Cardsharks - AGD Mentorship

[Guard Dog]

Hey Cardsharks,

This is the thread where we can discuss anything related to your site and mentorship. As I said in the previous thread, we will begin taking a look at your site tomorrow.

Typically, I would prefer not to have a website already built.. but will work with you on this one. What I would like to know (via PM or in this thread) is the software you are currently using for your website.

I do not believe I have experience with the software you are using and will need to know that in advance of any changes we might make to target keywords and traffic.

[Guard Dog]

Cardsharks ~

I have taken a look at your site today several different times and ways The software platform you are using appears to be Joomla with a community plugin. Can you let me know the full scope of plugins you have enabled on your portal?

I see also that you more than likely have an SEO (url re-write) plugin enabled as well, but cannot verify which one (SEF, I hope) you are using.

What I see on the homepage is a bit of a mixture of keywords and we may want to make some adjustments to properly target what you are looking for. These conversations should occur offline (not in this thread) as we do not wish to make more competition for you

Please PM me and we can go over some of the details of your site. First - Please update this thread with the software version (i.e., which Joomla version you are using) and which plugins (extensions) you are making use of.

Thanks!

[affcorner]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, look at Joomla forums ,=and make sure you have all your backdoors closed..lot of security holes with that...google this

"Bliss No. 5 chocolate"

is a joomla hacker at work

Check joomla forums, you'll be ok..

[Guard Dog]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, look at Joomla forums ,=and make sure you have all your backdoors closed..lot of security holes with that...google this

"Bliss No. 5 chocolate"

is a joomla hacker at work

Check joomla forums, you'll be ok..

Very, Very good point affcorner and I'll incorporate this into any website I help out with. That means WP, Joomla, Drupal and all backdoor issues known at this point will be closed if possible.

[CardSharks]

Hi guys, sorry I didn't realise I had my own thread :P Was waiting for someone to get in touch with me but now I know where I'm meant to be

Okies well I do indeed use Joomla as my platform of choice v1.5.7

My list of plugins and components is extensive but the greatest hits are:

Fontpage Slideshow
Jom Social Community
Seyret Video
JooBB
2JTabs

I don't use any of the typical SEO extentions in my site - the friendly URL's are generated using apachemod rewrites. I think this is a far cleaner way of doing things and ultimately lends a little more control.

I wasn't aware of the chocolate exploit so I will take steps to rectifiy that immediately.

Just from my own experience the issues I have already identified are:

Too much javascript in index.php - I need to package this all up and just use calls to the JS in an external file as and when needed.

My site doesn't validate for correct W3C Standards though it is u likely to until I have resolved the issue above.

W3C CSS is a little easier to fix.

I agree my frontpage is getting a little confused and my site has suffered from some enourmous 'project creep'.

Okay lastly I appreciate that I have an 80 per cent finished site here and that that is not an ideal state of affairs considering it's size, purpose and aim.

I will be purchasing some new casino domains this week so if you wish to start afresh I'm perfectly willing to do that.

Edit** I should have mentioned that I have a facebook account for CardSharks too with around 150 members and growing each day.

[Guard Dog]

Ok - that helps a bit and sorry I confused you with opening the thread without warning I'll have to change that process a bit to ensure I don't lose affiliates in the mix.

Mod-Rewrite: Yes, you are correct in that you have a lot more options there if you do it manually. That, of course, means you will have to do it all manually. It also means that 'stock Joomla URLS' will always exist in your page copy where Joomla is the one to generate the URL.

Example: On your homepage you have a link to: 'Poker Strategy Articles' and it is linked to: Guides

That is obviously a Joomla URL and doesn't help out your linking strategy (which is actually quite good otherwise).

You will have to persist a lot of 'due dilligence' to ensure that those URLs are always re-written properly.

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What we need to do:

Focus on specific pages and specific terms that you want to rank for. We will need to discuss this over IM, most likely. I don't want that to be public information for everyone to use.

Look at Wordpress integration along with contextual linking (LSL).


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That would be a good place to start

[CardSharks]

okies I'll read around that. Have added you to my messenger

[affcorner]

Hey guard, one other suggestion, when you open the thread, let us know the URL, if you want our 2 cents also ;-)

Ill check out site today ( i assume is one in your footer) later today

@card

what are main words you want to push? Being others reading this, put 1p public, maybe a lesser important one, but owuld be nice to see a real world example.

Give us some goals? Business goals also, not just "make money"...LOL

[Guard Dog]

We have changed sites to focus on:

Casino Bournemouth

That is the current project for CardSharks

[CardSharks]

lolz k well you know business-wise I would like this site to be competing with sites like pokerspace by the end of this year. Ofcourse I would like to make money with the site but I don't hvae a definitive figure. So long as a site pays for itself I consider it a success.

The wider aim is to have a network of poker/gaming sites ofwhich CardSharks is the 'mothership' but part of a network of say a 100 sites or so targeting niches that can perhpas feed some residual traffic into 'sharks.

My casino pages are a little more straightforward - target by location etc

I should add that the point of having a network of gaming sites is to harness some link power of my own without having to rely on link exchanges/buying etc

Ideally I would like to create the network using database sites with potentially tens of thousands of links but I'm not good enough with PHP yet to attempt that so I will stick to doing it with Joomla/HTML for now.