Welcome to Alledia, the Joomla SEO Experts

It is that time of the year again ... I'm headed back the U.K. for a couple of weeks.

Mainly the trip will be family-orientated as I've sisters who are graduating, getting married and having babies. There's a lot to catch up on!

However, it's a rare vacation nowadays that doesn't involve Joomla in some way. So we're holding two Joomla training classes, one in Cambridge on June 25th and another in London on July 1st.

Both classes will be identical to the ones we run in the U.S. with the same materials, resources, price and even the same bad wisecracks. I may just have to edit the Powerpoints a little to replace somes "z"s with "s"s and find some Essex jokes to replace the Redneck ones.

Joomla Day Netherlands took place this weekend and by all accounts it was a great success.

There was the official release for Joomla's new Resources Directory, a presentation with useful security tips by Brian Teeman, and a really good overview of how to create a Joomla SEO-optimized template:

Rene Kreijveld from Webcreatives.nl does a great job of explaining how to create a basic source-ordered template. "Source-ordered" essentially means putting the unique, original text on a page higher up in the code, so that search engines don't have to wade through lines and lines of repetitive code before reaching tha text. I'd recommend viewing the slides in full-screen as some of the code displayed is small (click the icon on the bottom, second from the right):

People who teach Joomla know they feeling ... things have been going well, but suddenly there's a blank look. The student's stuck on one point. You've tried a few ways to explain it, but they're not getting the big picture. You rack your brain and start, "well, Joomla's just like a ... " and you try to dig out a comparison.

Here are my top five favorite analogies to help people grasp Joomla's key concepts. Please feel free to post your own in the comments.

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
"Yo Mos, what's gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?"
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, "You know what's gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever's happening with us"
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it's some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople."

Lyrics from Fear Not of Man by Mos Def

I'm always on the lookout for business trends in our industry and I've spotted a significant new one in recent months. Increasingly CMS companies are supporting different platforms. The choice for each company is different, but the trend seems real:

Examples of Joomla Companies Supporting Other Platforms

• Rockettheme: Joomla and phpBB3
• Joomlart: Joomla and Magento
• JoomlaJunkie: Working on iTemplater.com and building for Joomla, Drupal and Magento
• JoomlaPraise: Working on CMSMarket.com
  
• CMSExpo: Started with Joomla and expanded to all kinds of Open Source CMS

Alledia is based down in the south of the United States in Atlanta. We started our Joomla training classes here and by the end of June we'll have run almost a dozen Atlanta classes.

Its time to spread the Joomla gospel (the Jospel?) a little further around the south so early next week we're headed to Charlotte, North Carolina and the Music City of Nashville, Tennessee. We'll be in Charlotte on Monday 8, and Nashville on Tuesday 9.

In the last two weeks I've been in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Washington, New York and even Alaska. Just one more short trip to Charlotte and Nashville left.

The trip taught me something. For two weeks I kept in touch via email and cellphone but had no time for three things I'd been using every day. Two of them I really missed, the other ... not so much.

One of the hardest things to explain to people when we're discussing SEO nowadays is that its not about the h1 tags, nofollow links and managing Page Rank. Aaron Wood summed this up well by saying that for the modern marketer, PR should stand for "personal relationships" rather than "Page Rank". Even more accurate is this quote from Seth Godin

"Yelling with gusto used to be the best way to advertise your wares. There was plenty of media and if you had plenty of money, you were set. Today, of course, yelling doesn't work so well.

What works is leading. Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they'd like to go. Connecting them to one another.

It's enough if the tribe you lead knows about you and cares about you and wants to follow you. It's enough if your leadership changes things, galvanizes the audience and puts the status quo under stress. And it's enough if the leadership you provide makes a difference." 

We can all think of companies that have tried to enter our markets by putting down rivals. The hot-head loses opportunities for partnerships, for links, for publicity. I've seen hate-bait (deliberately posting a blog that makes people angry in order to get attention) fall away as people see it for what it is.

How do you know if you're leading and being a successful modern SEO? If you're being copied. Its so easy to replicate ideas nowadays that the question isn't if someone will copy your business model, but when. Imitation is a form of flattery. The time to worry is when no-one is copying you ... if no-one thinks you're worth following.

This is an interesting review request that popped up in our inbox. WebHostingReport.com is a good domain name but a somewhat thin affiliate site. It aims to rank for hosting, blog hosting, cheap web hosting and other keyword terms.

The site doesn't have much going for it in terms of interest, but its a nice example of targeted lead generation. To me it looks like more a more sophisticated version of the Siteground promotional sites we discussed last year.

• A short list of five hosts, with one favored host almost always on top
• Lots of interlinking for keywords
• A small collection of generic articles on the topic

The Joomla Training bandwagon is starting to roll this year. We've thoroughly covered the East and West coasts of the United States, and not it's time to do more work on the center of the country.

If you're in Texas and the Mid-West we've got Joomla classes coming up for you in the next three weeks.

Texas Joomla Classes

• Dallas - May 18
  
• Austin - May 19
• San Antonio - May 21
• Houston - May 22