Joomla Optimization Archives - Website Beginners Guide

How To Solve the Joomla Read More Problem

I was reading a post from Brain Clark on Copyblogger about the “Click Here problem” and I just had to think about Joomla.

You know the famous “Read more” line that comes up if you split your articles into an Introduction and the main part of the Article.

Reading some of the results in the post got me to change that Text on my Joomla websites..

“Here are the results:

Click to continue: 8.53%
Continue to article: 3.3%
Read more: (-)1.8% “

Change the “Read More..” text

To have another text on your own Joomla site is not that difficult.
First Login to your Joomla Administrator Panel and select the Joomla language manager.

Then open the English file and use your Browser function “Edit” and “Search” function to find the “Read more…” line.

Now change the line to the Immortal words.. Click here to continue…, save the file and wait to see if visitors will really read more pages on your website.

Since it is a small change, it could be worth your Time to try it…

Joomla Dynamic Page Title option for Improving Internal Linking

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

So, your are working hard on your Titles and improving them with relevant keywords and making them attractive for users… but do you have the Internal linking also down?

One of the lesser used options on the Joomla SEO Configuration is the option to use Dynamic Page Titles.
But using this option can also increase your Search Engine Positions, because of the fact that your link to your pages with a link filled with Keywords, that is your article title!

If your use the read more option and show your articles on the Frontpage, you should use this option, it is a simple option to activate.
Just got to your Global Configuration (make sure your configuration.php is writable at this time and set it to unwritable afterwords) and go to the SEO Tab, there your find the two Options.

The Drawbacks of using Dynamic Page Titles

When you activate this option, you might be in for a suprise… and not always a pleasant one..
Your website, and especially the front page looks very different than before!

So how did this happen? and how can you fix it?

Well, it is a difficult one to give you a simple solution, but it is easy to explain.
If you activate the option the way the page titles are used is different because it call another class from your Template CSS file, so you have to check your Template CSS and probable find a class like a.contentpagetitle that is the one to look for if you want to change the way your Titles look of they are active.

If your don't see any change, you could have a Template that already has corrected this to match the “normal” title or your template does not use a CSS class for the Title presentation.

So for strange behavior check your template and template CSS files first!

Change the options so it matches your site, or gives you nice layout for the titles and see over a few weeks if it works out for your search engine positions, if you see no results and don't like the layout, just uncheck the option.
Although I recommend leaving them on for a longer period, since it take a while for Google and other Search Engines to reindex your site based on your alterations.

Joomla and Missing Metatags

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

If you are like me, you like to have your Metatags like description and keywords filled with relevant content..

You could have Metatag generators for you website, or overviews of the content with a component like OpenSEF.
But what if you don't use OpenSEF but sh404SEF?
In that case you could register and download the Joomla Metatag component form iJoomla.

But if you just want to see what pages still are in need of content for these Metatags.
In that case there is now a very simple but effective and easy to use modules, with two versions, one for the Joomla 1.0.x versions and for Joomla 1.5…

It is written by Dan Rahmel who also wrote two Books about Joomla!
and

And it is easy to install.

The module is installed as a normal module, but it is only for the administrator.
That is why it is listed under the Administrator part of the Modules and has to be published and positioned on the cPanel, which means that it will be visible on you administrator homepage (the first one after you login)

After publication you find the items without the Description and Keywords listed on a separate Tab on the Administrators page.

You can download the version you want from JoomlaJumpStart.com where you can even find more information on Joomla and the insights of Dan Rahmel.

There are people who will tell you that Metatags like the Description and Keywords are useless these days.. for Search Engine Optimization that is.

But try to work on writing good solid page descriptions and use just up to a maximum of 10 keywords in the keyword field.
Use the keywords you have used in the page, and in the Title and wait for the next index round of Google.

The Descriptions field mostly show up under you page title and should be written as a small advertisement to bring you the visitors you want.

Is Joomla 1.5 RC 1 Ready for Search Engine Optimization?

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla SEF, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

I have been running a test-site installation of the new Joomla 1.5 RC 1 to see what improvements there have been made for SEF and SEO.

There is a difference between SEF and SEO, you can read more about that on Search Engine Friendly or already Search Engine Optimized but I will not go into that much more here, as the point of the exercise was the see what changed / improved.

First thing you notice is that the Basic URL without the SEO Option set is still the same as before.

