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Joomla SEO is not just about installing search engine friendly page plugins when you launch your Joomla site. We’ve put together a guide to a few of the things we look at when optimising a Joomla website.

Recently we launched a website for In House Clothing, a factory clothing supplier with outlets in Bakewell, Leek and Glossop. The brief meant we needed to implement a content management system, so being rather handy with it we built the site using Joomla. In House Clothing wanted to display the clothes that are available in-store and we decided the best way to do this was to use the Virtuemart E-commerce component for Joomla, but with the shopping basket turned off, essentially using it as a catalogue. The finished site is a clean, easy to use site that can be updated very quickly by the staff at In House Clothing.

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog seems to have banned one of the internet’s recent celebrities Jeremy Schoemaker from it’s site because he had the audacity to point out it’s flaws. Loads of SEO blogs are going nuts bout this, promising to boycott the site and writing all manner of horrible things about the people that run it. What’s the point though? Does a link from MyBlogLog really make that much difference in terms of SEO? And, outside of Western Geekland (where I must admit I enjoy living sometimes), has anyone even heard of MyBlogLog.com.
I guess they have now. Could it all be a case of extreme linkbaiting? “Let’s pick a popular internet user like Shoemoney, ban him and see how much publicity we can create for our site”. Hell, it got me to visit their site to see what it was all about (and frankly I didn’t see the appeal, but then I’m not a Myspace junkie either).

To those keen-eyed visitors who have returned to our website recently, you might notice that the main Netpromote site has undergone something of a re-vamp.
The entire site has been moved over to the Joomla content management system so that we can show our clients what it’s like to have a site that is scalable and easily updateable.
If anyone spots anything that’s not working, please contact adam AT netpromote.co.uk and let me know so I can fix it. Thanks.

http://www.rorweb.com/
This site is a nifty tool for creating structured feeds from your website. The idea is that the generic RSS format that many of us use at the moment does not really tell search engines the truth about most sites, and a structured XML feed would help the search engines see what is really important in your site.
They also have a free sitemap generator which is worth a look.

Like most people who run a blog, we’ve been plagued by comment spam recently. It has been taking time out of the working day to login to Wordpress and sift through all the rubbish looking for a real comment.
Today I’ve had enough and have installed the Akismet anti-spam plugin for Wordpress and because I know how effective it’s been on another blog I know I can relax and let the spam take care of itself.

With the continued growth of the Internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to keep up to date with all the information sources they are interested in. The Internet is a complex and rapidly changing environment and searching through known websites for new information takes a great deal of time. This is where RSS can help; with an RSS reader any Internet user can be told when the sites they are interested in have new content, without having to check each site. Also, free RSS reader services are readily available, which always helps to get new trends established! The growing popularity of RSS has great implications for both commercial and private use.

RSS will help businesses syndicate news to the web at a much faster rate. New content takes about two weeks to register with the present submission and link promotion processes. This takes too long for news stories, as by the time the page is listed the news section has moved onto different content. By releasing articles by RSS feed, businesses will be able to get more Google news listings, and keep subscribing customers up to date with their news, and industry news, via their RSS reader.

Taking this a step further, industry leaders could potentially evolve into the central news source for their industries. Many already collect relevant news items from around the web and supply that news to their employees and executive board. This can be extended to supply all this news through the one RSS feed, or by separating multiple feeds by subject, thereby supplying readers with all the news specific to their industry or interests.

Those businesses that provide RSS feeds will also be in a position to release timely counter stories when necessary, for example when stories about competitors or their industry go out in general news. This is also an excellent way for businesses to reply directly to any news article about them, as well as get their press releases out to a wider audience.

An RSS news feed could be used to send branded news to customers each day, keeping the company at the forefront of each customers mind and adding to brand recognition efforts. It could also syndicate the businesses news to the press as many journalists make extensive use of RSS feeds to keep up to date and to pick up on breaking news.

News articles can be published for reuse on other sites. Either the whole article, or a synopsis that the leads back to the main story on the home site, can be syndicated. The authors would retain the copy write of all articles and any site that used the article would have to link back to the originating site and provide full credits. This will allow businesses to softly advertise their expertise through news articles. It’s a valuable way to promote trust in businesses; recommendations from news sources rate amongst the most highly trusted after recommendations from colleagues and friends.

RSS content syndication is set to become a major trend in search patterns and we feel that companies of any size will reap benefits from getting involved with this as early as possible.

If you are interested in RSS for personal use, and do not currently subscribe to any RSS feeds, Google provide a free web based reader service called Google Reader, whilst still in beta testing it’s a relatively intuitive interface which can handle a large number of subscriptions effectively, the only immediately evident drawback can be a lag in adding new RSS subscriptions to your list. There are however many other, fully tested, blog and RSS readers available.

If you have any queries or would like further information on RSS, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

This book looks worth a recommendation for any businesses out there saying “I know blogging is there, but we don’t have any use for it”. As the web moves from being a place where you can upload your business brochure and call it a website to being a place where business is conducted through information and interactivity, Scoble goes into how you can apply blogging to your business.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/047174719X

When Google kicked out BMW.de from their index this week for cloaking, it made me wonder just how many large companies know exactly what their SEO company are doing on their behalf. I’m sure that when the SEO company in question approached BMW and suggested this was going to be their strategy it would have all appeared above board and would have been explained as the best way to get rankings for a graphically complex site like this.

The suits at BMW probably did not have a clue what was going to happen.

The SEO company on the other hand could not have failed to know that this could and probably would happen. So who’s responsible? Is it BMW for trusting people to just get on with their jobs and not corroborating the information with another SEO company, or is it the SEO person for really just being rubbish at their job. And have Google delivered just punishment, or should they actually follow the link trail back to the site of the SEO company that did this and make sure they are excluded from the index for promoting spammy SEO techniques?

It’s a wake up call to check up on what your SEO company is doing. If they can’t explain it, or you are not sure about what they are doing, it could be time to ask for another opinion.