If you’re upgrading an old version of Joomla, it can help to make sure your hosting is running both PHP5 and MySQL5.

Lots of people will still be on version 4 of both and while Joomla may seem like it installs OK, lots of components and modules with either not install or not display correctly.

However, many people are still having problems with PHP5.3 so err on the safe side and stick to 5.2 for PHP just now if you have the choice.

One can’t help but notice the amount of Google Local listings being shown before the main organic search listings whenever a search is made containing a geographical location. If your business would benefit at all from geographically targeted searches then you should get it listed on Google Local.

This is an excellent way to gain a good listing for your site without hours of SEO or spending loads on PPC. It’s certainly not hard to do, costs absolutely nothing and the results are really quick in most cases (as long as you choose to register with phone verification).

Of the businesses I’ve signed up most have received targeted visitors from their listing. If they hadn’t been listed they wouldn’t have received those visitors.

Fill in all the boxes on the signup and ensure a few of your key search terms are scattered around in the description and then go through the verification process. Before you know it you could be dominating the top of the search results pages for your business type in your town.

Add your site to Google Local here.

When I’m advising clients on how to improve their website, normally I have to push really, really hard to encourage them to update the website regularly with new content. Blogging is obviously an easy way to do this but there are others ways. e.g. an e-commerce shop might add customer reviews, extended descriptions etc on a regular basis. Sometimes I’ll recommend adding a news page as an alternative way of saying “go write a blog”.

The thing is, normally when I recommend a path like that, the good intention is there but the site doesn’t get updated that often. As a result most sites do OK in search engines but are never firing on all cylinders.

What happens when the plan goes the other way? What when you start writing screeds and screeds of content, or worse yet, cut’n'pasting thousands of pages of old Powerpoint presentations, proposals, case studies, technical documents etc?

Does your customer really need or want it? Sure search engines will lap it up and it will probably bring more one-time visitors into your site, but do you really want to be feeding all this stuff into your loyal readers RSS feed or email newsletter?

So how do you get it right?

If you are planning on adding tons of less-than interesting content, do it in a way that places it in an archive or knowledge base. Try not to throw it down the throats of your repeat visitors or readers. Keep it out of the RSS feed and don’t tell people in your newsletter that you’ve just uploaded a technical document from 2001.

Or better yet, why not pick and choose the best of the content and leave the rest out? The stuff that you do put in could be introduced in such a way that it lets your reader know the relevance of putting it in now.

Do it that way and introduce it to your readers in the right way and they might just end up lapping it up. If you simply deluge people with crap they will unsubscribe. If you’re serious about adding content there’s definitely a balance that has to be achieved. Get it right and you’ll reap the rewards of loads of visitors from search engines AND loads of repeat visitors.

Many people using Wordpress to build themselves a website these days use an automated installer system provided by their server company. These are handy tools but I have 2 problems with them:

1. The version of Wordpress is rarely the most up to date

2. There is what seems a throwaway question that is actually very important in the installation process

It’s the second point I want to refer to here. When installing Wordpress there is a question that asks whether you want to allow search engines (Google, Technorati) etc to access your blog. Many internet users trained to say NO to any privacy questions (Do you want to sign-up for our newsletter? Can we give your email address to anyone we please?) will automatically say no to this question too.

Those budding site builders then go on to create a fine site and great content but they’re just not getting anywhere in Google. There’s a reason. Saying no to the installation question about search engines inserts a Noindex, Nofollow tag into the website source code. This means that no matter how hard you try to get into Google it’s just not going to index you.

Thankfully though there’s a quick fix. If you go to the Settings > Privacy section of your blog admin menu you can find the setting in there and give access to the spiders who really want to index your site. Then, providing you’ve got a few links pointing at your site, the spiders should be around to visit soon and your listings should appear shortly after that.

Nowadays every B&B seems to have a website. It’s essential in the travel and tourism industry. People shop online for their holiday accommodation and to ignore that is to ignore a large percentage of potential customers. Once the website is running though, what can a B&B do to start achieving more visitors from the web?

- Make sure your site contains the right keywords in the right places. If you run a B&B in Crieff, make sure that B&B Crieff is in the Title, in an H1 heading, and mentioned a few times in the content of your home page any other pages where it is appropriate.

- Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find other similar search terms that people use to find accommodation in Crieff too. Incorporate those search terms into appropriate pages in your site, again putting them in the Title, H1 and body content positions.

- Signup to Google Webmaster Tools and create and submit a sitemap for your website. Register the same sitemap with Yahoo through Yahoo Site Explorer.

There are loads of other on-site SEO tips to get stuck into but those basics will at least help get your site found. In addition there are loads of off-site actions you can undertake to help boost your search rankings.

- Claim your listing on Google Local. Google Local results are showing up at the top of searches for loads of geographical searches. If I do a search for B&B Crieff in Google the first 10 listings are those who have claimed their Google Local listing for their B&B.

- Make sure your B&B is listed on Trip Advisor and encourage all your visitors to leave a review there (perhaps by emailing them a day or two after they’ve gone home with a link to your tripadvisor page). The Trip Advisor reviews are being displayed with the Google Local results mentioned above so it would be worth pursuing even if Trip Advisor wasn’t already one of the biggest travel sites to get listed on.

- If you’re not bad at writing, you might consider running a blog on your B&B site. News of what’s happening in the B&B is bound to be of interest to your repeat visitors and may attract new ones. A blog is also an easy way to update a site regularly to keep search engine spiders coming to your site.

- Get into social media. Twitter and Facebook are great ways to connect with guests who’ve already stayed with you and possibly find new guests. A full run-down on social media networking is outside the remit of this article but I’ll try and follow up with some tips in a later article.

- Find some travel forums, join and take part. Put your website link in your profile and signature where allowed and then get active. Try and give useful information to as many people as you can and use the forum regularly. Aardvark Travel forums are a good place to get started with this.

Those are just a few hints to help a B&B get listed a bit better on Google. Obviously a full SEO strategy will go into more depth and address more areas than this but hopefully it will help a few people get started down the path to better rankings.

This is one of those niggling little problems I had this week. I usually build a Joomla site in a temporary directory of the domain it is going live on then move it to the root directory once the site launches. The normal process involves changing the temporary location in the Joomla configuration file and if you’re running Virtuemart e-commerce, change the directories in Virtuemart’s configuration file too, then move the site to the root directory.

However this week when I thought it had all gone smoothly, it appeared that secondary and additional product images were not showing up when enlarged. It turns out they were still being referenced in the old directory.

A look at the database told me that the full URL for the large version of secondary images/files had been coded into the database for every image meaning that when I moved the site, the URL’s were then pointing at empty locations.

There were two ways I could think of to solve this:

1. Use a redirect on the images directory. I just added this line at the end of the .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /temp_dir/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/ http://www.domain.com/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/

2. Use phpMyAdmin on your server and go through each row in the jos_vm_product_files table and edit to put the new location in the file_url field. If you’ve got a lot of images, this can take a while.

For the moment, both ways seem to work.