Brewsterware

May 26, 2007

SEO for Joomla

Filed under: Marketing — Joe Brewer @ 3:33 pm

A while ago I spent some money on an ebook (something I rarely do). I was expecting alot for the eighty dollars I had spent. On this occasion I was rewarded with loads of excellent quality information. The ebook was written by Aaron Wall, and for those of you not in the know, he is an expert at SEO.

The ebook is absolutely brilliant – not only does it tell you what to do to get high rankings in the search engines, but it teaches you how to think like an SEO expert. The material is worth at least double what he is selling it for.

I’ve been applying some of the ideas to a Joomla site that I working on and have seen much improvement. The first thing that I did was to find a componant that could rewrite the URLs as the default SEO URLs weren’t really worth switching on, although I beleive that this has been addressed in 1.5. At the time of writing the SEO URLs look like this:

www.domain.com/content/view/12/28/
www.domain.com/component/option,com_glossary/Itemid,32/

Meandering though the Joomla forums, I came across this blog which had several reviews of SEO URL componants. The best of which seems to be Artio’s SEO URL componant. It’s been through quite a few changes recently, most notably is the reduction of database queries which seems to have been the main complaint. I have been using it for a few weeks and it has been performing very well. The only thing that has been annoying me is that everytime you save the main configuration, all of the custom URLs, title tags, keyword and description meta tags get deleted.

As well as rewriting any URL, this componant will let you specify different keywords and descriptions for the meta tags for each page, even if you have used {mospagebreak} to break a document into several pages. However, after losing my custom keywords and descriptions several times (mainly because of development of a custom componant for a hypnosis glossary), I have come up with a patch. It requires a little hacking of core code, but I think its much better than the current way of adding keyword and description meta tags to a document. Here is what to do:

Add this code to the top of mospaging.php which can be found in the mambots/content folder:

function AddKeywords( &$content )
{
global $mainframe;
$mainframe->appendMetaTag( ‘keywords’, $content[1] );
}

function AddDescription( &$content )
{
global $mainframe;
$mainframe->appendMetaTag( ‘description’, $content[1] );
}

Scroll down to this code (roughly line 130)

// page counter
$row->text .= ‘<div class=”pagenavcounter”>’;
$row->text .= $pageNav->writeLeafsCounter();
$row->text .= ‘</div>’;

// page text
$row->text .= $text[$page];

Add the following code after it:

// add keywords to the header
$regex = ‘#{keywords}*(.*?){/keywords}#s’;
$row->text = preg_replace_callback( $regex, ‘AddKeywords’, $row->text );

// add description to the header
$regex = ‘#{description}*(.*?){/description}#s’;
$row->text = preg_replace_callback( $regex, ‘AddDescription’, $row->text );

To use it put the keywords and description in the relevent tags in your content pane like this:

{keywords}here, are, some, keywords{/keywords}

{description}here is the description{/description}

Happy SEOing 🙂

February 22, 2007

Affiliate link cloaking with drupal

Filed under: Marketing — Joe Brewer @ 4:00 pm

So here is my nearly infamous affiliate link cloaker rewritten for Drupal. Usage is pretty much the same as the other link cloakers, but I’ll explain again here anyway as there are a few differences, and a few things you’ll need to bear in mind when using it.

Installation:

Install by putting the two files (alc.module and alc.info) into a directory called alc in your modules directory. Enable the module by clicking the check box next to “Affiliate Link Cloaker” in the module admin page.

If you are not using a WYSIWYG editor, follow these instructions for cloaking your links:

In the link that you want to cloak put the word affiliate. For example, with this link:

<a href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”>Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook</a>

change it to:

<a affiliate href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”>Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook</a>

If you are using a WYSIWYG editor, change it to:

{cloakurl href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”}Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook{/cloakurl}

That’s all there is to it!

If you want to make the text in the status bar change when the user puts their mouse over the link, use the “statustext” tag in the link. For example:

<a affiliate statustext=”Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook” href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”>Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook</a>

or if you are using a WYSIWYG editor:

{cloakurl statustext=”Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook” href=”http://www.netprofitstoday.com/cbae/?a=GmPNICPmNz”}Rosalind Gardners Super Affiliate Handbook{/cloakurl}

If you find that it doesn’t cloak you links, it is probably because you have HTML filtering turned on. This is found in Administer->Input formats then clicking on Filtered HTML. Turn the filter off by unchecking HTML filter and pressing Save configuration.

I’ve currently only tested with non WYSIWYG editors, but I will get on and do some more testing in the coming week. If you like it or use it, please leave some feedback 🙂

Download it here

February 13, 2007

Affiliate cloaker for Mambo

Filed under: Marketing — Joe Brewer @ 12:57 pm

I’ve rewritten the Joomla mambot I wrote last year for Mambo. Basically it works in the same way as the one I wrote for Joomla, and all instructions can be found in the link on the right.

I’ve tested with Mambo version 4.5.4 and all is well

Download and enjoy 🙂

September 2, 2006

Using Joomla! for Affiliate sites

Filed under: Marketing — Joe Brewer @ 3:36 am

I’ve been using Joomla! for a little while, and have been very impressed by the features and community suppport for it. The only pain is keeping up with the security updates, but that’s not really much hassle, and it obviously pays to keep updated.

From an SEO perspective, I have been watching where my links have been coming from and I have noticed that I starting to get some hits from google from my researched keywords even though I havent added any of the SEO componants that re-write the URL. This just goes to show that google is after original content.

I have written a mambot for Joomla that cloaks affiliate links. If you run an affiliate site and dont cloak your links, you should know that you are loosing commission through users changing the link. My link cloaker is simple to install and use on any Joomla site – even if you have a Joomla site with many links, it is very quick and simple to alter the links to cloak them. This software is free, and you can download it from the link on the right.

June 15, 2006

Easy Money

Filed under: Marketing — Joe Brewer @ 12:36 pm

I’ve started joining affiliate schemes in the hope that I can make a bit of extra cash… Well, actually I joined some of them quite a few months ago, but it seems that it’s anything but easy money with the amount of effort that has been going into this recently. I need to finish some articles for my dating site as that seems to be making a difference to the amount of traffic that I am getting. I’ve also bought another couple of domains and some decent hosting which I am going to use for a site on combatting stress – again lots of articles are needed for this.

Anyway, I got an email from SFI this afternoon saying that they have posted my first commission cheque – a whopping $11.46 !! What’s that saying about small acorns again?

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