Tag: seo

The Easiest way to add Google Authorship to Joomla Articles

I wrote about this a while ago in my Joomla microdata article. It has struck me since that it was complete overkill to add authorship in that way and can be done without any code changes at all, just using the standard contacts component.

The reasoning is, that you don’t have to link each article on the site to the authors Google+ page. If there is an author page on the site, and each page is linked to the author page then you only need to add the link to the Google+ profile on that author page.

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A New Solution to FOUT (Flash of unformatted text)

Adobe recently released their ‘blank font’. It is essentially a font which contains no glyphs and is basically a css hack to stop the flash of unformatted text when using webfonts.

I wrote a long time ago about how to cache the font files when using @fontface. That method can be used in conjunction with this to create the best user experiance for your site.

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Adding Microdata to Joomla Articles

Google has been using microdata for quite a while now and adding it to your website can help with clickthrough rates from search engine results.

The most obvious is Google’s own authorship markup (not strictly microdata per se) where linking to your Google+ profile adds your profile image to pages in search results, but there are many other tags which can be added to display extra information next to your page title and description.

In this article I am going to look at adding microdata for article publishing times, images and authors to Joomla 3.

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Adding Twitter Meta Tags

Last month (April 2013) Twitter announced the introduction of a new set of meta tags known as ‘Twitter Cards’. Adding these tags to your site allows extra information such as an image and description to be attached to any tweet which contains a url of a page on your website.

You can read the twitter article on the subject here.

As twitter falls back to opengraph tags, not all of the tags are needed if you already have Facebook opengraph tags on your website.

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Adding Facebook Opengraph META Tags to a Joomla 3 Template

There are hundreds of plugins, modules and components which add Facebook opengraph tags to your articles, but is it really necessary to add an extension for the sake of a couple of meta tags.

There was a time when Facebook ignored your standard meta tags and insisted that you add a specific opengraph tags for things like page title and description. They no longer seem to enforce this from looking at the linter with the exception of Joomla’s author tag which it doesn’t like because it uses meta name instead of property. In fact, after a bit of experimentation, it seems the only needed tag is the site type, everything else will be collected from the standard meta data. So lets add some tags.

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Website Internationalization and Alternative Language Links

I was recently asked a couple of times about international SEO and targeting websites with similar content at the correct people without just serving up a duplicate site.

The most obvious example of this is a .com website which is meant for American audiences and .co.uk which is meant for England, but it could also be a ‘uk’ sub-domain of the .com and potentially a completely different website using a different brand name as the domain name. The content of these websites might be practically the same apart from an address and contact number. So how do we make sure that the correct site gets sent to the right users?

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What Does Google See When You Move Domains?

Ok, so I moved my site. I used to have a domain called serach-friendly-web-design.com, I moved all that stuff to here because I thought that the information I gave was benifical to other people and I should retain the pages. So basically, if anyone goes to an old page they will get to see what they are looking for.

So how does moving a site look to Google? First of all I should point out I have no commercial gain from this website apart from people hiring me for me services.

OK, so lets look at what happened.

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Are CDN’s Always a Good Idea?

At first a content delivery network seems like a great idea, but is it possible that it can actually be detrimental to your sites speed? Lets find out.

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What is the xreference Meta and Joomla External Reference Field?

The reference field is not something that is new in Joomla 1.6 and up. Joomla 1.5 had a ‘Key Reference’ field in the articles advanced parameters tab. What is different is where the field is now found and the way the data entered is utilised.

In Joomla 1.5 the content of the key reference field wasn’t actually utilised at all. It was a spare field which you could use in a template override to quote an external reference, or change the name in the language files and use for whatever you want.

In Joomla 3 there is a new field in the Metadata Options called ‘External Reference’ which comes with the tooltip ‘An optional reference used to link to external data sources’. The reason why the field has moved from parameters to metadata is obvious – it is now used to output a meta tag, but what is this xreference tag and more to the point, what is it used for?

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Stripping Joomla 3

So Joomla 3 has been around for a while now and seems stable enough that you can use it for production sites without having to check up on it everyday to see if anything new has broken. And with a new site comes a new template. As always, I wanted it to be fast loading, so I set out to investigate what it is that joomla is inserting into my site.

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