Farewell to Joomla! 2.5

December 31, 2014 is the last day of Joomla 2.5. It is the official End of Life for this version.

Though 2.5 may have had what felt like a rushed lifetime, in many ways it leaves behind its own legacy. It helped the Joomla project to demonstrate its ability to grow quickly and produce a stable product along the way, demonstrated that the Joomla! team has taken steps to improve an already fantastic platform even further, and in many ways has served as an effective bridge between two releases which will have truly lengthy lifetimes with focuses on long term support and stability.
If you are running an earlier release of the current Joomla version (for example, you are running 2.5.1 and the current version is 2.5.6), you should upgrade to the current version. Each minor release fixes a number of bugs and/or security issues. It is always good practice to upgrade to the latest maintenance version as a first step in troubleshooting a problem and fixing any newly discovered security issues.

Download the latest Joomla version , call us for help at 613-2316308 or contact us via Joomla Bliss .

Google Plus - Facebook Minus

The much-maligned Google Plus has received copious amounts of attention in the past couple months after becoming the number-two social network in the world. A report released by GlobalWebIndex, a collection of market research on web usage conducted by London-based consultancy Trendstream, found that Google Plus had accumulated 343 million active users by January 2013, up from 90 million total users a year before. This massive surge means that Google Plus has passed Twitter (288 million active users) but is still a distant second to Facebook (693 million active users).

Speculation about Google Plus’s future growth, the end of the social network’s “ghost town” image, and rumors of “Facebook Fatigue” tended to be the topics discussed in the flurry of blog posts that followed GlobalWebIndex’s announcement. Unfortunately, little time was spent looking into the reasons why Google Plus has grown so rapidly and become a force to be reckoned with in an industry that has killed off many seemingly strong products in the past.

This is good. Facebook is a monopoly, and clearly, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. But like with any monopoly, it is good to have an opposition to it. 

At Joomla Bliss, my website design company in Ottawa, we find it hard to find time to create useful and meaningful content to our main website for our existing and prospective client, but there is also LinkedIn, Facebook and now Google Plus. And don't forget Pinterest!! We really wanted to avoid useless reproduction of the same info, but soon we will have no choice, so we will be copying and pasting snippets of texts from one place to another, like everyone else..

Mystery Solved: Joomla 1.8 renamed to Joomla 2.5

We were a little embarrassed to find out that the mystery with the numbers between Joomla 1.7 and Joomla 2.5 was solved so easily.  Joomla 1.8 was renamed to Joomla 2.5 and voila  - a whole new Joomla. The next version is going to be 3.5 we hear. We look forward to new changes and hope they will be for the better.

In the meantime, I am doing an SEO seminar for the Ottawa Catholic School Board next week. Very excited!

If you need a website, please review website design Ottawa website. Check out our website portfolio section.

Joomla 2.5 Released

It is now Joomla 2.5.1

Our question is - what happened to all the numbers in between version 1.7.5?

We are eager to try this Joomla version, but will be very cautious about using it for large projects. Joomla 1.7 did not make us fall in love with it, and it took a while for all the plugins and components to catch up.

With all that said, we will use Joomla 2.5.1 for one of our small web design projects this month and will report back the results.

Our main search terms are: web design Ottawa and website design Ottawa.

For SEO help, please contact me via my SEO Ottawa website.

SEO for Website Design Ottawa

It is probably not warranted to create a special post for such a small topic, but I couldn't resist the urge to announce that after a few months of arduous SEO efforts, my web design company finally got on the first page on Google.ca for our two main keywords: website design Ottawa and web design Ottawa.

We managed to get on the 2nd page quite quickly, within 4-6 weeks from the start of the original SEO work, but the fight for the 1st page took a few months. Mind you, we are competing with other web design agencies who are constantly monitoring and supporting their SEO standing. And Ottawa has a dozen of web design agencies per square foot.

Now the real battle begins! We need to move up a few links on the 1st page.

Wish us luck!

Google changes: Ten recent algorithm changes

If your site got downgraded by Google in the last couple of days, the announcement below is probably the reason why.

The most important ones for SEO are these five changes in Google's algorithm:

• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
• Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
• Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.

The last two are rather vague, but the first three are quite clear: less consideration to Title tags, Headers, menu items and much more consideration to the actual copy/text on the page, so less emphasis on hieararchy - which will make SEO even harder..

This seemed to have affected my website design Ottawa site but has not had any impact to my SEO Ottawa site.

Referrer Data from Signed-in Searches on Google is Now Encrypted

This October Google launched a new SSL-based restriction on search data, "making search more secure". For users who are signed into their Google account (gmail, blogger, analytics, etc.), while searching on Google for certain keywords, their search terms will not be "passed" along to the websites they visit. So the website owners won't know what keywords those users typed to get to their sites. Note, this affects only signed-in users or those who chose to search from Google's encrypted platform: https://www.google.com (note the 's' after 'http').

