Simplosys Solutions Blog

I've used the StudioPress wordpress theme, it's one of my favorites, and the best part is that it's free! It has an excellent color scheme, has a clean Web 2.0 look, overall, I just love it.

As with most other Wordpress blogs that I’ve installed, I added Headspace , XML Sitemap generator and many other useful Wordpress SEO plugins. I have written earlier about my Wordpress blog SEO techniques that have worked great so far - including achieving a page rank 3 within 20 days of site launch for one of my blogs.

Studiopress was awesome, except that it gave me one major problem. It wouldn't change the Home Page Title. The home page title defaults to the Site Name- Site Decription format. If you know anything at all about SEO, you’d know that that’s a serious no-no. You want your home page’s title to be keyword rich, to include synonyms and include terms closely related to your site that your visitors are searching for. Your home page title is arguably THE most important SEO factor for your website. Of course, bad content and a great title is not going to help a lot, I am assuming that the basics of a website (good content, fast load speed, clean look and feel) are met.

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Like many web developers and SEO's, I've always been on the lookout for the perfect Ecommerce platform. CRELoaded is literally LOADED with ecommerce functionality but does not integrate a CMS into it, an unbelievable deficiency in the Web 2.0 world where content is king. Joomla and Virtuemart looked promising but with Joomla sites, you end up spending a lot of time trying a gazillion plugins (components, modules, mambots) that you need to mix and match to make a great site. And then there comes the upgrade and you never know which ones are going to work and which ones will not. And then you also don't know which of your components are supported by the Joomla third party SEO products such as sh404sef or OpenSEF. These plugins are free but often don't support certain components. You need a good Joomla developer that takes the time to keep themselves abreast of the latest in the Joomla and Virtuemart world. Virtuemart is also sort of limited in some key functionality. For instance, it does not integrate an affiliate management feature (there are workarounds, but there you go, more plugins) and does not have recursive billing options built in. These are core features that several stores need.

So, as my hunt for the perfect Ecommerce software continued, I ran into this post, a recent August 2008 post - http://wordpresswebpro.com/seo-tips/yahoo-store-the-best-e-commerce-platform-for-seo/. I am working on a site that is built on Yahoo Store now and I am realizing why this guy is so excited about it. It is pretty good. I am still pretty new to it so I don't know enough about the pros and cons, but it does look promising based on what I've seen so far.

With all the speculation about Microsoft buying Yahoo and even talks about Yahoo not doing so well, I hope Yahoo keeps making it's Store offering better!

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I remember having a heated debate with a friend that works at Yahoo Search about whether SEO involves spamming the search engines for links and whether all SEO's are spammers. He seemed to be a right-wing conservative on this matter, understandable, considering his job every day is to come up with ways to make seach better and SEO's skewing results makes it harder for him. I've given this a lot of thought and I've come to the conclusion that, if done right, it's not. The focus should be on making sure that's value addition to the Internet all along the way.

Testimony to this is that even Yahoo, in their web hosting packages, has entire sections dedicated to SEO, and in fact, has a blog dedicated to that as well...http://ystoreblog.com/blog/category/seosem/. So I guess seo is not really spamming afterall. Finding creative ways to get links is not a bad thing then...it's just marketing. Spamming is bad though, and we all agree on that. The line is gray and it will remain that way until some of the geniuses at the Search Engine companies figure out a way to truly differentiate good content from bad, and start giving less importance to links and more to quality unique content.

There are some very good posts on this topic. I've read many over the years and I am going to list them as I run into more on this topic..

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_{Wordpress bloggers often have the need to integrate a forum or a user discussion area in their websites. This is especially true for blogs for a commercial product (software/book/download), multiple-author blogs} or blogs on topics that lend themselves to discussion among visitors. My blog at http://www.endlesswait.com is about legal immigration issues in the United States. Legal immigrants are a frustrated bunch, usually waiting in line for years (often more than a decade) to complete their immigration process. During this wait time, there are all sorts of information that they need to maintain their legal status and what not. They tend to discuss this with each other.

I am working on adding a forum to this site at http://endlesswait.com/forum. As of today, this forum has nothing in it. Just the plain bbpress install.

The installation process is pretty simple. It is documented well here but there are a couple of points where you could get confused. If you already have a wordpress blog and are adding the bbpress forum to the blog, then Step 2 in the installation sequence takes care of that. I managed to install my forum in about 20 minutes from start to finish. It should have taken even lesser time, if it weren't for some minor errors that got resolved by reading the documentation pretty easily.

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ScreenHunter 5.0 is a free Snag-IT replacement screen capture software. You can download it here - Screen Capture Software.

