What I noticed is that the advice you get within articles for SEO is how to best optimize your site after you have launched our site. The important factors that are dealt with is keyword researching, meta tags, meta description, etc. But there are a lot of advantages if you can get you site indexed prior to launch. With a little bit of work your site could be indexed in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc prior to your site going live.

The primary method of sites indexed within the major search engines are gaining back links from other sites that have already been indexed in the search engines. Search bots are released on these sites and they will follow the links to your site and your site will get indexed. A joomla based site is developed in usually 3 methods:

1) intranet based - This is whereby the site is developed offline.

2) On a sub-domain - not visible to real visitors

3) On a live site.

My recommendation is to develop your site whilst you are either offline or on a sub-domain. Whilst the development of your site is taking approximately 4/6 weeks, you can be working on the main domain optimizing for the search engines.

Register the domain name - At times you notice that a certain domain is available and think that you will wait till last minute to purchase this domain. You should register the domain immediately and put it on a free hosting plan if you are intending to save a months payment of hosting whilst developing the site. Now you have a base to build backlinks whilst developing your site.

Put up a home page - Put up an installation of Joomla and strip it down completely and install a SEF component i.e. sh404sef. Within the home page put up sign that mentions the launch of the site as 'coming soon' but at the same time upload some content that is keyword optimized detailing what the site will be about. Use the login system to make it look like an mail opt-in solution, the pre-login message can be 'Sign up to be notified about the launch of the site' and place an No Spam policy.

Blogging - Get a mysite.com/blog url live and upload some blogposts. They do not have to be lengthy, but try to get the posts keyword optimised; think about the pages you intend to use for your site when it does go live. Do the post using silo, silo is when you have cross-blog posts; this is when a bunch of posts link to one main post which is 'bumped' up in the ranking due to the weight from the others. If your future site to go live will be covering a certain topic and you intend to place under its own url i.e. mysite.com/dog-training then the silo affect will link back to this url, do not forget to use anchor based text.

Sign up to feedburner and under the section 'publicize' you will be able to sign up to 'ping shot' that notifies the blogging directories and pings your rss. Joomla has a lot of solutions available to get rss sorted on your site, should not take more them 10 -15 minutes to get sorted.

Write a few articles and submit to directories - Whatever you site will be about there will be certainly a related topic area that you can write about. You do not need to do many, 2 - 3 articles at approx' 500 words each can get 80/90 link backs in Google, this is provided you submit to a lot of directories. Go over to Digital Point forum and you can get an article written and submitted to 100s of article directories for about $10/15. For 3 articles you could get this done as low as $30. Just remember to put your anchor text based link back in the resource box.

Get a link back from a site that has been indexed. Most of the steps above should assure that your site gets indexed since it would have been linked from a site that has already been indexed.. However you could attempt to get more link backs maybe from a personal blog that is indexed in the search engine. You could do a search to find blogs that are related to your site and providing they do not have a no=follow ruling then you could gain some quality linking from there. Maybe finding a blog/site that will mention your site. All failing you could offer a site some free advertising in exchange of a link.

Conclusion - If you know you will be working on your site for the next 4/6 weeks offline or on a sub-directory, then you should include this in your plan by spend 15 - 20 minutes a day. At the beginning of your launch you would already have a site optimized and just firing to go.

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Optimising your site for the search engine should be a crucial part of your marketing strategy for you Joomla based site. Within this Joomla tutorial I want to show you one of those important factors that a search engine utilises to give your website weight, the H1 tag.

The H1 tag has been utilised by Google since its beginning advent, it is the element that defines the title for a article. This may confuse some people who understand SEO (search engine optimisation) and use blogs thinking that 'title tags' and H1 are two different things, sure they are; but we need to step back a few years to get and understanding.

Does anyone one here still remember the concept of 'tables', it was a method used prior to css and tablesss layout? Am I giving away my age here? :) No seriously I know we still use tables today and a lot of sites depend wholly on them, however a Joomla site owner may not; some of you who have only every designed a site in Joomla may not have even come across tables. Heres what a typical table would look like:

Tables would have column and rows, these rows would have cells; within each cell you would write your content. So you could have a whole column with 15 - 20 cells each with its own unique content, each of these content 'articles' would need a title; these titles would be wrapped in the H1 tag to make them look bigger and bolder and dinstinguish between each content. Google decided to give weight to the H1 tag for the reasons metioned above, of course if the primary keyword is included in this 'title' for the content it gives Google a better and clearer understanding of what the rest of the content is about.

Joomla however was not created with the search engines in mind, in fact it is quite the opposite; you can not just pop Joomla out of the box and have a wholley search engine friendly site. More then likely you have to tweak core files or utilise 3rd party extensions that will do this for you. In order to get H1 tagging you would have to go through this process also. The main content headings in Joomla are wrapped in the proprietary class ‘contentheading’, therefore H1 tags are not assigned. This could be done manually but I have provided a process that does this automatically but also applies css, thus making the H1 tag smaller and more appealing to the eyes.

\components\com-content\views\frontpage\tmpl\default_item.php
\components\com-content\views\article\tmpl\default.php

Please ensure that you make a back up of this file **you have been warned** prior to making any changes. What you are looking for within the file is the tags with the class contentheading, you would simple wrap this tag in the<h1><h1> to get the desired affect; however this will look extremely ugly and big.  So what I propose is that you add the css also:

 <h1 style="margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt 0pt 5px 10px; font-family: Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; color: rgb(161, 123, 165);"></h1>

This kind of css styling makes the title look presentable and appealing, you of course can choose any color or styling that you want.
To make things simpler for you I have added a modified version of this file to this post, all you would need to do is a search for the string of css styling above in the file and make the neccessary styling changes that reflect your site; save and upload..

