Every Year Google creates a few April Fools “product” launches.

This year?

Google Mail in Blue, revolutonary!

And Google Nose, a special feature product.

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

Google has done several April Fools video’s and webpages in the past, they are at it agian today with these two options:

Where Google goes into the food sector with http://www.google.com/fiber

and this one:

They bring back Morse Code to get you into tapping your messages via http://www.gmail.com/tap

Don’t know how to get the right code? Try http://morsecode.scphillips.com/jtranslator.html

The big give away on this one was featuring LL Cool J alias Todd Smith

Try and do that yourself and create the same hype on the internet…

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

A few weeks ago the WordPress.com based Blog on Joomla Blogging and Seo 4 Joomla were closed down by WordPress.com for violating their Terms Of Service.

I also had a Dutch WordPress.com site shutdown and after an email to the people of WordPress that was brought back up. The problem with all three of the sites was the fact that they linked to my website about Joomla SEO, http://www.pathos-seo.com.

I removed the link from the Dutch site and it has been up ever since I did that. It seems WordPress.com has Blacklisted the Pathos SEO web and all that link to it from within their free blogging network.

For the other two blogs I didn’t want to send a t and request to get them back-up again. I decided to take the content and put it on a new domein and give the whole site a makeover and set som new focus as well.

So here it is, SEO 4 Blogs my new website on which I plan to write on Joomla, WordPress, Blogging and SEO. I hope you will like it.

For now the most works is done as I needed to find all the old images on my Harddrive and upload them again…

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

I recently finished my book on Joomla 1.5 SEO by Packt Publishing, you know the company behind several great Joomla Books and of course the Open Source CMS Awards.

One chapter in the book is about Joomla! Blogging and RSS Feeds. This chapter is now made free for you to download!

Use this link Joomla! Blogging and RSS Feeds to get download the PDF file.

Here is a Summary of Chapter 5:

• Why blogging is good for your Search Engine Optimization strategy
• How to set up a blog section in Joomla! and how to build a blogging menu and RSS Feed
• Why the use of comments and interaction with your visitors is important, and how you can handle spam and comments by the integration of Disqus
• The use of RSS Feeds and how to improve your Joomla! RSS Feed, using the Google FeedBurner service
• How to claim your blog on Technorati, and a short introduction of the commercial blog component MyBlog from www.azrul.com

I hope this free chapter will give you even more insight in the possibilities of Blogging with Joomla.

P.s. And if you want to buy the book after finding this chapter useful, I won’t hold it against you…

[easyazon-image-link asin="1847198163" alt="Joomla! 1.5 SEO" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51nVCScz87L.jpg" align="none" width="405" height="500"]

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

Joomlart.com released a new template called JA Uvite and it is really one of the greatest templates I have seen that you can use on a Joomla based Weblog.

The templates features some module’s in its footer that you could use for Related items, Recent posts and even for recent comments if you have a Joomla comment component and modules installed.

A great homepage setup like in their example makes this template one of a kind. I really like te colors and the way the modules are placed though out the page.

You can download the template if you are a member of the Joomlart template club, membership includes not only this template, but at the moment you have access to 100+ others and more to come!

It also includes 30+ extensions to get your Joomla website in even beter shape.

I think is a great deal for the great looking templates the put out every month. So here is another one:

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about MojoBlog, that the only thing missing with this Blog tool for Joomla where the SEF options to create nice SEF URLs, and missing the Title tag for each post.

Reading some posts from www.goodwebpractices.com and www.alledia.com I wanted to see if the options in the advanced settings of the SEF Component sh404SEF would help to overcome these MojoBlog problems.

It did!! and it wasn’t even that difficult, so I thought I would share this with you, so you can do the same…

Getting sh404SEF Component and Module ready

First of is getting the sh404SEF component to show you its real strength!
If you installed and use the sh404SEF component (please use the latest release), you will see this basic configuration screen:

And you see nothing there that can help you… now just click on the item next to this screen that says “select advance parameters:

After this, you will see a screen with some more items to use in this great SEF and SEO Component:

As you can see now, there are to items on this screen that you can use to get some great stuff for you MojoBlog posts.

But before you can get to work on those items, you have to make sure of one other very important item to be published!
The sh404SEF Custom module needs to be published!
You can find this module in the normal module overview of Joomla, and you only need to publish it.
The module is part of the sh404SEF Component installation, so you don’t need to install it yourself.

There are a lot of parameters below this screen, but you only have to set it to published, that’s it.

Creating the SEF URL

Once you have done the above things to get everything into place, lets start by creating a SEF URL for a MojoBlog post.

First go to the front-end, while making sure the site, or just the MojoBlog component is NOT showing SEF URLs. You need this to get the “old non SEF URL” to put into the settings.
If you have a post, it should say something in the last part of the URL like
“index.php?option=com_mojo&Itemid=63&p=5″
This will be different on your site

Copy this part of the URL and then go back to the sh404SEF Panel and click on:

And then choose “new” , this will bring up a field that will aks for that old URL and the new one.
Just copy the code from the previous step into the “Old URL” part and create a nice new one that should get into that place.
Please use “-” to connect the words
For the URL you can use the post title and you could leave out words like “and”, “for” and stuff like that for shorter URLs (Google ignores those anyway)
If you have set the option in sh404SEF that .html should be added to the URL, you can set it here as well.