Next you go into your Global configuration and look up the Seo Settings…
That has changed a little, and has a new option, which is really great!

Did you see it? There is an option that says “Use mod_rewrite” ! and the best part is that is works!
So now if you don't know how to, or can not use a .htaccess file because of provider restrictions, you can still have SEF URLs like this one..

You see there is now an index.php between your domain name and the SEF URL.

Full SEO Options

You can set both settings and use an .htaccess file to get ride of the index.php so that the full (SEF) URL looks like:

Hmm.. maybe they should call it SEF Settings? But it is a great improvement that you can use the SEF URLs without a special component.

Does that mean that we don't have to use a SEF Component anymore?
No, they are still very valuable for several functions like URL rewrites… yes those still apply, because you want more control over the how the URL is formed.

The SEF function of RC 1 uses the Title Alias for the URL, so you can play a little with that, but that takes away a possible use of the alias for HTML Title rewrites…

Also you want to control the 404 Sef function and landing page, with Joomla 1.5 RC 1 there is good basic 404 page with the right headers, so old URLs will be removed form the search engines.

Also SEF component is able to prevent Rewriting URLs if a Components doesn't support them and breaks with te standard URLs.

The Duplicate Metatag problem

What you would see with the “Old” Joomla was that the Global Metadata was inserted into the HTML code together with the Article Metatags like description and keywords.

The problem seems now to be resolved, so if you now fill an article with The Metatags Description and Keywords (and you know you should) than ONLY those tags are in the source code!

From a Search Engine Optimization view, this is a very good thing… problem is that you still get the Global description on every page you don't fill the parameters, so pleas leave the Globals empty and let the search Engines pick there own excerpts.

You see, there is still a need for a nice Metatag generator if you have lots off pages or multiple editors.

Overall SEO conclusion for Joomla 1.5 RC 1

You have a better Content Management System than before from a Search Engine Friendly and Optimization point of view.
The basics are in Place to get any new website based on this Joomla 1.5 version to get better results, just by activating the SEO Settings on a bare minimum of SEF URLs.

Its a very big improvement that it can work without the .htaccess files that so many people are struggling with, so that every website can have nice URLs to work with, so set that configuration option to ON.

As I will do some more testing, expect more post on these and other items, but please be patient, as I want to Inform you based on experiences, and time is limited..

So if you want to be up-to-date, and you liked the post, use the RSS Feed to keep up..

A Joomla Frontpage changing Module

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

I found a module today bij http://www.joomlaworks.gr/ called “Ultimate Content Display” which is working great.

What is does? It can display content from sections or categories in a simple to place module position.
But the best part is, it can change the articles it shows by setting some parameters!

So why is this so exciting? Because you can now have “fresh” content on for example your Frontpage simple by adding this module.
Think about it… you can show returning visitors articles they otherwise may have never seen.
But also you have fresh content on you homepage every time the Googlebot, Yahoo or Live robots visits…

You can have the content in a list form, or a slide / fader with time settings and many options more.
I will write an extended how-to use and copy the module on www.pathos-seo.com later next week.

You can see the module in action on the Frontpage (on the bottom of the page) of www.pathos-seo.com where it says Random content.

The Module you can download from www.joomlaworks.gr

Joomla SEF and SEO Questions? Here is Where You Get Answers!

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla SEF, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

Joomla SEF and SEO Questions? When you have questions about Joomla with regards to making Joomla Search Engine Friendly, and the next step, making it Search Engine Optimized, where do you go the get answers?

Well, you found this Blog and the website www.pathos-seo.com I hope…

But that is where you can rad all about it, with How-To's and hopefully some great insights in improving your own website.

For getting answers to questions you might have with specific situations this is of course not a great solution.|
You want to post a question and get an answer as quick as possible…

Now you have several options to do that, main source of Joomla information is the forum at forum.joomla.org
If you have a more specific question related to SEF and SEO with Joomla your have recently got two extra specific forums to post your question:

The Joomla SEO Forum at Alledia
The Joomla SEO Forum at Joomlashack

Both Forums are great resources of getting more information in how to solve problems with your Search Engine Optimization for your Joomla website.

And yes, before you ask, I try to visit and answer Joomla SEO and SEF question on these Forums.

