From the category archives:

Search Engine Optimization

Animal Shelter Marketing Letter

by Caroline on February 19, 2007

More info for animal shelters needing web sites or web marketing……..

… I’ve been building/rebuilding web sites for animal rescue groups. It’s my way of giving as I don’t deal with the shelter that well. I do two basic things: 1) build the site, 2) market the organization on the web.

The web sites I build are usually built on free software called Joomla. Instead of upload stories or changing HTML directly you would login to the administrator and publish your stories from there. If I do help out we don’t have to use that system, but I do recommend it because 1) multiple people can update the site; 2) you can easily grab email addresses from people interested in your org; 3) we can often add new features really fast. For instance I can add an online store in an hour or two; it uses a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor so you don’t need to know any html — really a whole lot more.

Here are all the add ons to the base product:
http://extensions.joomla.org/

The main issue, though, is marketing. I assume that you want your web site to be found when someone types in
nh shelter
dogs for adoption
Or the like.
The business of making that happen is called SEO or search engine optimization. SEO used to be mechanical and very easy to do. Now the mechanical part is just the pre-requisite to the real work of web marketing. It’s very labor intensive (takes a lot of time, though the tasks themselves are not that hard).

Successful SEO is mostly about writing, writing, writing. There are tons of ways to get the word out about your web site, some of them really help you in the search engines, some less so.

I’ll help with either of these, my standing offer is here

A few things you might want to know about me:

I’m a low stress person, I don’t want to be a CARRIER either!

I’m just here to help, if this causes problems in the org don’t ever feel like you owe me anything, it’s your organization

Really good SEO skills are marketable. If you want training to market arnne it’s a great opportunity to learn for the doggies and then use it in your career.

I’m available when you need me, please don’t stress on my account.

Best,
Caroline

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.htaccess mod_rewrite to eliminate non-www domain and index.php

by Caroline on December 25, 2006

#Redirect any bogartcomputing.com request to http://www.bogartcomputing.com
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bogartcomputing\.com
rewriterule (.*) http://www.bogartcomputing.com/$1 [R=301,L] 
#Redirect any index.php request to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php /$1 [R=301,L]
#redirect any home/ request to /
RewriteRule ^(.*)home/ /$1 [R=301,L]

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Adding multiple domains to cpanel using addon and redirection

by Caroline on November 21, 2006

Question: how to use cpanel to host multiple web sites, each of which has multiple domans associated with it.

Example:

Assumptions: Name server setup points all of these domains to the name server where site1domain1.com etc. are hosted; site1domain1.com has content in /home/site1domain1/public_html; site1domain1 is “main” cpanel site, a Mother Site.

site1domain1.com has web content for site1domain1.com
site1domain2.com has pointer to site1domain1.com

site2domain1.com
site2domain2.com has pointer to site2domain1.com

/home/site1domain/public_html:                       site 1 domain 1’s content
/home/site1domain/public_html/site1domain2: site 1 domain 2 is pointer to site 1 domain 1
/home/site1domain/public_html/site2domain1: site 2 domain 1’s content
/home/site1domain/public_html/site2domain2: site 2 domain 2 is pointer to site 2 domain 1

Answer:

site1domain1.com is the host cpanel’s “main” site. It has a public_html directory under which its web code resides. Make sure none of the following directory names exist under public_html:

/home/site1domain1/public_html:
site1domain2
site2domain1
site2domain2

Task #1:
Make site1domain2.com point to site1domain1.com

Go to Addon Domains. Enter
site1domain2.com
site1domain2
a password here
Click Add Domain

This action creates the physical directory /home/site1domain1/public_html/site1domain2

New Domain Name:
Username/directory/subdomain Name:
Password:
 

Point site1domain2.com to site1domain1.com 
Go to Addon Domains.
At Redirect Domain to URL select site1domain2.com
Click Setup Redirect
Enter http://site1domain1.com/
Click Save

In browser go to site1domain1.com, it should show content in public_html
In browser go to site1domain2.com, it should redirect to site1domain1.com

Task #2:
Make site2domain2.com point to site2domain1.com

This is different than task #1 because there we were redirect the main hosting site’s domain. Here we are creating an add-on domain, redirecting it from the main site to the site2domain1 content, and then creating a pointer URL that redirects to site2domain1 as well.

