SEO

• How to remove the Joomla generator tag - reloaded

  Why you should do that? Humm, there are arguments why yo should get rid off or keep it, but it's a matter of personal choice, mainly. The methods to removing the meta name generator tag for Joomla varies between versions. I discussed couple of ways to do it  in an earlier tip. Here is a new one, working in Joomla 2.5!

• Increase your Joomla site's SEO score with sh404SEF

  If you think, that is enough to build a nice site with a great content to have lots of visitors flowing to your site you're wrong. There are millions of webmasters trying to do the same. And Google and other search engines simply can't find, index and sort all of these sites, and show them to your potential visitors. So you need to do a little more to help these search engines - and to help yourself!

• iPad and Joomla

  The Apple iPad is the buzzword of the day, and probably will stay on the top of many people's wishlist on the top - or near to the top. The iPhone's big brother arrived in early 2010, and Apple has sold a huge number of devices already. The iPad is a success, and as a mobile device for consuming information it's really great.

  So how does this relate to your reality as a Joomla developer? In short: You need to make sure that your Joomla website works on the iPad. And not just that it works. It should be a delight surfing your website on the iPad. On a previous tip I touched already the subject, here are more tips on how you can build an iPad-friendly Joomla site.

• Joomla SEO with Dublin Core

  Using Dublin Core Metadata for Search Engine Optimization is a practice often overlooked by Joomla (and non-Joomla) webmasters and self-proclaimed SEO gurus alike. Bad enough, because embedding Dublin Core metadata elements in your web pages provides a standards-based approach to search engine optimization that boosts your SEO score and complements your HTML meta-data.

• Joomla Site Statistics

  Are you a good webmaster willing to see how your site are performing? Or you're a web developer in need to show to your client how their brand new/re-branded/tweaked/SEO/SEM mastered site is performing? If the answer is yes, you may already know, that web statistics is a powerful resource. And there are a lot of Joomla packages to help you. So, why you are reading this, instead of grabbing one and using it?

• Just turned SEF on and inner page images where gone

  Did you had this experience? Couple of days ago I just turned on SEF and the inner pages began to act weird - images disappeared, modules misbehaved, scripts weren't loaded...

  My first reaction was that I have set something wrong... or the SEF component I used have a flaw. After few days of digging I found that the issue has a much simpler cause.

• Leverage browser caching

  One of the most easy ways to make your Joomla website faster is to leverage Joomla browser caching. This is one of the high priority tasks recommended by Google to make your website load faster.

• Misterious "Bad Certificate" error when you click on certain inner links

  One of my clients, who have serious Joomla background complained recently, that on his brand new Joomla site when he clicked on one of menu items his browser raised the well known "Bad Certificate" error. The site obviously worked well, but for some reason the link to that inner page was created using the https:// prefix.

  Obviously, he had no valid security certificate in place - as many sides does not have these days, but the menu entry being an inner, Joomla generated link he (and myself, for some... 5 minutes approx) was dazzled, what might happened?

• Not Traffic On Your Joomla Website? THIS Might Be Why [2019 Joomla SEO]

• Problems geting SEF URL's work on 1&1-s servers

  Your Joomla site is hosted on 1&1? Great!... Or not so great? Yea, I know the feeling, I had that experience too. All worked just fine (almost) until I decided to kick in the SEF engine, and use the .htaccess redirect, as I suggested elsewhere. And the disaster stroked...

• SEO DOs And DONT’s, According To Google

  Changes to Google’s algorithm have the ability to make or break businesses. Google is sending out the signal that you should worry less about the current SEO trends, and more about producing great content, and that they’re “leveling the playing field” for sites that don’t pay as much attention to SEO. Obviously great content is a positive, but at the same time, Google is showing us each month all of the changes it is making, and all the while, providing tips about how to do certain SEO things better.

• Sitemap in robots.txt

  Are you a SEO-conscioncious webmaster? Of course, you are!

  And you already have a nice, standards-compliant XML sitemap! Congrats! (Maybe you used a Joomla component to generate it on the fly - Brilliant!) You even had submitted it to the Google! Great! And you think you can enjoy from now that well-deserved pina colada, right? Hold on, you have some important tasks to do!

• Stopping Google from indexing e-mail links

  Recently one of my clients - who are still believing in "Page Rank Sculpting" whatever this may mean - asked me to stop Google from indexing some of links Joomla generates. Most of them are easy to "patch", using various tools (sh404SEF, Marco's nofollow plugin), the most problematic one (for me, of course) was the E-mail this button on the top of the article.

• The 301 redirect

  Just upgraded from a static site to Joomla? Or just reorganised your content? And, of course, you don't want to loose your existing Google PageRank and your external links...

  What you can do?

  301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently". This is the solution Google recommends for webmasters to keep their ratings.

• The most common Joomla SEO mistakes

  Mastering the Web is a never ending learning process. You can learn from both good and bad examples. Unfortunately most of us are learning from their own mistakes. A well known situation is that you got a brand new Joomla site, latest tricks, stunning design, appealing content, but you miss a key ingredient of the success: the Visitor. And you've wondering, why they aren't coming, despite your SEO efforts as sending out marketing e-mails to your closest 10.000 "friends" and spending nice money in buying incoming links and lots of postings on every imaginable social marketing site, blog and forum. It's not obvious, but the problem may be in what you did, and not in what you missed. Anyway, here's a mix of things usually Joomla webmasters are doing wrong. Learn from, and try to avoid these most common mistakes!

• The pharma hack

  The Paharma Hack (or Blackhat SEO Spam Hack) is a very elaborated hack wich is often unobserved for the regular visitors - and website owners - because does an ingenious trick: present a different version of your site for the searchengine bots. The site, for a long period of time looks and behaves normally for the regular visitors. This attack is very interesting because it is not visible to the normal user and the spam (generally about Viagra, Nexium, Cialis, etc) only shows up if the user agent is from Google’s crawler (googlebot). Also, the infection is a bit tricky to remove and if not done properly will keep reappearing. It's one of nastiest hacks you might have. We recommend hiring a specialist to remove it, because generally the infection reappears in no time after the site is "cleaned".

• The site name/title

  There is a setting in the Joomla site configuration, which is often overlooked or used to hold allmost nothing, in best case the URL of the site, the Site Name. You're asked during the install to fill the respective field, and you generally have no clue what to write in that box.

  So, what's wrong with that? The site is working, regardless what you wrote there...

  You may think one can wrote here anything crosses his mind, right?

• The ten commandements of SEO for beginners

  Why don't have Joomla in the title of tis article? Simply because these are the basics, the cornerstone stuff any webmaster must learn and respect. If you want a successful site, you must follow these Ten Commandements.

• To SEF ot not to SEF - is this a question?

  I'm joking, of course, but this is a real issue - from SEO perspective is a "to be, or not to be" type of question. To have some humanly readable URL's is key for your SEO success these days. And if Google and/or Bing does not loves you.... you are on the "not to be" side.

• Tutorial for Joomla's JCE Content Editor