SEO Blog » Joomla and Mambo

Central Ads block for Mambo or Joomla

Administrator — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 05:24:30 +0000

Central AdSense or YPN Block for Mambo and Joomla

Google heat map for ad placement gives highest weight to the ads placed in the center of page. Ads placed at center location on screen generates maximum CTR thus increasing the revenues.

A sample of application of such ads at the central location can be seen at www.healthdebitcard.com and www.skincarediary.com

Below is step by step instructions to create a new module position for ads placement at the center of screen.

First of all you need to create a new module position for central location on your page. To do this go to Site > Template Manager > Module Position and add a new position. Name it ‘central’ or whatever you like.
Now you need to edit the html of your page and load this module at this position. To do this go to Site > Template Manager > Site Templates. Select the template you want and then ‘edit html’ for it. Now you need to find the right place to position this new module at the center of your template. Use this to load central module at your desired location in template.
< ?php mosLoadModules ( 'central' ); ?>
Check if central module is appearing at the desired location by using the inline preview tool (site > preview).

Once this is done, now you need to create banners to appear in this new module position. For this I used the existing banner component

Create a new client for banner and then create a desired banner for this client
Now you need to create the module to show this new banner at the central location. For this go to Modules > Site Modules. Use the existing banner module and copy it. Edit the copied module specifying the banner client id you just created (in the previous step). Change the rest of module properties as per your needs
Publish the module and that’s it you will be seeing ads appearing at the new module position you created.

This process is actually generic way to create new modules/content block, here we use it for creating central ads block.

Launching Answers Forum

Administrator — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 02:19:38 +0000

I am glad to announce launch of forum to this blog www.seodon.com/forum

If any of you have questions about Mambo/Joomla feel free to post them in, I will try to answer or point to right source.

The forum discussions cover (not exhaustive list)

Mambo/Joomla General Help
Adsense/YPN general Help (and use of it on various CMS softwares)
Search Engine Optimization
Wordpress

What is search engine friendly URL in Mambo or Joomla

Administrator — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 04:07:37 +0000

How to use search engine friendly URLs feature of mambo and joomla? Read on for step by step instructions to turn on the SEF URLs in mambo or joomla.

To make URLs in mambo or joomla search engine friendly, do following:

Make sure your server has mod_rewrite enabled (so you need to have apache servers)
Server must allow .htaccess override

If you have both of these, then you can turn ON the search engine friendly URLs feature in mambo or joomla by going to admin > global configuration > SEO. You will need to rename the htaccess.txt provided with installation to .htaccess

If all goes well for you, your content URLs will look like http://www.site.com/content/view/5/2/ and component URLs will look like http://www.site.com/component/option…tact/Itemid,3/

These type of URLs are much friendly to search engines than the default mambo or joomla URLs.

However, these URLs doesn’t have any keywords in it so there still more to do. Best option is to use open source components from OpenSEF or 404 SEF to rewrite the URLs so that it has content title in the URL. With openSEF URL rewriting component installed, your urls will look much nicer like http://www.site.com/section_name/ category_name/content_title.html.

Search engines will love such URLs and you get full benefit of keywords in your content titles. Example of above techniques can be seen at www.photogrow.com which uses Open SEF component.

Mambo Joomla Blog Module

Administrator — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 03:51:33 +0000

Often Blog component of mambo joomla is misunderstood. The blog component in mambo or joomla is nothig related to facility for users to write blogs.

In fact blog page in mambo joomla puts together various content items and is configurable by users. Note that its just the differently organized view of same content items. As I discover more blog component turns out to be real good way of organizing your content. I would map it to what is called as category in wordpress.

Mambo Joomla blog component can be used to create the views similar to what user gets on home page of any mambo/joomla site. On my site www.skincarediary.com I have used blogs to create multiple home pages for each category, its certainly better than linking content tables from menu.

How to best utilize blog component:

1. Have your content organized in the section/categories the way you want.
2. Create a menu for blog page-category for the category/section of your choice.

Now you can see that blog page shows the content items from that category/section in the way homepage items are displayed.

Example site: www.skincarediary.com

AdSense or Yahoo YPN on Joomla and Mambo

Administrator — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 05:12:46 +0000

Joomla and Mambo are the coolest open source content management systems around now. Both of these systems comes with default component and module for banner management, however features provided by this component are very basic. The banner module shows the banners at the specific location configured from admin console. You can setup multiple banners and these banners (you can use it for AdSense or ypn ) are shown in rotation.

However with default banner module major deficiency is having more than one banner on the site. Its said that there is way to copy the banner module and be able to have more than one banner being displayed on site. Still its near impossible to specify particular AdSense or ypn ad at specific banner.

Other deficiency which I think is major one is inability to be able to place AdSense or yahoo yp ads in the content itself. Joomla or Mambo doesn’t have built in support for this. There are some open source mambots/component/modules available which help doing it. The Yahoo YPN mambot is very good for showing Yahoo YPN ads inside the content item. It has features to have ads shown on all content items or user can select manual placements.