Basicus Inc.

SEO Search Engine Optimisation

Joomla Template

Posted on | March 21, 2008 | 1 Comment

Beauty in Design features high quality tutorial series for web design, Joomla template, mootools, javascript and ajax, and even templates.

His no-frills, rapid-fast template was thought up by Usable!. It is a custom Joomla template created for the Usable consulting and training group in New Zealand. This template met the need of Usable’s request to load under 8 seconds on a 56k connection as well as a fixed header for better navigation.

Joomla seo tip: Don’t ever change your url’s!

Posted on | June 17, 2007 | 2 Comments

Since I have a bit of lazy days this summer, I am going to give you a few hints and tips regarding SEO’ing in general, and some of the details surrounding SEO for Joomla.

Today I am going to talk about something I see many people fail to do right, and that makes them go straight to the bottom of the search results. Again and again and again.

The problem of changing url’s is especially common amongst us that uses a content management system like Joomla to control our content.

The reason changing url’s makes it impossible to rank well for a site, is the fact that the complete structure of the site is made up by those url’s. The crawlers of the search engines are following those url’s, and if they keep being different, the pages will never get any Page Rank, and therefore they will never rank in the serps eighter.

What can be done then, you might ask?

If you are using Joomla, you NEED to get hold of any of the components for SEF-urls. I have used both OpenSEF, JoomSEF and Sef Advance, and my recommendation is different depending on what other components you are using.

If you are going to run a web store with VirtueMart on your site, I would go for JoomSEF with their commercial add-on for VirtueMart. It works wonders for getting rid of the ItemID problem that is plaguing Joomla.

If you will not use any third party components, Sef Advance is my first choice. It does not slow down your site at all (almost), and keeps the url’s completely stable even when you do upgrades of the core system.

OpenSEF is hard to recommend right now. It is still not out of beta, and it slows down your site heavily. Untill they have sorted out the speed problems, and have also gotten rid of the tendency of changing the produced url’s I can not recommend using the component.

What is your opinion?

Testing out Submit Edge for directory submission

Posted on | June 2, 2007 | 3 Comments

Up until now we have done more or less everything ourselves when it comes to building links for our sites and our client’s sites as well.

So, when we (Devenia that is), decided to test one of the directory submission services around, we landed on Submit Edge. We are currently testing their “submit to 600 directories” package, and it will be really interesting to see the results over the next few months.

Using a service like this really is a big time saver, because finding and submitting to directories manually is really, really tedious.

What is your experience with manual directory submission services like the one Submit Edge is providing? Do they submit to the number of directories they promise?

LOTRO – a very cool twist to the mmorpg game

Posted on | April 9, 2007 | 1 Comment

There I was thinking that LOTRO was just another mmorpg with a different landscape but everything else the same. Boy, was I wrong!

After playing Lotro a couple days, I realize they have done this game quite different to games like Anarchy Online (AO), World of Warcraft (WoW), Neocron and other games I have previously played.

I’ll try to explain where the big difference in gameplay lies: WHen you first enter the game you run around and do quests like delievering stuff, killing monsters and the usual. So far everything looks standard.

This changes drastically though the moment you are done with all the quests that are offered and you have reached level 5. Then you get to a final quest that leads you into an instance where you play as part of the storyline. This instance is a bit hard to finish, because you meet som higher level mobs there.

When you are done with this, you come out on the other end of the instance and don’t see the low level guys (or mobs) any more. You now play with others that has reached the same level only, and gone are all the low level mobs as well.

To me this was a big relief, because I really did not expect it to go like this :)

The guys behind this game has really done a great job so far. And I am extremely happy I was wrong about a mmorpg for once :)

Gotta go and explore some more in LOTRO :D

Using ScribeFire for blogging

Posted on | April 9, 2007 | No Comments

So I had to google around a bit to look for another blogging tool that could replace the standard WordPress interface. ScribeFire is one of those tools. It’s quite different from w.bloggar, because it is not an application per se, but lives inside FireFox as an extension. The best about it, is the fact that it lets you use the dictionary from FireFox that is THE best dictionary I have ever seen.

Below is a screenshot of it.

