qxdigital joomla blog

UK Based IP Hosting at Great Value

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:16:55 +0100

Recently I've been out hunting for new hosting - I think it's time to go dedicated! One of the top priorities on my shopping list is a UK based ip address to aid in my UK targeted SEO campaigns.

I came across Web Fusion. Their prices are unbeatable and some of the features are just perfect:

Unmetered bandwidth through their tier one network
24/7/365 support
Dedicated UK IP address
Full Root Access
Hardware RAID

The Unmetered bandwidth is a great selling point, and one they can supply at blinding speeds as WebFusion is part of the Pipex Communications Group.

I'll be testing their offering over the coming weeks, specifically their suitability for Joomla sites; I'll come back with a full rundown in the future.

Visit WebFusion now.

Read "UK Based IP Hosting at Great Value" at qxdigital...

Free Private Property Sales handled by Joomla!

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:43:44 +0100

The site I'm covering today is a fantastic example of what a skilled Joomla designer can do with a solid brief and some great components. The site I'm talking about is House Finder UK.

I came across this site a few weeks ago and couldn't believe it was a joomla site. At first glance you would have thought it was a totally custom job, the type that is common in this market. But as you delve into the site you realise that joomla has handled the brief perfectly.

Design wise it's just perfect - clean, simple and easy to navigate. Feature wise it's stunning, everything you could need from free property listings to information on property investments.

The site is aiming to attract UK property renters and buyers looking for their next home, and also those selling their homes. It allows individuals and agents to list properties on the site for free, a relatively new avenue in the lucrative UK property market.

With over 1000 properties currently listed either for sale or rent the site is definitely doing well.

Components

All property listings are handled by Mosets HotProperty. There seem to be some great modfications such as the great lightbox feature for property images, and the tabbed panes for the listing details.

They also use Virtuemart to full effect for the little extras such as featured listings and sign boards.

There is also a well designed and customized implementation of EasyFAQ.

Finally the blog on the site is produced using myBlog.

As you can see, all the components on this site have been totally css'd up to fit perfectly within the custom joomla template. It's this attention to detail that gives the site the custom feel that will ensure it stands out from the crowd in the market it operates.

Designers

The credit for the design and implementation of this site goes to non other than the great JoomlaJunkie. We've dealt with JJ on a number of Joomla sites and can definitely recommend them. If you want your site to stand apart from the rest you shouldn't look any further; their professionalism, design skills and joomla knowledge are top notch. House Finder UK is proof of that.

Read "Free Private Property Sales handled by Joomla!" at qxdigital...

Warning: If you don't use sh404SEF, you're losing traffic

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:20:22 +0100

This may appear quite a bold statement, but it's true - a totally standard joomla site will often suffer poor rankings in comparison to a flat html file competitor. This is down to the fact that with joomla it's hard to polish the seo basics such as title tags, SEF urls, meta descriptions and 'noindex' robot tags.

It's fair to say that of the four problems I've mentioned three of them can be handled using alternative components to sh404SEF. The point I want to get across is that sh404SEF can do all of these, far easier, and also allow you to control your title tags - the single most important factor in SERPs rankings.

Control over title tags is lacking in joomla, severely lacking. If you want to invest some time in your site today, install sh404SEF. Once you have properly configured sh404SEF, and gained some key inlinks, you will see a marked increase in traffic to your site.

Here are some quick steps to configure sh404SEF on your site:

1. Note down the urls of your main pages in your site, the ones you want to rank well - not just the homepage. If you have a relatively small site you could do all pages.
2. Note down a second list of urls, these are ones that you don't want to be included in the SERPs - contact page, terms and conditions, privacy policy, lost password pages etc etc.
3. Use free keyword tools to create some optimized page titles and meta descriptions for the chosen pages. This is something that shouldn't be rushed - the more time you can afford to spend researching keywords the better.
4. Find the urls in sh404SEF, if there are any duplicated urls use the function to select the main url to be used. In all duplicate urls the only difference will be the itemid, ensure you chose the correct itemid for module display.
5. Select the urls you want to rank in turn and add the new titles and descriptions to each. Ensure you keep titles to the magic 66 characters that Google displays.
6. Select all of the urls that you do not want to include in the SERPs in turn and add 'noindex, follow' in to the robots tag. This will ensure that you do not leak pagerank unnecessarily and thus strengthening your other pages.

