Media Street are proud to announce the release of our Joomla! component which works with Virtuemart and PayPoint.net (old SecPay) which enables companies to take payments online through their website.

The component is version 1.5, upgraded from 1.4, it's compatible with the latest version of Joomla! and Virtuemart. To find out more please visit the PayPoint component homepage.

A majority of businesses at the moment are realising how important the Internet is to their company and budgets are increasing every quarter for online marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO). So what's everyone investing in? Or what should they be investing in? The answer is simple, they should be investing in link building.

After a blog, a link building campaign is the simplest marketing method possible. In a sense, in a majority of cases, it's not even marketing. You don't pay for a click, you're not getting the front page of all the websites and to be honest, probably less than 150 people a year will visit your website for 80% of the links built. So if you're not getting the visits from the link and if you're not getting front page / in your face advertising then why do it? How does it work?

If you've read "Tips for Speeding up and Increasing SEO on Joomla!" you might still be wanting some more information regards to improving your Joomla! website speed and search engine rankings. So here they are:

1. Enable the cache option and GZIP compression in global configuration. Please be aware that signs of caching can take time for the effects to kick in. Also Virtuemart, at present, doesn't allow these features.
2. Minimise the number of components and modules that you use. The more you operate the slower the site will run.
3. Limit the size your image files.
4. Avoid using external website feeds, modules and components. If you have for example your Tweets from Twitter than your site is needing to retrieve all that information, externally, for each page load.
5. Use a host who offers Joomla!, Wordpress and other CMS hosting solutions. They are used to supporting GZIP compression and they won't oversell capacity. View our web hosting area.
6. Avoid using loads of images on your template and CSS. If you are then compress and compact.
7. Optimise and repair your database.
8. Keep Joomla up-to-date so it's secure and has no bugs and is always optimised.
9. Install the web page speed tool from Google. It works on Firefox and instantly can inform you of ways to improve any website showing errors on a risk scale.

As a content management system (CMS) Joomla! can sometimes end up be the slowest of them all.

Firstly you need to understand a stripped version of Joomla! doesn't run slow. It has no weaknesses both search engine wise and, in terms of page loading speeds, the pages load quickly and the code is clean.

Google Page Rank is Google’s way of measuring how important a website is on a scale of 1-10. Therefore if a site has a rank of 10/10, then Google will favour it a lot more than of site of 0/10 in terms of Search Engine Positioning, frequency of website being crawled e.t.c

You can find out your websites Page Rank, or any other websites page rank, by having the Google Toolbar installed on your browser.