Joomla SEF – An Amazing Support Story

I’ve just written the statement below as a review on extensions.joomla.org, but thought I would also post this here because I’m so impressed with the support I just received, the quality of the extension, and I want the JoomlaBear community to know about it.

I also want to give you all a heads-up about what I consider to be the new heavy-weight Joomla SEF extension that you should consider using over the other big names in SEF URL’s.

I’m switching to AceSEF because it’ faster and the support is amazing – It’s the type of support we give out at JoomlaBear, a willingness to get in and sort things out for our users. And this type of support is rare.

Below is my review of AceSEF:

I just had the best support experience I have ever had with anything related to Joomla. I contacted JoomACE via live chat to ask a couple of pre-sales questions – mainly to find out if AceSEF would be able to handle everything I needed for a Joomla/K2 installation.

A polite and courteous individual helped me through all my questions via Live Chat – and very promptly too.

So I went ahead and setup AceSEF and found that a feature I had wanted for SEF and K2 was not working the way I wanted – Please note, not a fault with AceSEF but a special requirement for my site – a URL format that would not be typical for most users (I’m pedantic about these things

So I got back on the live chat with JoomACE and within minutes their developers were logging into my Joomla installation and adding a new feature to the extension! AMAZING SERVICE!

I can’t recommend this extension highly enough – I’ve used sh404SEF on over 100 Joomla sites that I have built in the past 3 years – But I’m switching to AceSEF – It appears to run faster, and the support…  need I say anymore?

Final note – I’ve spent days testing various SEF extensions and hacking the sh404SEF extension for K2 – nothing worked properly – AceSEF solved all my K2 SEF issues out of the box and is the BEST option if you are using K2 and Joomla – in my opinion.

Give it a whirl.

AceSEF Control Panel Screenshot

SEO, Social Media and Getting Keyword Targeted Backlinks

Chances are if you have stopped by this blog you are probably looking for some kind of Joomla template. You can find our templates by visiting the home page.

Today’s post however is something a little off the beaten track – I’m going to talk briefly about Joomla 1.5 SEO, Social Media and the best option to drive more traffic to your site with less effort.

The inspiration for this post comes from my friend Griz who has just published an excellent article on SEO and Social Media, and the summary of this comes down to one thing – Get Keyword Targeted Backlinks.

I’ve been a follower of Griz’s blog for nigh on 2 years now and I can say from experience that his methods work. I have put into practice much of what Griz teaches and have seen the results.

At this point you should really go and read the article yourself, if you have not already, because Griz is incredibly insightful, and eloquent to boot. However I will summarize briefly – the crux of it all is don’t waste your time on social traffic. At least not if you want a steady stream of traffic that converts into sale or leads.

Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc are incredibly over hyped at the moment – yes they provide a nice way for people to interact and share photo’s etc – but when people go looking for a product to buy, for example a Joomla Template, how do you think they do this?

They don’t typically log into facebook and ask all their high school buddies who they haven’t seen for 10 years where the best place to buy a template is – they get on Google and they type in the keywords.

And how do you rank your site highly in Google?

Again you should see my friend Griz on this topic -  but it generally boils down to how many links you have back to your site and the quality of those links.

You do want to get your on-page optimization correct, and I have written a post on this that I linked to at the top of this page with the anchor text Joomla 1.5 SEO – this should give me double indexing in Google (again see Griz). There are some extensions that will help you get the right page titles, H1 tags, etc – and you do want relevant content – but beyond this it’s all about the links.

If you want to talk to me directly about link strategy I am always happy to chat. Leave a comment or use the contact form.

Using The Joomla Search Engine Friendly Patch (Video Guide)

Today’s video is again quiet long winded, I apologize in advance I’m still getting the hang of this… We cover the most important enhancements that the Joomla Search Engine Friendly Patch provides to help you improve your Joomla SEO (Also known as the SEF Patch for short). Links and some important notes below video.

You can download the SEF patch from Joomla At Work.

View the template demo at http://chromatic.joomlabear.com/

IMPORTANT: I don’t talk about this in the video but you must use FTP to upload the patch files and replace core Joomla files. You can’t install this like an extension. I don’t generally approve of ‘hacking’ Joomla like this – but for the SEF patch I make an exception because the features shown in the video are essential, in my opinion.
Also note that when you update your Joomla installation in the future the patch files will be overwritten again by Joomla core files and you will need to grab the latest SEF patch and reapply before your SEO modifications are live again. A pain I know, but until Joomla includes HTML title editing in the software I will keep using the SEF patch. Rankings = Traffic, need I say more.

Another thing I do not make clear in the video is that modifying the Title Tag parameters in mainmenu > home is a function that you can apply to any menu item – not just the home page – sorry about that the way I phrase it you would think it’s just a home page thing.

And lastly I don’t state that by updating the Black Bear Chromatic Title Tag this will also be visible in Google eventually – but not until Google re-indexes our Joomla template demo.

Thx for listening – If you have something you’d like to know about Joomla! then leave a comment and I’ll consider it for the next Joomla Video Tutorial.