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Using w.bloggar for blogging is a relief

Posted on | April 8, 2007 | 2 Comments

A long time a ago I tested w.bloggar for posting to my blog. For some reason I ended up with the web-based built-in interface of WordPress instead.
I have finally taken the time to configure w.bloggar, so I don’t have to log into the admin-interface of WordPress. It’s a relief to not having to worry about timeouts and other inconveniences and just write.

I have not checked if there is a proper spelling checker in this program, but otherwise it looks really neat.

Her is a screen shot of this post :)

wbloggar.gif

Update:
There are two things I can’t quite figure out: How does the image upload function work?
How come a post that I have just posted dissapears when I try to update it and press “Post” instead of “Post & Publish”?

Do you know?

God vs. sex

Posted on | April 7, 2007 | 4 Comments

On CNN yesterday there was a story where they claimed that the word “god” is almost as popular as the word sex when people search in the search engines. So I figured I’d have a shot at doing a bit of research on the search terms surrounding the word god.

Sex on the other hand is not much to research about. We all know this is one of the most searched for terms ever. So there is not much of a challenge in that one ;)

What I will do is build a few (well actually I believe I need a ton) of links to this particular blog post for the word god, and see what it takes to get it to the top of Google, Yahoo or Live.

Since Google returns more than 150 million results when searching for god, I will probably not get it to the top this year – or next year for that matter.

In another post I wrote about my personal believe – or the lack of believe in god so I will not talk so much about that here.

Update: I had to add a couple pictures regarding god and well.. a girl representing the other word.

What do you think, is it possible at all to rank for the word “god”?

Update: I just looked through the logs, and it looks like this post is starting to rank for the key phrase already :)

I am now the happy holder of the first position when searching for “God Girl Sex Games” in Windows Live search :) Go ahead, try searching for the phrase God Girl Sex Games.

LOTRO – First impression

Posted on | April 6, 2007 | No Comments

I promised to give a short first impression of the new mmorpg-game around called Lord of the Rings Online – Shadows of Angmar. So, here goes:

First of all, you need some pretty good hardware to play this game. It consumes pretty much all the recourses of my not so new computer. I have 512 MB of RAM, and a 256 MB graphics card. I would say this is an absolute minimum to play this game.

The first few minutes of game play was quite ok for the computer, but after 15 – 20 minutes it lagged badly. As far as I have experienced with other games, this is caused by the game engine to consume all available recourses of the PC, and the only way to get around this problem is to tweak the computer to use as little recourses as possible on other tasks.

Now – to the game itself. I did not capture any screen shots this time, but the graphics are pretty much the same as in most mmorpg-titles around. So, there is not so much to talk about regarding that part.

What I like so far is the fact that I can chose between first person and third person view. I generally prefer playing in first person and see through the eyes of the character.

This game is a very typical MMORPG game when it comes to the leveling treadmill unfortunately. You level up your char, then gets access to better gear, level up some more and so on. I guess it will take many ears before we will see a game that does anything different in this regard.

So, if you like leveling up (power leveling or not), you will like LOTRO.

I will post more on the game later on when I have tested more, and if I remember, I will try to get some screen shots and share them with you.

Happy leveling :)

Lord of The Rings Online

Posted on | March 31, 2007 | No Comments

Lord of The Rings Online will launch this month, so I figured it was a good idea to start a forum for the game where players can discuss the game. I have just gotten myself a beta-account, and wait eagerly for the launch of the beta april 6. :) The game will oficcially launch april 24.

It’s gonna be nice to test out a new mmorpg, since I have not played much of those since my hardcore playing days of Neocron and Anarchy Online.

I will report back here when I have tried the game a bit, and tell you if it’s woth the subscription.

The Global Warming Swindle

Posted on | March 30, 2007 | 1 Comment

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Watch this video. It shows a quite different view of the global warming theories than the hyped up theories of the environmental movement. Thanks goes to John who published it on his site so I could pick it up and share it here.

What makes me wonder most after digesting the message in the film is: Can we as consumers trust anything we are told? I mean, we are bombarded with “truths” about all kinds of stuff. Is is just lobbying for funds or political views all of it? Is there nothing in this world we can consider to be pure and unbiased?

It’s hard to distinguish between the different views out ther, but I guess it all boils down to using our logic and not swallow everything we are presented.

What do you think? Is the global warming movement a swindle?

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