H1 Hack download link here.

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A new product released from the wowjoomla team aims to get your site indexed fast in the search engines at the same time create a surge of traffic visitors, Digg Motivator is the tool for the job. You can read more thoroughly about the plugin here.

It simply allows you to hide a url that contains either exciting content or a freebie like an e-book, audio, video, etc. Heres the snag :), in order for the visitor/reader to your site to get hold of the content they have to digg a story over at digg.com. Once they have dugg your site they need to come back and 'insert' their Digg username which undergoes validation and automagically takes them to the content url page, if the Digg username does not match it takes them to a failure page.

To get a better and clearer understanding of how this all works just click here.

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Here at WowJoomla we believe that 1.5 is not just a cleanly coded product of genious minds, but rather a new way of thinking for all Joomla developers, the shoulders upon which we can stand and grow.

For many end users, there's not much difference between Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5. But believe me, 1.5 has a strong unrevealed yet potential which will play an important role in Joomla's taking over of CMS market in the following years. And the foundation of the anticipated success of Joomla 1.5 is the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architechture it was built with.

Here's how Trygve Reenskaug, the inventor of MVC, described the concept back in 1979:

1. Models

   Models represent knowledge. A model could be a single object (rather uninteresting), or it could be some structure of objects.

   There should be a one-to-one correspondence between the model and its parts on the one hand, and the represented world as perceived by the owner of the model on the other hand.

2. Views

   A view is a (visual) representation of its model. It would ordinarily highlight certain attributes of the model and suppress others. It is thus acting as a presentation filter.

   A view is attached to its model (or model part) and gets the data necessary for the presentation from the model by asking questions. It may also update the model by sending appropriate messages. All these questions and messages have to be in the terminology of the model, the view will therefore have to know the semantics of the attributes of the model it represents.

3. Controllers

   A controller is the link between a user and the system. It provides the user with input by arranging for relevant views to present themselves in appropriate places on the screen. It provides means for user output by presenting the user with menus or other means of giving commands and data. The controller receives such user output, translates it into the appropriate messages and pass these messages on to one or more of the views.

Long story short, Model stores and manipulates state ("hands"), whereas View renders it to a user ("looks"). Controller receives user input and routes it to a corresponding Model ("brains"). It also decides what View to use

	Model	View	Controller
The Concept	Stores and manipulates state	Renders model to a user	Receives user input and routes it to a corresponding model. It also decides what view to use
HTML analogue	HTML itself	CSS	Browser
What will it look like in PHP?	Classes that store and manipulate data or any of the data itself	Classes that populate templates with data and the templates themselves	Classes that map incoming HTTP URL requests to handlers and handlers themselves
Why bother?	Imagine your application initially stored data in files. After you decided to start storing it in database, all you will need to change is a model	View can be modified without affecting the data	Controller synchronizes model and view
What Joomla! classes actualize MVC architecture?	JModel	JView	JController

Next time we'll create a simple Joomla component with MVC. In the meantime, enjoy the funny MVC tune, written by James Dempsey! :)

After you have dugg this post, please click this link to check if you qualify to receive a free copy of Digg Motivator!

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Most of you may have been wondering what on earth happened to WowJoomla. Well, the site that is on the verge of offering new services underwent the worst case scenario conceivable...

The 3rd party server hosted for us in the US burnt out!

That's right. Can you believe it? This did not just effect the wowjoomla.com server but a network of sites and services offered by the recly.com team (you could call it a sister service), which included clients work. It is a nightmare scenario that no website owner should have to go through. Luckily, we had everything backed up, but still it took us about a month to recover.

Since we are on the topic we need to assess what has gone on here and what it may mean to you as Joomla site owner either starting out with a new site or already have a full fledged blown site that is serving 1000s of pageviews.

1) This is a must that should not need be told. Back up everything, I repeat; "b-a-c-k-u-p e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g", preferably on a daily basis. If you have not backed up your database or your site it is possible that you could lose everything that you have worked for and in some scenarios irretrievable. Look at it from a real-life situation. You walk over to you shop in the middle of the high street to notice that it has been completely burned down, everything disintegrated and you have no insurance.

2) Read the fine prints from your host provider. What is actually covered? What is in that fine print? You expect to get the basics on the deal like 99% uptime, etc. But what happens in a situation when a server or a hard drive burns out or gets destroyed, what provisions they have in place for this situations. Are they covered for 'acts of god'?

3) If you have built the site yourself then have a developer on standby in your rolodex, this means in your contact lists of emails. Seriously, it does you know harm to head over to the Joomla forums or any other developer forums and poke about and make friend with developers, not just for server based issues but in general. You will be surprised by the amount of help you can get out there. However if you suffer an outage then you best option may to get paid assistance, which will determine the fasted response. You have services like joomlancers.com, getafreelancer.com, etc that you can outsource the work. Of course you can contact the wowjoomla.com team if you have any issues or concerns regarding these matters, we are here at your service.

We had to give priority to clients prior to our own site although we may suffer in our reputation but that is the ethos we follow, hence the delay in our site up and running sooner.

But we are back now and intend to fire ahead with the services we want to offer to the community of users that have supported us and strongly grown over the month. Our promise to you is that we will provide many different ways for users to get in contact with us, so we can continue to communicate whatever the situation may arise. Please feel free to tell us about any experience you may have had with a outage or burn out.

Kind regards,
Anton and Azzam

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