Save the new URL and you are done with this part, you could check if it works already.
(Make sure the SEF Component is enabled an working again if you disabled it before)

Getting the Title and Metatags to  Work

You have seen another nice items in the sh404SEF Control panel… it says “Metatags”

Before you click on it, make sure you have the ”Old URL” you used earlier at hand, because you are going to need it here as well.

After you clicked on the above icon , choose “new meta” from the upper right-hand menu.

You will get a screen like the one below:

As you can see, the first file is where your old URL should go.
Below that you have the fields:

• Title: where you can write your HTML Title that will be picked up by Google
  This title is different form you post title and shows only in the Title bar of your browser.
• Description Tag: make this into a nice commercial description for you post
• Keywords tag: Keep this few in numbers and make sure those terms are in the post text
• Robots tag: Come in handy you want to doe some Follow, NoFollow or Index, NoIndex stuff
  Otherwise you can leave it empty.
• Language tag: only useful for multilingual installations.

If you are satisfied with your lyrics, save it and go to the front-end, selecting the post you just worked on, in the source code of that screen you should see the Title, description and keywords you just entered…

One final thing remains, but that is out of you hands…. wait for Google or other search engines to re-index you page so you can check if what you did is indeed what the robots will pick-up…

If you want so see if things work on a live example, go to Hummerbie Mojo Blog and check some of the posts.

P.s. One more tip… the “Old URLs” from MojoBlog contain the last code &p=10 (or another number) and that last number correspond with the post ID from MojoBlog. So if you know that number, you can use the old URL you copied and just change the last number.

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

Did you know you can assign different templates to different sections that are called on by your Joomla menu?

Let’s say you want your Joomla Blog categories to have a different Template then the rest of your website, how would you do  this?

First you have to create a menu item that holds your section, or the categories like you did in Creating your Blog Menu

Now go to “Site” -> “Template manager” -> ” Site Templates” and there select the template you want to use.
Then click the “Assign” button in the upper right menu of the screen.

Now you can select the menu item(s) that should show the different layout.

After that, you should see something linke the screen below.

Go to the Frontpage of your website, and try the link yourself, look if it works…it does…!

If you want to reverse the process, simply push assign again and choose the top choice “None”.

So, where could you run into trouble and how to fix it…. for this to work, you should select two (or more) templates that have the same modules like ” left”, “right” end other positions you want to use, since you can only assign a module to one position.

If you have a template that works the wrong way, you could try to chance position calls in the index.php of the template (via the HTML editor in your template manager) .
For example, your want your menu to appear in “left”, but your new Blog template only has a ” right” column.
Go into the Blog template HTML and simply change “right” into “left” and see how that works out.

I know, it is so simple, you just don’t think about it this way…

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

It recentrly came to my attention that ther was a Bug in the Productbook component < 1.0.3 that gets into an endless loop if you edit a categorie and select a categorie that is the same categorie.

That means if you already have one categorie and you start to edit it, you could select that categorie, or one on a higher level, to make it its own parent.

The easy way to fix this is to deinstall the component and install version 1.0.14 or higher

Unfortenatly if you already done this on an exiting installation you need to go into your PHPAdmin tool and change the faulty categorie back to the right toplevel.

Fxing a loop error in productboom categories

The table to edit is "jos_productbook_catg"

You will see the that the value of the lastest edit categorie for cid is the same as the parent.
Which will bring it into an endless loop…

Change the parent value to the right cid nr and save it, this should fix the loop problem.

Top prevent this thing from happening again, you should replace the file admin.productbook.php with the new version which you can download from the download section.

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

Today Joomla 1.5 Stable release is a fact, Just read the announcement form the Joomla Core team and Download your version form the Joomla 1.5 Files.

So how to move forward from here, and what will bring Joomla 1.5 use in SEO and SEF options?

I will not be writing about this release here, but on my own Joomla, WordPress and SEO Blog, because I don’t have the time anymore to update three blogs.

So if you want to keep getting great information on Joomla and Search Engine Optimization, make sure you get the RSS Feed of Joomla Search Engine Optimization.

I hope to see you there! I wil still monitor this blog and reposnd to comments, just no new posts…

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.

Today I found a great addition for the productbook component, which as a very pleasant suprise, since I am very busy with other projects and website building for customers.

The Productbook menu module

The Module of Phoca can be seen active on the right site, and will display all categories and sub-categories defined and published in the productbook component.

If you want to use this module, please check the download and information link:

http://www.phoca.cz/phoca-productbook/

The only problem I had with istallation was that I was missing the images, but from the upzipped package you can upload them with your mediamanage right into the images folder of Joomla itself.

A big thank you goes to Jan Pavelka of www.phoca.cz .
They also have some great Joomla 1.5 components! So be sure to check the website!

Want to read more in this topic? Go to SEO for Blogs.