, my background is marketing and economics. So there in lies the difference.

To get a handle on your new marketing program you have two clear options: either try and understand this new culture yourself in order to hire the right Website and Internet Marketing company; Or, work with an in house staff member and train them to mange your web and marketing program.

The tools are now available to manage the output and costs economically in house without having to be a web developer or Internet Marketing expert.

You can now take charge of your web program and have a very sophisticated business website to build business. This program is used by small startups to large multi national corporations.

For more information on how you can take charge of your web program call 386-690-1800 or email info(at)mediawright.net. Cheers

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