Joomla Post/Get/Forward Assistance - post

I am using Joomla v1.6 and am need of some assistance. I have aprox. 50 videos with titles that are a numeric value. I want the site's visitors to enter the title number and be immediately forwarded to the appropriate article. Due to the ongoing videos being added, a menu will not work and a search module will display a majority of the videos. Since the user might be watching the incorrect video if a choice is given (search results). I guess what I need is to limit the steps/clicks the visitor has to use to see their video choice.
I have spent the last three weeks looking to no avail. I have two Joomla.org post will no answers.
Any help is GREATLY appreciated.

If you have the video numbers in the title, won't they come up in the URL?
For example, article titled '12345' which I assume contains your video:
SEO off: index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1:12345&catid=7:video&Itemid=101
SEO on: /component/content/article/7-video/1-12345
idea: You could probably really easily do a form submit using something like Jumi and just match the url pattern with a little php, substituting the submitted form video number for the last part of the url.`

I think you can use K2 to categorize and manage your videos.
K2 is similar to Joomla's built-in com_content, but has many extra features.
You can download it here:
http://getk2.org/

Related

Using YouTube API, is it possible to filter search by upload date?

I'm working on a personal project to retrieve YouTube videos on a particular subject very quickly after they are posted. Using the "Sort By" filter works well, however, I've noticed that some videos that fit the search query do not appear in the HTML. So, I was wondering if it is possible to also sort by Upload date, similar to the YouTube feature which allows for filtering videos based on if they were posted in the last hour, today, this week, etc. I believe that if I could include a filter for videos posted in the last hour, that would improve the accuracy of my project.
Any help is very much appreciated.
Check out the "order" parameter in this API (can set it to "date").

Friendly URL Structure with folders

I am currently building the URL Structure for an insurance website. I was hoping someone would give me some advice? I am trying to make it as SEO friendly as possible!
As an example, for 'travel insurance' the URL link would be;
http://www.example.com/travel_insurance/travel.html
and then for the quote form;
http://www.example.com/travel_insurance/quote/get_a_quote.html
would that be an ideal structure?
Any suggestions/advice is appreciated!
Being an seo specialist, it is best practice to keep your URL's as short and descriptive as possible.
If you want the actual page to rank online then add the keywords you wish to rank for in the URL.
If you do not want the page to rank it won't matter much.
Too many characters in the URL will not show up fully in search engine results snippets and can cuase a loss of potential clicks thru to your web page.
It is also best procatices to use a - Dash rather than _ underscore in your URL's.
I would go with:
http://www.website.com/travel-insurance.html
http://www.website.com/travel-insurance/get-a-quote.html
Less folders, quicker path, easier to understand.

search for and embed youtube videos in ruby on rails application

I have a website where I want to basically allow people to display several youtube videos onto the same page.
For example, I have a friend who has 3 different videos. Instead of sending a link to the three videos individually, they would go to my site see the 3 search boxes, search for the videos individually (the search is done on youtube), then they can pick the videos and click "done", at which point, the 3 videos would be embedded on their page.
I'm trying to figure out how to approach this in ruby on rails, but I'm not finding much information on how.
Here's a link from 2009 of a guy who's saying that he can actually do the search and retrieve from youtube: http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=30443
But I don't know how to do the search & retrieve, and I don't know how to do the embed. I think I can figure out the embed, but what's the best way to do the search/display results?
Thanks a lot for your help stackoverflow, you're my only hope (besides google, but google failed me today).
all you need to know about the search feature is described in YouTube Data Api. You will need your app to communicate with this API. The best thing to do may be to look after a gem specialized in this ; there is a list available in another StackOverflow question.

Rails - extract seo keywords from block of text

I need to generate seo meta keyword tags based upon user generated wiki content.
Say I have an article and a predefined list of keywords/phrases, is there some good method to grab matched article keywords? Keywords may not be of one word length and will be given a predefined weight as to which keywords are used first. Some implementation of Nokogiri seems the obvious choice but I wondered if there were something more complete for this exact scenario.
You could process your text thanks to a semantic API, it will give you a list of potential keywords + the score associated.
I've begun to develop this gem: https://github.com/apneadiving/SemExtractor
It still needs some improvements for error handling but it's fully operational to query the following engines:
Zemanta
Semantic Hacker from Textwise
Yahoo Boss
OpenCalais
If you're only wanting to grab keywords for the meta keyword tag, that's not really worth your time. Google doesn't pay attention to those anymore.
Here's a good post about it, with a video of Matt Cutts from Google explaining that the meta keyword tag doesn't play a part in search engine rankings.
http://www.stepforth.com/blog/2010/meta-keyword-tag-dead-seo/
What is worth your time? Good title tags.

