I went yesterday night to a SEO meet-up for the second time. If you are not aware of what SEO stands for, I suggest that you start looking into it before you start to write anything online. Somehow, the discussion made me think about a past time when I was in Costa Rica.

It is funny to think about how I sometimes relate previous and current events in a way that would seem illogical at first sight. A few years ago, while being in the area for work, I traveled to San José, in Costa-Rica. I brought with me my Lonely Planet book, that tells about the whereabouts of about any places in the world. Since I was traveling by bus, and the traveling time was about 20 hours, I got plenty of time to read all about San José in that book, and a sentence caught my attention: « For most travelers, a stopover in San José is regarded as a necessary evil before heading to the real Costa Rica ».

I didn't quite understand what it meant until I arrived. When I left the bus with all my luggage, I went to the first cab at the corner and asked him to bring me to a specific hotel. I was trying to save some money without scarifying too much comfort, so I was following the advices of that helpful book.

To my disagreement, the taxi was turning around and around, asking people about the hotel; the poor man was totally lost. I was tired, and thinking that this taxi driver was taking me for a ride (as in the idiom). At the first half decent hotel that I found, I asked him to stop and decided to take my bet.

Some travelers might tell you that they disliked San José's dirty streets, or the dangers targeting the tourists. I was already used to all that, but I really understood that sentence from the book when I was fighting to find my route. In the whole two weeks of my stay, I rarely saw a street sign, and never saw a civic number on a house. Nobody knew the names of the street. If you asked for directions, you would be told something like this: 300 meters north of the white church and 50 meters east of the big tree. But sometimes, that church was long gone ! So while most local could understand their jargon to find their way around, it was almost impossible for me.

To get back on the theme, that tour in Central America made me realize that people around do things in different ways. Something that looked purely basic to me such as a street and a street number was totally confusing for whoever that was driving me. And to me, 350 North and 100 East of something was quite confusing. And the very same thing happens within the online world.

Some people will spend time andmoney to construct a blog while making mistakes negatively affecting their rankings. Other people will treat the web as a fish net and focus on the domain name, neglecting quality content. Some people will follow poisonous advices that will kill any chances of getting visitors to their blog.

I have been connected on the net for over 16 years. Most people didn't know what an email address was in those time. In 1994, neither Internet explorer or Firefox existed. I was connecting through Compuserve and paying by the minute for a slow telephone connection. I decided at the time to look into making my own website. So I looked into HTML, and learned the hard way, editing my pages in text. There was no Google at the time, only Infoseek, Altavista and Yahoo, as well as some other odd underground search engines. As soon as my first website was born, I installed a counter to it and noticed that the counter was not going up. So I quickly learned the SEO of the time and added my URL to the main engines. Then the counter started to run, but not fast enough for my taste so I started to look into improving my traffic.

It is obvious that search engine optimization came right after the first sites were online. The process at the time was not rocket science. Search engines were quite dumb and poorly made, so by just repeating the same keywords hundreds of times, your ranking was definitely improving (DON'T DO THAT NOW!!!). A few students of Stanford university in California looked into improving search results by analyzing the internet as a whole by checking backlinks to measure the importance of sites. The search engine was named BackRub that eventually became the well known Google of today.

Google was built with one major goal: provide a better user experience through better search results. And it achieved that result. Instead of browsing for tens of pages, if not hundreds, we are now able to find the information that we are looking for in the first page, and sometimes in the first result. As a lot of webmasters are trying to get traffic without necessarily working for it, Google had to keep the algorithms updated to keep the quality level of its results. And its still regularly looking into that.

There are a lot of horrible mistakes made by new bloggers, and I understand them. You try to build great content and that takes hours and hours. Someday, you realize that almost nobody reads you, and get really frustrated. It's a shame to think that you are talking to a wall ! So you decide one day to go online and search for : Increase my traffic or bring more visitors to my site or something similar. You can get lucky and land on a right site, but most chances are that you will land to someone who promise you the unachievable and will cheat you into very bad decisions that will affect your rankings.

To those of you looking to get free internet traffic, I will answer that there is no magic trick. Those tricks were working 10 years ago, but if you apply them by now, you will get punished by the major search engines for trying to cheat them. However, there are steps to build traffic that will work. And it's not only to build content. I invite you to browse this website and learn them. Soon enough, you will get plenty of traffic if you follow those steps.

I also advice you not to submit your website through any type of “service”, as it might result in the search engines believing that you are producing spam. Keep building content and reading the tips in this site, and wait until you know enough to take actual steps to boost your traffic. This site will show you how to set your pages properly, name correctly your folders, use Meta tags the right way, understand how to build content, keyword density, how to setup the file robot.txt correctly, the mistakes to avoid and the right steps to do.

Some joomla utilities and extensions

Some background about me

In 1994, I made my very first html page. After looking for an editor with Lycos, (Google was not there yet!), I found out that I could program it easily with a txt editor such as Notepad. I miss so much that celeste page with my midi file playing and little ASCII arts.