Now all you need to do is gain links to your site, both to the homepage and deep links to the sub pages.

Visit joomlacode.org to download sh404SEF now. You won't regret it.
Read "Warning: If you don't use sh404SEF, you're losing traffic" at qxdigital...

Upgrading OpenSEF to sh404SEF - and taking Mosets Tree with you

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:00:00 +0100

We have been long standing users of OpenSEF to create joomla search engine friendly urls, mainly because when we first started fooling around with SEF urls it was the best component out there - some would say SEF Advanced from Sakic was better but it certainly wasn't $40s better!

Over the past year or so OpenSEF hasn't been updated and it's now clear that it's abandonware. This left us in a sticky situation as we, and many others, needed a replacement.

After a great deal of research it was obvious that the only two contenders were JoomSEF from Artio and sh404SEF from Yannick at extensions.siliana.net. Looking into the two components further sealed the deal - sh404SEF is far superior, the sheer amount of features and plugins for it are unbelievable. We'll save the details for a later blog post dedicated to sh404SEF, it's worth it.

Having chosen the successor to OpenSEF the real work now started - we had to test and configure the new urls to ensure they were the same as the old OpenSEF ones on our largest site. This was of paramount importance to ensure that all the PR and links we had build up weren't thrown away in the switch.

Content was fine and it handled iJoomla components far better. The only problem was Mosets Tree, the most annoying this was that it was a minor problem causing major headaches! The old MTree urls were of the style:

http://mysite.com/dir-name/listing-name/visit/

Whilst the new urls were:

http://mysite.com/dir-name/listing-name/visit.html

Where "visit" can be replaced with "details", "recommend" etc etc.

We had anticipated using custom redirects to overcome this problem but soon realised that this wouldn't work as they would only go from internal joomla urls to SEF urls - not from old SEF urls to new SEF urls.

The answer was to read a great .htaccess tutorial and devise some custom rules to cover the problematic urls for Mtree. Here is the result, all work prefectly:

########## Begin - Redirecting Old Mosets sef urls to new ones
#
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/details/ dir-name/$1/view-details.html [l,r=301]
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/visit/ dir-name/$1/visit.html [l,r=301]
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/review/ dir-name/$1/write-review.html [l,r=301]
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/report/ dir-name/$1/report.html [l,r=301]
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/recommend/ dir-name/$1/recommend.html [l,r=301]
#
########## End - Redirecting Old Mosets sef urls to new ones

All you need to do is copy and paste the above code into the top of your .htaccess file and all incoming visitors to the old urls will be 301'd to the new ones - the 301 means your PR will go with it too!

Read "Upgrading OpenSEF to sh404SEF - and taking Mosets Tree with you" at qxdigital...

Need to reset or clear your joomla stats? This is the tool

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:32:01 +0100

So having just finished the new site I was going over the backend and tidying everything up - deleting unused categories and content, clearing the cache etc. I realised that the page impressions statistics were going to be way out of line so needed to be reset.

I had presumed that this would be a feature built into joomla that I hadn't yet come across, but searching the menus turned nothing up. Before I headed into the depths of phpMyAdmin to hunt out and clear the relevant database table I thought I'd do Googling. Luckily I came across Joomla Stats Cleaner!

Reset Joomla Stats

Joomla Stats Cleaner is a great little tool that not only resets the page impressions counts, it can also clear:

Page Impressions (Hit Count) of ALL Content Items
Browser and Visitor related Statistics (Browser, OS, Domain)
Content Hits by Date log
Search Text log
Banner Impressions Count of ALL Banners
Banner Clicks Count of ALL Banners
Poll Votes of all Polls
Weblinks Clicks Count of ALL Weblinks

Once you load it up it gives you check boxes to select which functions to perform.

Reset Component Stats

It also detects certain components and offers to clear data from them too. Here are all the components, and the associated actions, that it currently handles:

Remove all entries from AkoBook guestbook
Remove all comments from AkoComment component
Remove all comments from Annotation component
Reset the download counter and download logs for all DOCMan documents
Reset all records of Facile Forms
Reset the Letterman hit counter for all newsletters
Remove all comments from MosCom component
Reset the download counter and remove all votes and comments from ReMOSitory

Read "Need to reset or clear your joomla stats? This is the tool" at qxdigital...