Joomla

AMP Ping Up Joomla Website

21 May 2021
Dwayne Grimes
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Categories: Analytics, Joomla Component, Search Console, Uncategorized, Web Rankings, WebmasterTools

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) make your website more digestible for Google and has been adopted over the past 5 years by the other search engines. Google currently being the most utilized search engine, and the focus of this article. The goal for AMP is to make the content delivered more quickly for mobile users by condensing and indexing the pages. WordPress adopted this as a part of their core installation, and in testing we discovered Joomla is Rich Results Ready as well. Here is some of the things we have done to improve a Joomla site to be AMPping itself up to be searched.

A great place to start is to use Google as an AMP Tester. Use the link below to access Google’s AMP tester.

https://search.google.com/test/amp

There is also Google’s Rich Results Tester which can be accessed here.

https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

The hard part about these tests are they do not work on your “home” page. There is also Google Structured Data which is the actually the important part of the indexing; however, the page will benefit by being AMP ready. The combination will get your page mobile ready for search engines, with very specified content details you want indexed. We start with the Google Structured Data (GSD) on the services pages. The first thing we did was install a free plugin by Tassos Marinos which you can download in the Joomla Extension Directory (JED) or directly from his site.

https://www.tassos.gr/joomla-extensions/google-structured-data-markup

Install the component like a normal Joomla component. Then enable the plug-ins. There will 3 of them.

Then go to Components >> Google Structured Data >> Dashboard.

Click on the “Items” tab on the left, and “Article” will be the main item to deal with.

Once in “Article” item we set it to pull the “Browser Page Title” vs the “Title” because of the way we have the SEO set up. Make sure to complete as much of these sections as you can. Save your changes.

Then go back to the “Configuration” tab. Fill out as much as you can. Once you are done and satisfied you can go to the “Advanced” tab and turn on the minify of the output.

Before you minify the output look at the source code and make sure the content you want in the GSD is correct. We had an issue with “description” not showing up. We had to reinstall the plugin.

We had also installed a free AMP plugin, but it didn’t help. Just using the GSD plugin from Tassos was enough to make the site Rich Result Ready. Make sure to follow the instructions and view the source of the page to make sure the Structured Data looks the way you want it to before you request Google to index your pages. If you don’t it could be weeks before Google crawls the site and indexes it properly.

Lets us know if this helped you…

Using Redirects In Joomla

22 May 2019
Dwayne Grimes
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Categories: Analytics, Google, Joomla, Joomla Component, SEO

When launching our new website we tried to keep the URLs of the web pages the same as they were in the past. This didn’t quite work out like planned. The old site was using an underscore for dividing words in the URL, and the new one was using dashes. This caused indexed pages to produce a 404 page not found error. We decided to use redirects until the new pages got indexed.

The process is pretty straight forward.

  • Go to Components >> Redirects
  • Click on “New”
  • Enter the “Expired URL”. Our example “managed_it_services.html”
  • Enter the “New URL”. Our example “services/it-support-services.html”
  • Save

We went back to Google Analytics. In the Search Console >> Landing Pages section. We clicked on the icon to launch the page.

This however took us to our 404 page we have set up in the site. It seemed like the redirect didn’t work. When we got back to the Redirects section in Joomla was saw the “Redirects” plugin wasn’t enabled.

Once we enabled this the redirects happened right-a-way. The best part of enabling the URL Redirects plugin is it allowed us to record the URLs that someone went to. We could then create a redirect for that URL that we may not have listed otherwise.

Let us know if this helped you.

Google Maps API Now Requiring Payment

24 May 2018
Dwayne Grimes
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Categories: API Key, Google, Joomla, Joomla Module

Working on a website that is using Hot Themes extension Hot Maps and the module is suddenly broken. The browser console is pointing to a an invalid API code. I logged into to Google to update the API and copying the Key I have been using for months, but the map is still broken.

Hot Themes tech support is telling me to go to the page to get the API Key.

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/get-api-key

When i get there I am being informed about a new pricing structure starting on June 11, 2018.

Clicked on “Get Started”.

Selected “Maps” and clicked “Continue”.

I used the down arrow to select the “Project”.

I am now presented to “Create Billing Account”.

This was a free service. I clicked “Cancel” and got the next screen which looked promising.

I was brought to a screen to enter a credit card. I am doing this for a company I work for and don’t want to enter my personal card info, so I was stuck.

I am hoping to get this resolved. I have been in contact with HotJoomlaTemplates and I am not sure they know about this new process.

 

CSS Warp Text

5 February 2018
Dwayne Grimes
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Categories: CSS, Joomla, PHP

Working on a new project I wanted to create a badge that would have warped text with a dynamic date. It would be a flag with the text of how long the company has been in business. They started in 1997 and I used PHP to get the current year and display in the warped text.

This site helped me accomplish this.

http://csswarp.eleqtriq.com/

I took a little bit to understand how it sets the position, but when you understand it this site is incredibly helpful.

Let us know if this helped you….

 

Godaddy Hosting – upload_max_filesize – How Do I Increase My Upload Size

11 May 2017
Dwayne Grimes
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Categories: Godaddy Web Hosting, Joomla, PHP

My Joomla install told me the upload_max_filesize is 2M. I changed this in my PHP5.ini file on the server, but this had no effect. I learned later that this takes time to become in effect.

A faster way is to “PHP Selector”. You will see “Switch to PHP Options” in the upper-right. Click on this.  Click on the number next to “upload_max_filesize” and change it to what you want. Godaddy said to keep it under a Gig or you will have issues.

Let us know if this helped you…

 

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