Managing Spam Comments In Wordpress and Joomla

Some of the sites  mentioned in this post belong to friends of mine who use Wordpress not Joomla – However the same issues apply to those of us who run Joomla sites and choose to use a comments plugin.

My friend RT has written an interesting post on the pros and cons of dofollow versus nofollow.

His post sparked quite a bit of discussion on the issue and many commented on the large amount of spam that ensues when a blog is ‘dofollowed’. Frank Carr also pointed out that when he ran dofollow on his earn online cash blog his site was then picked up and added to various ‘dofollow’ blog list around the interweb – this in turn resulted in poor quality traffic and a deluge of spammers.

So what can you do? Well it seems the tide may be turning against dofollow amongst its stalwart followers, I have been a supporter but sadly reverted to nofollow a few weeks back – the spam was just overwhelming me. When you run dofollow many of the spam posts will be from real people, not bots, and spam filters have a very tricky time picking these up.

Akismet has actually worked quite well for me. I have a blog where I played with feeding RSS feeds into wordpress posts – using the wp-o-matic plugin.

I didn’t really check the comments on the blog for a few months as the project was just an experiment on something very different… But when I did look a couple of months later there were 900+  comments in the queue!

So I installed Akismet, which is a wordpress spam filter that provides a ‘check for spam’ button in the comments window. This scans all your existing, unapproved comments, not just the new ones.

Akismet moved all but 3 of the 900+ comments to the spam folder.

I did a double check by manually looking at 3-4 pages in the spam folder and they were definitely spam. The 3 non-spam comments were valid.

Akismet did a good job in this case.

If you are using Joomla this may end up being a major issue for you as all the comment components are 3rd party, and to my knowledge none have particularly robust spam moderation features.

Do let me know if you are running comments in Joomla and have any interesting methods to combat spam, has anyone looked at implementing Akismet for Joomla?

Connect Content – Increase Web Traffic In One Week

Update: The network described below has passed to new owners and resides at another URL – however the founder, whom I have a lot of respect for, is currently working on another interesting project that allows users to post articles.

This is a quick update on my progress with ConnectContent and the increase in web traffic, and earnings,  I’ve achieved in only one week.   For those who haven’t read my introduction to Connect Content you could take a look now.

In brief, Connect Content provides a unique way to exchange links with a large pool of users. Links are one way and are not exchanged directly. There is a large pool of people inter-linking and links are not reciprocal.

In the traditional reciprocal link analogy User A would link to User B and User B back to User A.

Using Connect Content User A might link to User Y, User Y  to User E, User E links to User Z, and so on.

Additionally there is a rule that links must be within a post of approx 150 words or greater. This is great because search engines tend to give much more weight to links within content, as opposed to a blogroll list or those sites that have 20 links in the footer.

Connect Content is all about connecting people with content to other users with relevant content, just as the name suggests! Because of this the process is fairly white hat, meaning you are unlikely to get penalized by the search engines for taking part.

Finally the Connect Content network costs just$12 per month to join, The fee has been put in place only to deter spammers and general rif raf. Other networks that enable users to get one way links cost in the region of $150 per month. Connect content is costs a negiligable amount of money.

So on to the good stuff, my increase in web traffic in only one week! And a general report on the links I have been given back to sites in my portfolio.

I’ll start by letting you know I have more than 10 sites that I run. Connect Content definitly represents the best value to web masters with a strong portfolio of sites – however even a user with 2-3 emerging sites can still benefit greatly.

So in just one week I have received 8 links in total to 6 of my sites.  2 sites have 2 backlinks each. And the links are great! People with sites on similar or complimentary topics have taken the time to write succinct posts on my topics and publish them on their own sites.

In return I have reviewed 9 sites in the Connect Content network and linked back to them. It’s kept me quite busy but it’s been fun and there has been a real reward.

On one of my 6 sites that received high quality links back I experienced a 50% increase in traffic and a 300% increase in adsense revenue.

On a second site that is only one week old I have received just one link back so far from the Connect Content community but I have managed to get the site listed in Google and am receiving 5-15 visitors per day from the search engine. Let me expand on that, I registered the domain name for this site only 9 days ago, had a blog up with around 5 articles, 3000 words of content in total and I have this site listed on google and recieving visitors within only a week on the network.

The above two examples illustrate the power of backlinks.

Some of the other links back to my sites may take some time to get picked up by Google as the mighty G tends to index sites more or less often depending on number of factors, primarily how important it thinks the site is (how many people link to you) and also how often the content is updated, or how ‘fresh’ your content is. In my experience a site liek our joomlabear.com gets indexed every 1-2 days by Google. Mainly because we have over 800 links back from people who use our templates (thank you to all the people who link back to us – we really appreciate it). We also update content on the site as regularly as possible – and if we are not writing content there is always activity in the forum and on the blog.

Anyway – if you are a webmaster with a few sites you want to push and you don’t mind writing some content and linking to other relevant sites then give Connect Content a go.

I honestly believe you won’t be disappointed.

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