Welcome to Alledia - the Joomla SEO Experts

Earlier this week I posted my talk about Joomla SEO from the JoomlaExpo in Chicago. The penultimate slide was a list of sites that ranked #1 on Google and some people responding with details of their own success with Joomla.

I'm going to be giving variations of this presentation a few more times in months to come and so I thought I'd give you an opportunity to boast:

Do you have a Joomla site with great rankings? 

Feel free to post as many or as few details about the site as you wish. I'll include the best ones in the presentation.

This is my presentation on Joomla SEO from JoomlaExpo.

Increasingly we're going to be recommending two SEO solutions for both Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5 ... sh404SEF and the SEF Patch. I'm in the process of rewriting the SEO Book to make those our clear recommendations for most 1.0 and 1.5 sites, but this is the first time I've explained that publicly.

I arrived back from Chicago just before midnight yesterday and I'm still buzzing today.

The JoomlaExpo was a huge success. I've a whole bunch of stuff to organize and post over the coming week from Powerpoints, handouts, Expo recaps and news of the big Joomla project that was announced with the City of Chicago.

There were over 280 people at the Expo including some from Malaysia, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, England, Scotland and many other places. The whole event was pulled together by excellent organization from the JoomlaChicago members.

Click here and also here to see photos of the event. More to come later in the week when I've had more sleep. If  you haven't done so already, I'd definitely recommend attending a Joomla event near you. Next up is Vancouver.

Note: Please be aware that this post contains some disturbing quotes to make its point.

Last week I wrote about how some newspapers are working out how to grow their brand online. Today, I've an article about how one newspaper is rapidly moving in the opposite direction.

The Washington Post is one of the oldest newspapers in the U.S. and one of the most important because it's read by D.C.'s powerbrokers. It's famous for numerous stories from the Spanish-American war to Watergate.

So why is it negligently allowing its reputation to be destroyed online? The problem is their blogs and the problem is so serious it could be a case study for how not to protect your brand.

The Post's blogs have already been in trouble for posting spurious chain-emails as facts, but it seems as if they're sinking even lower at the moment.

Portsmouth's Logo

If you're not American or a baseball fan, the Chicago Cubs are famous for being biggest losers in U.S. sports history. This is their 100th year without winning the World Series. Close behind were the Chicago White Sox who recently ended their drought after a mere 88 years.

Portsmouth haven't made it a century of losing yet but if your grandfather was in elementary school last time your favorite team won something ... you probably support a loser.

We've posted a few times about Group Jive, the only component available for Joomla that allows site members to create their own social networking groups. I've called it a vital extension if Joomla hopes to compete as a social networking platform, but the project has had a checkered history and unfortunately it seems that its stumbling again. They're on MicroPledge.com looking for donations to help make the component work natively on Joomla 1.5.

Rocketwerx recently did something very similar and raised over $2500 towards finishing their Joomla 1.5 and phpBB3 Bridge. That caused a mixed reaction from members of their forum but its possible that this fundraiser may breathe new life into the Group Jive effort.

Until recently it was easy to laugh at newspapers and their attempts to move online. Even now many are struggling to catch up. However, some leading papers are proving to be very adept and are rolling out advanced Content Management Systems with great SEO tactics.

One favorite strategy is to create highly-targeted pages for particular keywords and promote them heavily with internal links.

This is a technique that just wasn't possible back in the days of HTML because of manpower needed to create so many links. However on a Joomla! site its easy and I'll show you how:

We're delighted to announce that our first Joomla training class will be on Saturday June 21st in Alpharetta, Georgia.

The training will be in Alpharetta, just a few miles north of Atlanta from 9 am to 4 pm. We've chosen Roam as the location as it offers high-tech, comfortable meeting rooms equipped with wireless internet access, whiteboards, projectors.

Because this is the first class we aim to make it extra special. We're limiting registration to 10 students and are providing a wide-range of extra gifts.

If you've been around the Joomla or Mambo projects during the last 5 years, you'll have heard of Andrew Eddie. Currently he has the unwieldy title of "Development Working Group Coordinator", but spend any time on the forum and you'll see he's hard at work in many areas of the Joomla project.

Last year we interviewed Andrew about extensions that he was developing. This week he launched his new site JXtended.com and with it over a dozen products.

Apart from making the owner of JExtended.com rich (I mistyped three times when writing this article alone) what can we expect from the new site?

Quite a lot of people have written asking permission to translate blog posts here on Alledia, so it made sense for me to clarify the license for the articles.

As of today, all Alledia.com blogs posts are now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

That means you can copy, translate and mashup any and all blog posts. The only requirement is that you provide a link back to the original article.

Sometimes you just want a short-cut. Sometimes the idea of slogging away for months to reach your goal just doesn't seem worth the effort. Take the woman on the right. My wife just went to Japan and found this "Dancing Cowboy" machine. Designed for people who want to get fit without effort, you don't have to do anything. Sit there, and the machine will shake like a horse and do the exercise for you. 

I'm sure theres a lot of people out there who'd like some SEO shortcuts. From an e-mail I got this week:

"4 months to do SEO seems like a long time to do anything. I mean what takes 4 months?"

Wouldn't it be nice if there you could jump ahead of much older and more established sites? Here are five ways to leverage Google's own features to your advantage:

I've been in the Mambo and Joomla world for several years now without going to a Joomla event. Now I'm headed to two within the next six weeks (Chicago and Vancouver) and every time I look at Joomla.org theres a new event announced.

I did some research and in April alone there were Joomla events in Norway, Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, France and Spain.