Summary of tasks:
Create site2domain1 add on domain, redirect it so it displays site2domain1 content, create site2domain2 add on domain, redirect it so it lands at site2domain1.com

Create physical directory /home/site1domain1/public_html/site2domain1
Go to Addon Domains. Enter
site2domain1.com
site2domain1
a password here
Click Add Domain

Create physical directory /home/site1domain/public_html/site2domain2
Go to AddOn Domains. Enter
site2domain2.com
site2domain
a password here
Click Add Domain

 

Go to AddOn Domains
At Redirect Domain to URL select site2domain1.com
Click Setup Redirect
Enter http://site1domain1.com/site2domain1.com
Click Save
Go to AddOn Domains
At Redirect Domain to URL select site2domain
Enter http://site1domain1.com/site2domain1.com
Click Save
 

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VirtueMart Product Details Page SEO Title Tags

by Caroline on September 27, 2006

 In administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.product_details.php, add the category name to the page title

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VirtueMart Category Page SEO Title Tags

by Caroline on September 27, 2006

In order to set keyword-rich title tags on a VirtueMart category listing page:

In administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.index_sdm.php (your mileage may vary on file name), add and initialize a $title variable in the top:

After setting the category name, append the category to the title:


This presumes your shop.index page calls

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Painful 301 domain redirect discoveries using Joomla com_sef 404sef

by Caroline on July 24, 2006

Answers the question:
How to redirect domains given tools .htaccess, parked domain redirect and Joomla component 404sef.
If you use Joomla and care at all about search engine rankings you’ll have to use a SEF translation of some kind. I chose 404sef and I’m grateful for what it does. Here’s how to get around something it doesn’t do, which is handling non-primary domains.
It will make Search Enging Friendly links for the current domain, but if you redirect a different domain to the 404Sef’d one the component will cough up a hair ball.

Setup:

  1. Joomla 1.0.10
  3. Siteground.com hosting cpanel with parked domains
  4. Global config: SEF on
  5. SEF404 config: SEF on
  9. secondary domains that need to redirect in a search engine friendly way to http://www.bombshelters.com/:

biologicalprotection.com
biologicalshelter.com
biologicalshelter.us
biologicalshelters.com
biologicalshelters.us
blastshelters.com
blastshelters.us
bombshelter.us
chemicalprotection.us
combatshelter.com
disastershelter.com
falloutshelter.us
governmentprotection.com
nbcshelter.com
nbcshelter.us
nuclearprotection.us
nuclearshelter.us
nuclearshelters.com
radiusdefense.com
radiusengineering.us
radiusengineeringinternational.com
radiusengineeringintl.com
radiusshelters.com
saferoomprotection.us
shelterengineering.com
shelterprotection.us
sheltersystems.us
survivalshelter.us
survivalshelters.us
undergroundshelter.us
undergroundshelterengineering.com
undergroundshelters.com
undergroundshelters.us
wmdprotection.us
Setup secondary domains to resolve to primary domain

These domains are all registered on network solutions. I changed the primary and secondary name servers on all of them to the siteground name server for bombshelters.com. Then on cpanel for bombshelters.com I used the “parked domains” tool to point each of the domains to bombshelters.com.

This worked, and then broken suddenly tonight. It actually probably broke when I installed 404SEF I just didn’t realize it.

Symptoms

I guess I had 404SEF off when I redirected the domains to the bombshelters.com name server because m initial tests worked great. You’d type undergroundshelter.us and the browser would display bombshelters.com content under the undergroundshelter.us address bar. When I tried that tonight I got “this page cannot be displayed.”

The pubic_html errorlog pointed to:

[24-Jul-2006 00:58:57] PHP Warning: strpos() []: Empty delimiter. in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_sef/sef404.php on line 83

[23-Jul-2006 23:04:24] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function: sefreltoabs() in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_content/content.html.php on line 584

Things that don’t fix the problem

  1. Turning off 404SEF: it fixes the problem but creates the old problem of unfriendly URLs
  2. Ensuring the strpos delimiter (and target) are not empty on sef404.php:

    3. [24-Jul-2006 00:58:57] PHP Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter. in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_sef/sef404.php on line 83

    bold line below is line 83

    if (!empty($pathdata) && (!empty($sefconfig->suffix)))

    {
    if (strpos($pathdata,$sefconfig->suffix) !== false)
    $path_array[$x] = str_replace($sefconfig->suffix,”",$pathdata);
    $x++;
    }

    This is fine as far as it goes, it’s good to test inputs before assuming they have content, but it addresses a symptom, not a problem.

  3. Similar to #2, defining sefRelAbs function against its will

]: Empty delimiter. in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_sef/sef404.php on line 83]: Empty delimiter. in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_sef/sef404.php on line 83content.html.php:
if (!function_exists(’sefRelToAbs’))
{
function sefRelToAbs($string) {}
}
What does work

In .htaccess rewrite any domain that is not http://www.bombshelters.com/ to be http://www.bombshelters.com/. Works for “bombshelters.com” (without www), “falloutshelter.us,” and etc. secondary domains.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !bombshelters.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bombshelters.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Big thank you to http://enarion.net/web/apache/htaccess/redirect-www-and-no-www/

 

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