Why do some websites add "Slugs" to the end of URLs? [closed]

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Many websites, including this one, add what are apparently called slugs - descriptive but as far as I can tell useless bits of text - to the end of URLs.
For example, the URL the site gives for this question is:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls
But the following URL works just as well:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/
Is the point of this text just to somehow make the URL more user friendly or are there some other benefits?
The slugs make the URL more user-friendly and you know what to expect when you click a link. Search engines such as Google, rank the pages higher if the searchword is in the URL.
Usability is one reason, if you receive that link in your e-mail, you know what to expect.
SEO (search engine optimization) is another reason. Search engines such as google will rank your page higher for the keywords contained in the url
I recently changed my website url format from:
www.mywebsite.com/index.asp?view=display&postid=100
To
www.mywebsite.com/this-is-the-title-of-the-post
and noticed that click through rates to article increased about 300% after the change. It certainly helps the user decide if what they're thinking of clicking on is relevant, in terms of SEO purposes though I have to say I've seen little impact after the change
I agree with other responses that any mis-typed slug should 301-redirect to the proper form. In other words, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/wh should redirect to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls . It has one other benefit that hasn't been mentioned--if you do not do a redirect to a canonical URL, it will appear that you have a near-infinite number of duplicate pages. Google hates duplicate content.
That said, you should really only care about the content ID and allow any input for the slug as long as you redirect. Why?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls
... Oops, the mail software cut off the end of the URL! No problem though because you still can roll with just https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427
The one big problem with this approach is if you derive the slug from the title of your content, how are you going to deal with non-ASCII, UTF-8 titles?
The reason most sites use it is probably SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Yahoo used to give a reasonable weighting to the presence of the search keyword in the URL itself, and it also helped in the Google result as well.
More recently the search engines have lowered the weighting given to keywords in the URL, likely because the technique is now more common on spam sites than legitimate. Keywords in the URL now have only a very minor impact on the search results, if at all.
As for stackoverflow itself, SEO might be a motivation (old habits die hard) or simply for usability.
It's basically a more meaningful location for the resource. Using the ID is perfectly valid but it means more to machines than people.
Strictly speaking the ID shouldn't be needed if the slug is unique, you can more easily ensure unique slugs by scoping them inside dates.
ie:
/2008/sept/06/why-some-websites-add-slugs-end-of-urls/
Basically this exploits the low likelihood of two identical slugs being in use on the same day. If there is a clash the general convention is to add a counter at the end of the slug but it's rare that you ever see these:
/2008/sept/06/why-some-websites-add-slugs-end-of-urls/
/2008/sept/06/why-some-websites-add-slugs-end-of-urls-1/
/2008/sept/06/why-some-websites-add-slugs-end-of-urls-2/
A lot of slug algorithms also get rid of common words like "the" and "a" to assist in keeping the URL short. This scoped approach also makes it very straightforward to find all resources for a given day, month or year - you simply chop off segments.
Additionally, stackoverflow URLs are bad in the sense that they introduce an additional segment in order to feature the slug, which is a violation of the idea that each segment should represent descending a resource hierarchy.
The term slug comes from the newspaper/publishing business. It's a short title that's used to identify a story in progress. People interested in URL semantics started using a short, abbreviated title in their URLs. It also pays off in SEO land, as keywords in URLs add importance to a page.
Ironically, lots of websites have started place a full serialized-with-hyphens version of the titles in their URLs for strictly SEO purposes, which means the term slug no longer quite applies. This also rankles semantic purists, as many implementations just tack this serialized version of the title at the end of their URLs.
I note that you can change the text freely. This URL appears to work just as well.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-is-billpg-so-very-awesome
As already stated, the 'slug' helps people and the search engines...
Something worth noticing, is that in the source of the page there is a canonical url
This stops the page from being index multiple times.
Example:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls">
Remove the formatting from your question, and you'll see part of the answer:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/
vs
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls
With no markup, the second one is self-descriptive.
Don't forget readability when sending a link, not just in search engines. If you email someone the first link they can look at the URL and get a general idea of what it is about. The second one gives no indication of the content of that page before they click.
If you emailed someone a link wouldn't it make more sense to include a description by actually writing out a description rather than making the other person parse to the URL where the description exists, and try-to-read-a-bunch-of-hyphenated-words-stuck-together.
First off, it's SEO and user friendly, but in the case of the example (this site), it's not done well or correctly
(as it is open to black hat tricks and rank poisoning by others, which would reflect badly on this site).
If
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls
has the content, then
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/
and
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/any-other-bollix
should not be duplicates. They should actually automatically detect the link followed is not using the current text (as obviously the slug is defined by the question title and can be later edited) and they should redirect 301 automatically to
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47427/why-do-some-websites-add-slugs-to-the-end-of-urls
thus ensuring the "one piece of content to one URI" rule, and if the URI moves/changes, ensure the old bookmarks follow/move with it through 301 redirects (so intelligent browsers can update the bookmarks).
Ideally, the "slug" should be the only identifier needed. In practice, on dynamic sites such as this, you either have to have a unique numerical identifier or start appending/incrementing numbers to the "slug" like Digg does.

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