Tagged: SEO

When someone types words into Google which relate to your business, you want to appear at the top:

google search for small business web design

To get there requires the science (some might say art!) of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.

Google AdWords Express is a relatively new product / service from Google which allows small and local businesses to advertise their business in Google’s local search results quickly and effectively. It is much like Google AdWords obviously but comes with a few differences that make it easy for local businesses who are not so Internet savvy to setup a campaign without the hassle of having to do any complex research such as choosing the right keywords, setting location targets and all of that other jazz.

Google AdWords Express

XMap is an excellent plugin for Joomla which dynamically generates both an HTML and an XML sitemap for your website. However, it has a problem where the homepage URL is not generated in a Search Engine Friendly way. Most people do not want their homepage URL to contain anything but the basic site URL (www.yoursite.co.uk), but XMap will always append the alias of the homepage menu item, for example www.yoursite.co.uk/home.html.

To fix this, open you will need to change the following two files in the XMap installation:

components/com_xmap/xmap.html.php
components/com_xmap/xmap.xml.php

Find the following line in both files:

$link = Xmap::getItemLink($node);

and add the following line immediately after:

$link = str_replace('/home.html', '/', $link);

You may need to clear the XMap cache via components->xmap->options in order to see the changes applied.