For those of you who missed it a few weeks ago, we got HACKED! that is right folks! A vulnerability in Joomla 1.5.6 caused the hacker to sneak in and wipe it all clean.  Worse thing about that situation was that Anton was on a boating type of holiday and severed all ties with the outside world, so I just had to sit hear and twiddle my thumbs.  Fortunately on his return he was able to fix the problem and get the site back up and running as you can see. 

He has been focusing on the WOWblog component which is the custom blogging component that I am using to write this post right now.  It has most of the standard features that you would expect from a blogging platform, but essentially the most important aspect that people tend to forget when they first see a blogging solution... good coding!  The most essential and important aspect of the blogging solution for us has been the coding and making sure that it is not buggy, we believe that if we get this right then the rest of it will set itself right in its own place.

It took us a while to get SEF working, this is expected; since SEF has to cover so many areas i.e. the tags, URLs, php URLs, Components, etc.  If you look at a blogging solution like wordpress it had to evolve to the solution that it is now from upgrade to upgrade.  We intend to concentrate on make sure every area of the blogging platform is working correctly with minimum bugs prior to implementing another solution.  However currently as you can see the solution has:

• SEF urls
• Tags
• Archives
• Most viewed
• RSS
• Commenting

Additional solutions expected are categories, Most commentators, etc. Now these are standard solutions that you expect from a blogging platform, what we further intend to do is actually work on approved and most likely modified versions of extensions that will work specifically with WOWblog.  Wordpress has some excellent plugins that can become compatible to Joomla and play a vital role in the performance of a blog, here we could modify and integrate these plugins to WOWblog.

For us WOWblog was a custom kit to serve our own needs, but if it takes a life of its own then we would certainly look at rolling out to our visitor base to use as a blogging platform.

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Here is an excellent tutorial explaining the benefits of using Google Webmaster Tools on your site. The image here explains the main benefits from the service. Submitting your sitemap to Google gives the benerfit of having all your url know to the search engine and especially if all the urls get indexed with the search engine giant.

Here is a little tool that makes the process of having your site verification process easier, the google verifier mambot. Once you access the Google Webmaster Tools service during the verification process you will offered the option to either 'add a meta tag' or 'upload a HTML file', choose the option of 'add a meta tag' and you will be presented with a unique content code.

Place this content code within the plugin config area and it this will insert that snippet in your templates.

Thats it. Any issues you can refer to the forum.

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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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