There may be times when the URL for your website needs to change to a new one. This may be because you found a better URL for your website, or, as a webdesigner, your client simply requests you to do so. A while ago I ran into such an issue for one of my own clients. A psychologist had 5 domains, all optimized for one of the 5 locations where she was working from. For all these cities the site was nicely optimized, but maintaining the sites and agenda's became a drag. 

We already discussed that a CDN can work great for your site performance. The idea is that your static files, like CSS, Javascript and especially images are not just loaded from wherever your webserver is hosted, but from several datacenters around the world. This ensures that if your wesite is hosted in New York, a user in Singapore can still load the website pretty fast.

Last weekend we decided to implement a CDN for the Joomla-SEO.net website, let me share my findings. We used the #NoNumber plugin CDN for Joomla, combined with the service

On Monday January 27th I gave a presentation about Joomla SEO for the Joomla User Group in Amsterdam, hosted by Dennis Buis en Sander Potjer. Time was too short to also discuss the subject of Performance, but it was a nice session, also I believed from those attending, with a lot of feedback among eachother.

This year the dutch Joomla community will gather again in Woudschoten Hotel & Conferentiecentrum in Zeist for the Joomla Dagen 2014. As usual, many really interesting presentations will be held, on many different topics, for both beginners and advanced Joomla users. It is also excellent for meeting your Joomla friends again ;).

What is particularly interesting this year is that there are quite a few presentations that overlap the subject of my site. I've already ticked some of the speakers that I will definitely try to listen to:

Over the last 2 months I have been working on an Ebook about Joomla SEO & Performance, similar to the subject of this Joomla-SEO.net, and today I am happy to announce that it has been published on both Amazon.com (Kindle Edition) and Smashwords.com (Epub version)! The book is called "Joomla 3.5 SEO & Perfomance" and has about 110 pages (25.000 words). Through the Smashwords network, the book should also be published in other bookstores globally, such as Apple, Kobo, etc., but this might take a while.

As explained in the article about microdata and rich snippets, Joomla does not offer support for microdata in the core. If you want to enrich your content with microdata you need to creat or buy overrides, install extensions or activate the feature in your extensions, if applicable.

One of the main 15 new features of Joomla 3.2 was the support for microdata. For the time being though, this does not mean that microdata are actively used in Joomla. The added support is a new library for Joomla developers, which allows hem to easier create the feature in their extensions and plugins.This is achieved by adding the JMicrodata class. The improved support will hopefully mean that in the near future, microdata or rich snippets will actually be used on your sites.

As discussed in the article about duplicate URL's, canonical URL's can be used to set a preferred URL for content that can be reached through multiple URL's. It is one of the methods advised by Google for treating your URL's. Joomla 2.5 did not support canonical URL's, but Joomla 3 does. This should be a good thing, but when you look for the keyword combination "Joomla 3 canonical URL", you encounter a lot of blogposts on the Joomla.org forum, discussing incorrect setting of canonical URL's. Actually, recently I stumpled upon an issue myself where it seems the feature is not implemented correctly in Joomla 3 (Joomla 3.2 at the time of writing). 

Last week I did a presentation on Joomla SEO & Performance in Utrecht, and through lack of time I was forced to do the performance presentation at lightning speed, leaving me gasping afterwards. However, we managed to go through the whole presentation, including a demo, in 15-20 minutes.

This got me thinking that it would be nice to create a short video with the most crucial tips and publish it on Youtube. I just created it, in just a few seconds over 5 minutes, demonstrating how to take a slow website with long loading and low grades could be improved quite a bit: PageSpeed grade from 30 to 77 and loading time from 5.6 to 3.1 seconds.

On Monday November 11th I have been holding a presentation in Utrecht for the Joomla User Group (JUG) Utrecht. Basically I discussed the subjects this blog is about, Search Engine Optimization, but also the subject of Joomla Performance, how do you make your website faster, both with and without the use of plugin:

http://www.joomlacommunity.eu/joomla-gebruikersgroepen/details/348-bijeenkomst-joomla-gebruikersgroep-utrecht.html.

For the benefit of anyone that attended, I already made my slideshow available on Slideshare, feel free to check it out already:

This week I was offered to test a pre-release of a pro-version of the JCH-Optimize plugin. Of course I grabbed the chance, as it is already one of my favourite plugins. The good news is that the free version still offers the same functionality as before. The pro-version just adds even more functionality on top of that. What is offered on top is the following:

• The plugin can search the whole body of the page for files to aggregate as opposed to just the head
• Can include inline javascript (and css) in the combined file
• Can now load the combined file asynchronously, taking advantage of this HTML5 feature
• Can load individual files asynchronously rather than just exclude them if they don't combine well