P.s. For the Dutch readers, you can go to SEO-SEF Google Forum on www.dutchjoomla.org

Do you know if your site is Down?

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

If you run a site, you will at some point in time encounter a site outage.
That is not only with a Joomla site, it can also happen with WordPress or Drupal or any other Content Management System.

I am now talking about the fact that a complete server is down or that the Internet Connection of you Hosting Provider makes it impossible to reach your website.

No, the error I am talking about is that the connection to your database is lost…

In Joomla there is a special page that is presented to you visitors telling them there is something wrong, asking them to contact the administrator.

Now that is nice.. or isn't it?
…ehhh how do I contact the System Administrator?

Change the Standard

Well in a standard installation you get these lines in your Global Configuration.
And most of use leave it as it is… of you take the site offline for maintenance it works just fine, so why change anything?

The second field in you Global Configuration is where you should make a little change.
Just ad a line with your email code in it like Hummerbie ( at ) Gmail (dot) com

Its even possible to change your entire offline page if you want to, but thats an whole other issue.

For now its really important that you know of your site outage before Google takes you out of the Index… and that can happen withing 48 hours if you have a really busy website.

Besides the contact information that you can easily edit into the Global configuration there is also an external service that can monitor your website for you.

Site24x7 gives you the opportunity to check you site one per hour and in case off a failed check you can get an email,sms or RSS alert.

Its free for up to 2 domains, but the paid service comes at a small price starting from $0,50 USD per month per domain..

Here is my configuration:

This is a check for the keywords in the error page.

And yes, there are reports with graphics and data to see the response times of the site.
Definitely worth a try , but just one warning… you might find out your have to talk to, or even change your hosting provider if you don't like what you see…

Joomla Basics 60 percent of Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors

Filed Under: Joomla Blog, Joomla Optimization, Joomla SEF, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

I was looking at search-ranking-factors at SEOmoz.org and they not only have made a very good list to look for Search Engine Optimization factors.
They also have a list of negative factors and there is a top five of negative factors.

Here is the short list:

Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

Looking at these factors its easy to see where thing go wrong in a standard installation of Joomla (before version 1.5)

Duplicate Content

First one is the Content similar to Duplicate or Existing in the Index:
This is because in a standard installation there are version in the standard HTML, PDF versions and print versions of each page of your website.

To prevent this, you should disable this functions in your Global Configuration under Content, disable the PDF and Print buttons.

Duplicate Title and or Meta Tags on Many Pages

All tough the Duplicate Title will not that easily happen, the Meta Tags can be a problem.

If you use the standard Metadata fields in the Global configuration you could really have a problem with this.
These value's are given to each page in your website…
Even if you use the separate Fields of each page to give a separate description and keywords!

You can simple check this if your site is indexed by Google, just do a search in Google like site:www.example.com and see what is in the description fields.. it might surprise you.

The best way to prevent this is to leave your Metadata fields empty and fill your page Descriptions and Keywords.
Even if you don't wont to use that, leave all fields blank and let the search engines take the excerpts from your pages.

Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

I wrote a post about this problem a while ago Joomla and Keyword stuffing and its of course related to the same problem as the one above.

The simple solution is to leave the Global Metadata fields blank.
Because Joomla will ADD the meta keywords to the list of keywords in your Global configuration.

You could install the free SEF patch from Joomlatwork.com to overcome some of these problems.

With the solutions used to prevent the above you can overcome some of the Negative Ranking Factors.
All it takes are some simple configuration changes and empty the Global Metadata fields, so make sure you don't let your website fall into the Top 5 factors…

The Little Joomla SEO Book now also in Russian

Filed Under: Joomla Blog, Joomla Optimization, Joomla SEF, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

I just received an email telling me that “The Little Joomla SEO Book” just has been translated into Russian…

Now that is what I like about the Internet and sharing Knowledge, so that people can help each other, even in other languages.

If you are Russian, you can go to Russian version of this book available here (translated by Dead Krolik)

At the same time I saw the Images for the SEO Book by Steven from Alledia.
I had the pleasure of proof reading his Joomla SEO Book, and I can highly recommend it if you are ready to make your Joomla site better found in the Search engine's.

So now you have three alternatives:

my Little Joomla SEO Book
Alledia Joomla SEO Book $ 37 with Lifetime upgrade and 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Compassdesign Joomla SEO Book (registration required)

And of course a big thank you to to Dead Krolik for his translation for the Russian Joomla Community.

