Every now and again we need to do SEO for a site developed in Sharepoint.

Now, I have nothing against Sharepoint, I am sure it is a great product and I know that lot of big organisations are using it, however, it seems as if Sharepoint developers have a real blind spot when it comes to SEO.

Some of the problem areas that I have picked up with sites built in Sharepoint (I am going to use the domain 'somedomain.co.za' as the example - this is a fictitious site just to illustrate the principles):

1. The main home page url normally redirects to some other page, for example http://www.somedomain.co.za/Pages/welcome.aspx . This is very bad from an SEO perspective. It is much better to change this so that the home page of the site is on http://www.somedomain.co.za and not redirected to a different page. The problem is that the home page of the site is really the most important page from an SEO perspective and will normally get the most links. So the links will all point to http://www.somedomain.co.za while the actual site runs on http://www.somedomain.co.za/Pages/welcome.aspx. This means that the link juice could be diluted! Similarly, the inner pages are sometimes in the format: http://www.somedomain.co.za/Pages/something.aspx?product=someprod. While Google and other search engines normally do not have problems indexing these types of pages, they are really not very 'friendly' from a search engine friendly perspective and pages with straight forward urls such as http://www.somedomain.co.za/products/someprod.html tend to do better overall.
2. The titles of the inner pages can be set to be more unique, but what I normally find is that they are set to the basic minimum of what the page could be about, i.e. very short and not making use of the full 64 Characters that are available. This link offers a solution for customising Sharepoint titles: http://weblogs.asp.net/avnerk/archive/2007/04/11/customizing-moss-page-title.aspx
3. It would also be good if they can install an automatic XML sitemap generator for the google webmaster side and getting the site indexed properly – luckily there are some plugins available for Sharepoint.
   

   Here is a link to a resource that helps with getting Sharepoint sites to be SEO friendly

   http://apoint2share.com/?p=64

Overall, it just seems as if developers who work with Sharepoint just seem to be extra SEO-unaware. Possible reasons that I can think of are:

1. Sharepoint is mostly used for Intranets and occasionally for extranets ('normal websites'). Intranets do not require SEO, so naturally that attitude is carried forward to the extranet Sharepoint site?

2. Sharepoint is often used in bigger corporations, and bigger companies do not care about SEO!

Any comments?

This guest post was written by Wendy Graham, a stay at home mother and freelancer who often writes about education for Online College Guru, a directory of online colleges.

If you are like me, running backups of your important files and documents is something that you know is important, and something that you know you should do... but you are probably not doing it as regularly as you should!

Please note that I am talking here of backing up your personal files and folders on a home PC network and not web hosting files or company files, although if you are running a small business operation and do not have a formal backup system or process in place you will be able to use this as well.

I used to have an external hard disk drive on which to make backups, which I then stored off-site. This was a good idea in principle but in practice it tended not to happen often enough.

The solution that I am suggesting works completely automated and hands-off, once you have set it up, it runs by itself and you do not need to be concerned with remembering to make the backup yourself.

How to backup your Joomla or Wordpress Installation and have the backup emailed to your Gmail account

If you want to take control over your own backups but are scared that you are going to forget to run them regularly, here is a method to make a backup of your website and have the backup emailed to your Gmail account.

Let's take a look at the advantages of doing this.

1. You are not dependent on having your hosting provider make backups for you. Yes, WE make backups on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, but frankly, you might be hosting with a place whose backups are patchy or non-existent, and our backups sometimes also fail due to server load or other snafu's. In this way, you know that you always have your own backups available to you.
2. The method that I am going to show you entails that the backups run automatically without you having to remember to a thing!
3. This method of doing backups will not use your ISP bandwidth, but rather your server bandwidth. Please note therefore that if you use this, you should make sure that this will fit into your server bandwidth allocation (this could be a problem if you are hosting on a South African server!)

Click on the read more link to get the full tutorial!

We are running our next Joomla training course on 27 May 2010 in Johannesburg. The course is a hands-on course for newbies to Joomla and use a case study to go through the whole process of creating a website in Joomla, from understanding how to structure content, to manipulating and loading images, to installing components and plugins, to making your site SEO friendly.

The course is hands-on and intensive for the whole day, and at the end of the day you will be fully equipped to build your own Joomla website. The course comes with a full support manual, a CD with the most useful plugins and components, and free Joomla templates

Click here to read more about our Joomla Training Course on 27 May 2010.

* Update on 7 April 2010 to update the date of the course

* Update on 8 May 2010 to update the date of the course

So you have wanted to upgrade your joomla 1.0 site to joomla 1.5 but scared to make the jump in case you lose your current content? Well you no longer need to worry about that any more as in this tutorial we can show you how to migrate your Joomla 1.0 content to Joomla 1.5.

Click on the read more link below to get to the meat of the matter.

I have used Google webmaster tools for a while now. I just love the way that it gives you a peek into the 'behind the scenes' world of your website. Using Google webmaster tools you can see where your site is positioned in the various versions of the search engines, and whether you have problems with your site indexing. It also gives you the opportunity to submit a Sitemap, which can really help to get your site spidered quickly.

I have written about the Google webmaster tools before, but recently Google made an update to their interface and changed some things around. Let's take a look at what has changed...

Stock images, rightly or wrongly, are one of the best ways of spicing up an otherwise dull website page.

Pictures speak to the emotions and portray a specific image - in fact, as any advertising agency would probably want to tell you 'image is everything'.

In the web design world this is actually not true and I can get really frustrated with the idea that the actual graphic design aspects are placed on some type of pedestal and that it is a case of 'graphics über alles' - actually, if your website content matches up to what your website visitors are looking for then the actual design of the site does not really matter that much. No really!

Nevertheless, for a corporate website or a brochure type site, stock images can be used very effectively to add interest to a web page.

Click on the read more link below to find some good sources for stock images to use on your site.