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Yosa Buson (1715-1783)

The module called Ping and Related Articles adds pingback functionatily to Joomla similar to the functionality you can find in Wordpress and it add similar articles with the subject of the pages from your website.

You can publish the module to the pages of want on your website (some pages or all of them). The first step is to index them as your website is accessed and to add the related articles. The second step is to create a XML sitemap that you can use to submit to Google, Yahoo or Bing - you can select the name of the XML file, but it will always be written on the Joomla website index folder (for example the link of the XML file will look something like http://joomla.webdesign-software-code-seo.com/sitemap_pingrelatesarticles.xml. The third and final step is to ping other websites to let the know about your pages. Because the considerable quantity of pages of some websites, we decided to keep the pinging in the background (it pings one article every few minutes) to avoid the load of the server and to spam the Update Servers.

A Ping is a message is used to let other people know that you have published new content on your site. The ping message is sent to different Update Servers (the list has about 90 items, but the list is always updated and improved), including blog listings like Google Blogs (for example).

Call to undefined function xmlrpc_encode_request()

If you get this error you have to have to install the XML-RPC PHP extension, or ask your provider to install it if you are on a hosted domain. The module will no work without it.

The module works on Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5.

Our refund policy: you have 3 days (72 hours) to test our product and to ask a refund. After the 72 hours period expires no refund is possible.

More information: here.

One of our more recent projects involved some modification to a flash web page and it's improvement from the search engine optimization point of view. The client was complaining that his page was loading very slow and it was not very accessible from the main search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing). I am not going to write about my experience with that particular web site, but the use of Flash for web development is slowly dying while the seo is having more and more influence over web design.

Reasons of having a fast loading web site

The speed of a site reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests (from human visitors and crawlers/spiders as well). Faster websites make the users happy (that kind of happy that may make them stay more and return), a slow site will make the user spend less time there - it may make them close the browser window or tab before the site was loaded completely.

Remember that the mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are used more and more often and they usually access site via public wi-fi or the internet access offered by phone companies. If your web page is not optimized also the that devices it will load slower or not at all - you may loose a visitor for the moment and there is a risk that the visitor will never return (from any device or computer connected to the internet).

From another point of view: if an e-commerce site is making 100.000 euros per day (for example), a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you several million euros in lost sales every year.

Effects of fast loading web sites

Last year Google incorporated site speed as one of the over 200 signals used in determining search rankings. Of course, it's not the most relevant one, but a site with great content and fast loading pages will be almost all the time in the top. Yup: don't forget the content of the site. Everybody loves (including the search engines) a site that shows them something interesting and they don't have to wait to get it.

A fast loading page will have a greater impact to the visitors, whatever it's design. There are 3 very important things that will impress a visitor of your site: the design, the speed and the content. The crawlers/spiders used by the search engines are blind, so they don't care about the design. But they will consider the other 2 things (among others).

Several tips how to get fast loading web sites

Remember that in web world HTML rules. Whatever language you use (php, perl, C/C , Java/JSP, ColdFusion, ASP or C#), they all get as result a lot of HTML tags. Over that you may add CSS, Javascript and Flash in order to make you web site more attractive and put a lot of image in the page to make the visitor watch them.

In order to make your page to load fast you must keep it as closer as you can (without losing the quality of the design) to HTML. Avoid using big files in the site (like Flash video, big images and animated GIF's), but if you really have to use them remember to use as fewer as you can.

Don't use too many images

It's a well known thing that images can greatly enhance the look of a site, but also they can really slow it down if there are too many. You should decide if all your images are really needed (they can easily be replaced with css effects and sometimes they should have).

Use the height and width tags

Using the height and width tags for images tells the browser the size and the place of the image before loading it, otherwise the page has to wait and to load the image before the text. The same thing happens also with the tables.

Faster images: reduce their file size

Using a lot of images can bring some additional megabytes to a page. Reducing the size of the files on server will decrease the traffic and the time of loading the site.

Use external CSS and javascripts files for faster pages

CSS can greatly improve your web sites load time! There is a big difference between defining the CSS for every element of the page inside the script and the definition of the style sheet with all the classes and id-s into an external file. Using the external file will allow the browser to cache all the formatting and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again.