This is not a great news for online marketers, as many SEOs were quick to point out. Although Google insists that only roughly 1% of all searches will be affected by this restriction, SEOs expect that keyword research and analytics data will be less specific and less accurate. I personally find it hard to believe that 1% of the search value was a good business case justification for Google to undertake this SSL project.

Google is gradually moving towards monopolizing information and, unfortunately, I see a lot more people "signing up" for Google accounts, buying into the teaser of their privacy being "protected". In the future, I won't be surprised to see Google Analytics "selling" some add-on features, for example, keywords from SSL-encrypted searches. What a novel idea, eh?

Ohh, but lets not to forget to mention: this SSL change will NOT affect paid ads on Google AdWords - why am I not surprised?

In hard economic conditions all companies will look for creative ways to increase revenue, i.e. force users into spending more. I think this SSL-encryption for signed users is one such measure by Google to continue to grow revenue: you get more people sign up to your accounts because their "privacy" will be protected and you also get more people buying ads from you to get better analytics data about their websites.

I am waiting for the next announcement..I am guessing, something to do with selling info based on "personalized" or searches: beware of the wolf in sheep's clothing!

Best Quality Links

Everyone knows that SEO entails link building. In fact, link building is the most important part of SEO. But what kind of links? Any links, from any website?

Well, the answer is any link is good to have but links from specialized reputable websites in the field of your desired keywords is what will affect your SEO in the most noticeable way.

Define "related" and "reputable" websites.

"Rebutable" has nothing to do with PR. In fact, a link from a website with PR0 can be quite valuable if this website is specialized in your area of expertise (i.e. in the area of expertise covered by your desired keyword).

"Related" is best understood in terms of specific keywords AND in terms of general specialization of a website. Again, websites specialized in your area of expertise are a much better link material than general websites.

Plus, ideally you'd want to have a link from a page that has a title containing the same keywords that your website is about and include the same keywords as an anchor text of the link that leads to your website.

If all your links come from these type of websites and these type of pages on those websites then you can only have a few links from each, with the total of 200 or so links, and you will be very high on Google, provided your content is unique and is well saturated with the same keywords.

If you have any questions, contact me via my webiste design Ottawa website or via my SEO Ottawa website. We revently launched a new website design ottawa 4u site, check it out and let us know what you think.

Website Design Ottawa

Yesterday I got a call from a sales person asking if I need help closing on my customers. I politely refused. During the conversation he informed me that one of Ottawa's most prominent website design agencies receives 25 registrations per day. They are on the 1st page on Google for "website design Ottawa".

Here are some of the new websites our designers built:

• Website design Ottawa
• Renovations Ottawa
• Joomla web design
• Search Engine Optimization

If you have any questions, contact me via my SEO Ottawa website.

Website Design for SEO using Joomla

Website design for SEO using Joomla is a bliss - Joomla Bliss!

1. Create 3 levels of your main menu
2. Use 3 column layout
3. Add severla modules on each columns, each with links
4. Use a calendar of events with proper URIs (i.e. search engine friendly)
5. Use aliased with keywords
6. Install a site map component
7. Buy iJoomlaSEO and work your keyword magic into various elements of the site's hierarchy and copy

There are other things you can do, but these alone will take an average site quite far.

That, and you will need to build back links. Focus on relevant links with kywords embedded in the anchor text. Get as many of those links as possible. For your local search, get links from your local websites.

Contact website design Ottawa for more tips.

Website Design Ottawa

How long is too long to close on a customer?

Not sure what other web designers are experiencing in Ottawa, but we certainly noticed an unpleasant trend this summer: it takes much longer to sign a contract. People seem to think much harder before parting with their money than before. And this includes some well off people, like lawyers and dentists. I've had two occasions already when the client took almost three months to sign up, and not for large and expensive web design project; we are talking $1500 web design projects.

With SEO, I also noticed that most clients prefer it if you charge them a certain amount per month. For some reason paying for something for an indefinite period of time gives them confidence. They are afraid to understand that with SEO there is little maintenance required, you don't need to do much to maintain your ranking, once youj've achieved it. Some work might be required, yes, mostly link building (which you can do on your own if you care to spend 45 min once a month, this is all it takes for most small businesses). After the initial investment, the maintenance fees should not be as high and you should definitely not be paying for SEO indefinitely... I guess clients follow the infamous classical logical fallacy "if everyone is charging monthly fees for SEO, they can't all be liers". (wishful thinking). Oh, well, a little research can save them thousands of dollards..but hey, good for my fellow SEO agents, right?

Your Ottawa SEO here..

My new SEO website, just for fun (okay, okay, not just for fun, we are testing some ideas).

Directory Links for SEO

We just completed a link building package for a client. I was pleasantly surprised to see that directory links now seem to give a faster boost to a website positioning on search engines, especially Google, than other types of links. Registering in Yahoo! directory alone - for $299 per year mind you! - boosts your site's positioning significantly. So much for Google's grudges against paid links. Some paid links are less paid than others, eh?

To get the most value from your directory back links, register your site in related directories with high page rank (PR), which is anything over 4.

If you need help with link building, contact us via our website design Ottawa office or SEO Ottawa office.