I learned pretty quick about SEO, because soon after my page was created, I wanted to know if anybody was visiting by installing a visit counter. And I realized shortly after installing my counter that nobody was knocking home. There come my passion to be found online.

I kinda stopped hardcore web design and totally lost touch for a few years, to notice after a while that some kids were more apt to code than me just by looking at their Myspace page.So I literally locked me in a room for my past Christmas vacations and decided that I would not go out until a knew fair enough about Joomla. Since I had followed the SEO area in the meantime, to get back on my feet was not such a tedious task to me. Hence my desire to get over with my programing handicap and rely to something that would do that part of my work in a flash.

Basic Joomla! explanation

Joomla is a core system, now at version 1.5x, that integrates a few functions like menus, a poll utility, a banner interface, a feeds utility and various managers to have you easily add content to your site at many places at once or at a single place. It gives you lots of flexibility and eases your tasks when updating a large or a small site.

Most of you know what Windows XP is. It is an operating system. It comes with some little software and utilities, like Notepad, Wordpad, Paint and others. You could operate your computer with an OS like XP, but it gets boring pretty soon if you don't add softwares to it.

The same happens with Joomla. Its core makes it possible to write articles, put medias and organize a website, but you might want to change the style and add some functions at some point. That's exactly what you can do by adding extensions.

But careful! Some extensions might render your site unreadable. Before becoming a Joomla wiz, try installing popular extensions that are high rated by various users.

Joomla tools

1- A standard paper notepad and a pen handy on the side of your keyword. Even though that is not a techie tool, it will be something of incredible value, once in a while.

Ok, lets keep on with Joomla extensions...

2- Akeeba Backup (Formerly Joomlapack)
Functionality 5/5
Ease to install: Medium
Without that extension, I would still be knocking my head on the wall. Before installing any extensions that can potentially mess your Joomla Core, you should install Akeeba, and make FREQUENT backups. Make sure that you read the instructions, and know how to use a FTP client. There are various people hanging by the forums, so help is available freely. A professional installation service ($) is also available.

3- Addthis

Functionality 5/5
Ease to install: Easy
SEO is all about having great content on your site and getting people notice it and share it. If you make great original content and add this extension, soon enough will people notice, then share and publicize your content. Google will also notice and raise your PR position. Make it easy for your user to share and bookmark your site, you might become the next viral marketing success story! Over 250 social site will get accessed easily by the click of a button.

4- Bigshot Google Analytics plugin

Functionality 5/5
Ease to install: Easy

If you are serious about making a website and/or blogging, you must install Google Analytic and get a good grasp of it. Google analytic will help you learn what patterns were used by your visitors to land on your pages, what makes them leave, where are your visitors from and a lot more information. Since Google is on the spot for everything related to private confidentiality, it does not provide anymore single visitors IP data, but will aggregate the data. You might look around if you absolutely need single IP Stats. However, for all the remaining, Analytic is one of the best.
What about the Bigshot plugin?
Most Joomla! extensions that provide help for Google Analytic are module-based. It works, but the problem with module based "plugins" is that they mess with your template and might make things a little less cosmetic. Since Bigshot is a plugin and not a module, it does not affect your design. To be fair to the other programmers, I decided to install another solution, Janalytics version 1.3.0 , to compare it with Bigshot.

JCE (EDITOR) ver. 1.5.7.4
After installing Joomla, you might feel that the editor lack some features. For example, you can set the H tags (H1,H2...), but you have no control to change the size once your writing an article except that of the CSS file. With JCE, that becomes a thing of the past. JCE is a great WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) that gets you back behind the stering wheel and brings all the desired control over how you want your site to look like. 

Stompernet is widely known as the leader for search engine optimization. They offer tips on pretty much anythings that you will get your hands on.

The following will be a free 7-steps course by Stompernet. The freebies are designed to get you interested to subscribe by showing you how great the tips are. SEO is serious business, and to be fair and honest on my readers, I won't hide the fact that Stompernet carries a minimal membership cost of $197,00 per month. It is a little bit over the price of your cup of coffee, but if you thrive to be amongst the best, you got to invest something.

DO NOT MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY! This course is totally free! Nobody will ask you for your credit card or similar information.

• Discover the 7 Critical Mistakes that over 90% of ALL Web Site Owners Make – and Exactly what to do to avoid them.
• Learn how you can TRIPLE your dollars earned with the same volume of traffic – this critical keyword identifier technique is hardly ever used correctly.
• Data Density calculations about your on-page optimization that not only matter the most for rankings, they’re VITAL for conversion.
• Understanding the “Cache Calendar” – the most important way to keep from being hustled wrong during your link building campaigns.

Just click on the LINK so you get to watch the first video. You will be glad I told you about Stompernet!