Do you use the same script on multiple pages? Switch to an external script: load the javascript files from one source instead of adding all that code to each of your pages like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="yourscript.js"></script>

That way the browser already has it in it's cache and won't have to read it each time another page loads. This one saves a ton of load time, specially for larger scripts!

Split up long pages: multiple short pages load faster

It may happen that you have some long texts you want to present to the visitors, some that could fill in several A4 pages on both sides and small font size. Split the text into several short pages instead putting in into a summer-day long page. The pages will load faster, the attention of the people will not be lost (nobody likes to scroll a lot to the bottom of the window) and you will also increase the number of internal links (if it happens once or twice it does not count, but long texts may happen more the once).

Keep your code clean

There are several popular wysiwyg editors that are integrated into the scripts of the page (into the backend) that allows you to save the clear readable text as formatted html text. Usually these wysiwyg editors allow the user to copy paste formatted text from the packages like Open Office or Microsoft Office that have a lot of useless code (for example empty tags <font> </font> or <span> </span> and <font size="4"> <font color="white"> the text </font></font>).

Removing any of those excess tags or adding the properties to only one or two tags will not only speed up your load time, but make you pages validate a lot cleaner.

The list can continue with at least a dozen tips. I prefer to stop here, I may continue some other time with additional information. Util then, if you are not clear about something in the text or you need more detailed information about anything don't hesitate to contact us.

It’s hard to believe that a monopolist company like Google could be frightened by the new search engines (as Bing or the one Facebook is developing), or even their combination with Yahoo (especially because the Yahoo accepted that their own search engine to be replaced by Bing). But, evan so, just just a couple of months after Microsoft launched Bing, Google announced it is tweaking a new technology to search online with the code name „Caffeine”, that could change the position the companies are holding in the search results. To that companies and persons that makes good money or they are surviving according the traffic generated by Google, the new technology represent a motive of worry.

Google suggested on the company's official blog, the fact that the technology could change the results of the searches, and that could oblige the beneficiaries of the Google search engines to change the solutions to optimize the results of the search engines (SEO) to protect their good results in the top of the list.

rezultatele bune în capătul de început al listei rezultatelor.

Google officials said on August 10 that the company is seeking help testing a new-and-improved search system, codenamed “Caffeine” — complete with changes to its indexing, ranking and crawling mechanisms. Silicon Alley Insider speculates that Caffeine could be the “secret project” to which the New York Post was referring back in June when it reported that Google cofounder Sergey Brin was assembling a team of Google search experts to tweak Google’s engine in response to Bing.

„For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. We are hoping that the new technology to bring a plus in speed and precision for Google”, announced on the company blog two of project responsibles, Sitaram Iyer and Matt Cutts.

„Most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences”, are writing the two Google engineers in the blog.

Bing, the renamed Live Search and soon going to be integrated in Yahoo, included a number of user-interface changes, as well as tweaks to the underlying Microsoft search algorithm. The Caffeine test site — available for anyone starting August 10, when it is not down — doesn’t offer any kind of noticeable UI tweaks. It does, however, change the way results are ranked.

Search Engine Land did a side-by-side comparison of a search for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” using the old and new Google engines. They found the new Google infrastructure returned video and news results midway down the page. The current Google search system, however, returned news at the top, video in the middle, and images at the bottom of the page.

With Bing, Moby images are the first link. The whole Bing page feels more like a site optimized to sell users something: Moby MP3 downloads, ringtones, posters, t-shirts. With Caffeine, video links are fourth on the page. News and blog posts about Moby are a little further down. On Bing, news and blog links are nowhere to be found on the first page of results.

This is hardly a definitive test, but so far, Google’s Caffeine indexing system seems like it is meant to yield results that are more Bing-like in any way.

Last hour message from Caffeine sandbox:

„Please try your search again in a few hours.

We are upgrading elements of our data center. The Caffeine sandbox should be available for searching again in a few hours”

Useful links:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-shows-off-next-generation-search-architecture-2009-8

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/