Here's my review about it. The product is a great tool for simple screen capture. If you are looking for Area/Window to JPG/GIF screen capture, this tool will do it for you. And it's stable, never once crashed on me. The interface is very easy to use and the screen capture works every single time. It works like a charm on XP Home, XP Pro, Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. I am sure it works on other OS too, though I haven't tried it.

Often, when we look at a new software product, the hardest part is to figure out what it does NOT do. Obviously, the product owner/seller does not talk about the deficiencies of the product in detail and online reviews are often not detailed enough to get a real picture. So, here you go - the cons:

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Over the last few months, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my career moving forward. I have a post-graduate degree in MIS, a few years experience as a Business Analyst, working mainly as a consultant on Workflow projects on Opentext Livelink and a little bit of everything else. I also founded an SEO/Web Marketing company about 2 years ago and I've been spending a lot of time growing that as well, in the process learning Joomla CMS, CRE Loaded, Plone, Etc. Overall, I've enjoyed my work quite a bit, but I feel like I am at crossroads now.

I am debating whether to pursue my entrepreneurial venture - the SEO/Web company, full time and grow it further, or take on consulting work.

I already have about 10 staff members around the world, mostly part-timers, working for me for the SEO company, which is what this site is sort of about. I've spent a lot of time and energy bringing it up to this point and I know that I've just started. If I put in enough time and make some smart decisions, this company can be big enough to fund my full time involvement with it soon enough (my estimate is that it will take 9-12 months). I think I am an entrepreneur at the very core and this option seems like a fun thing for me to do on a long term. Afterall, there's potentially endless growth possibilities and that's what makes the entrepreneurial life so exciting. It also has its share of stresses though. My day will start with irate client calls and staff issues and end with that too. I am a very technically and analytically inclined person and I am not sure I will get enough opportunity to work on technical or analytical things if I choose to run this company full time. The clients will be small businesses - less sophisticated and less state-of-the-art usually compared to large enterprises. So there you see where the dilemma comes from. Also, of course, there is far more risk in running a small business like this to make my living than being a consultant.

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Right now...October 17, 2008, around 2 AM PST..I am trying to get the last few bits and pieces of work done and invoices generated, payments made...and boom! Yahoo mail goes down...Yahoo displays a friendly message:

You've stumbled upon a temporary problem we're having with Yahoo! Mail. Usually this problem gets resolved quickly, without you doing a thing. In fact it may be taken care of now.

• Try pressing the Reload or Refresh button on your browser, or logging out then back into your Yahoo! account. Hopefully that will take care of things.

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This blog was built using Joomla and a few blogging components and bots. I am planning to enhance this blog, mainly using tips from forums and other blogs. I will document my experience as I proceed, for the benefit of anyone that wants a blog in Joomla and chooses to go with mojoblog. If you are not decided on what blogging component to use just yet, I wrote a previous post about blogging options in joomla.

Pre-requisites:

1. A Joomla 1.0.13 - 1.0.15 installation. mojoblog is not guaranteed to work with other versions as of this writing, to my knowledge. I got it working on a 1.0.13 installation.

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Start at this URL which only members of this group receive: http://www.bradcallen.com/seomindset/. If you are interested in SEO and are not a member of his group yet, I strongly recommmend it. He is one of the best out there.

You get his book SEO Mindset for Free ($7.99 for shipping) and a lot of other bonuses inlcuding Audio sessions with a lot of SEO experts, free membership to http://www.searchmarketingelite.com for 1 month and the best UNADVERTISED part - SEO Elite ($167 value) FREE. I got mine today. Unbelievable offer, totally worth it. By the way, I am not affiliated with him in any way and none of these links are even affiliate links or anything. I just genuinely think this is a great offer, the best I've seen in a  long time from any of the SEO companies.

I am not sure how long this is going to last. Probably not more than a day or two. Get it fast!

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I used the !jocomment on on of my client sites - check it out  - http://www.visionomics.com/Leading-With-Leading-Measurements.html

It installed without any issues and does what is says. It's easy to set up and you can get your site's commenting system going in minutes. However, I am not too impressed. Today's web 2.0 Internet users are used to the slick commenting options in Wordpress, Type-pad and other blogging platforms. They are not going to feel too motivated to comment with !jocomment. The user interface is the biggest issue in my opinion. It's just not sophisticated and enticing enough to get people to comment. Just my personal opinion.

If this component gets much better, then it has a huge market out there though. There are tons of mojoblog and My Blog users, both of which have their limitations as explained in my post here. If I had the option, I would much rather use pure Joomla components that were written from scratch instead of using bridges or wordpress-flavored products that interface with Joomla. Similarly to !jocomment, most other blogging features (Rafcloud for example) are availble as Joomla components or modules, they are just not good enough yet in my opinion.

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