The Forgotten Joomla SEF Component

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla SEF, Joomla Seo

Joomla SEF Components

I was looking at one of my clients Mambo based website, to see what it would take to move it to Joomla.
Main reason for this was that the Administrator Interface of version 4.5.x breaks the menu in Internet Explorer 7.

One of the Components I used on this site was Remosef, a special, but very stable SEF Component.
So I thought I would check if there was an update for version 4.6 if that transition would be easier than the conversion to Joomla..

But there was a nice surprise from Martin Brampton…

The Remosef for Joomla Component

As it turns out, Martin has created a SEF Component upgrade for Joomla 1.0.x version.
And since I liked the stability and simplicity of the old Remosef for Mambo component I put it into a test for you.

Now this is not a special technical test, like seeing how much queries and processing time this component takes, you have task other people how it preforms in that area.
For me the simplicity and workability counts, it should be as easy as possible for you.

Normally the installation of the component is just enough, with some alterations in the standard Joomla .htaccess to make sure you can use Third party SEF Components.

For the optimum results of this component, there is an extra step to take, but that is not that hard to do.

Installing the Component

Like I said, step one is always downloading the component and reading the information and installation instructions.
You follow Download the Remosef Component to get the file…
But make sure you also Download the SEF Modules, you will need them later on.

“Caution…. don't install this component, or any other component on a website that is already in the search engine indexes!”
Remosef is the Only site that has a warning like this, and some thoughts on duplicate content as well…. good thinking..
But of you have I website with the standard Joomla SEF URLs, you might reconsider :-)

Installation of the component is just like any other component, just by using the Component Installer of Joomla, point it to the .zip file and “Upload and Install” basically you are done after you made the changes to the .access file and upload it to the root.

You have to set the options in the .htaccess file to get the Third party SEF components to run, but you have to add an extra line at the end of the file, just as explained on the remosef site:
RewriteRule ^(content/|component/|jos/) index.php

Last step is to unzip the module file, and upload the files via FTP, directories are already made, so you can FTP it in one session.
These modules make sure that you get the best result from the rewrites done by the component.

Configuration of the SEF Component

Now here is why I like the component…
If you check the administration panel of the component, there is just one page.

The page consist of a few sections:

Remosef Options
Component name mappings
Character translations
Content tasks translations

That's it..

Look at the Remosef options:

Normally after installation the SEF prefix says “jos” but you might not want that in your URL, do you?
So you can change it to something like “site”, but if you do this, you also have to match that in you .htaccess file!
For this option it would become:
RewriteRule ^(content/|component/|sites/) index.php

The second option you should always set to “yes” since hyphens do better in SEO than underscores.

The Component name mappings:

As you can see, you can set any name for the normal and extra components to be rewritten to whatever you like…
And yes, I have to correct the Typo in Technical Articles…

The Character translations options are specifically for Foreign languages to rewrite things like Ã¶ and Ã¼ to “oe” en “ue”

Content task translations

You can rewrite every content name with anything you like:
You could do only one here, if you don't like the “view” in you URL, you could use “pages”instead.

With all the settings you could set in the manner as described, you would get URLs like:

http://www.example.com/site/pages/General/General/Information-on-Opensource-and-Internet-Resources/

Notice the Upper and Lower text? Remosef takes the exact phrase of you title!

If you use the standard after installation you would have seen example.com/jos/view/ instead of example.com/site/pages/

If you know Logout, you get an error… because of the rewrite.. You also get an error if you want to use the “preview”option form you administrator panel.
Don't worry, its just those two, and its because the index.php isn't used anymore because of the rewrite function.

Why I like it?

Because it works that simple.. and because it the most stable SEF component I know, next to SEF Advanced.
And it works with all SEF_extend.php that are compatible with SEF Advanced.

I am currently in the process of setting up an new website with this component, once its loaded with content and gets indexed by Google, I will post the results and look if it works like I think it will.
And although it says its in “Beta” I have found no errors yet.

And here is another nice part.. it has its own Joomla 404 errorpage… and you can modify it as well.
Test revealed you get a standard Error 404 from IE7, but the modified page from Firefox, but with the right 404 Not Found headers.. whohaa!!!

So if you are looking for a SEF Component for your Joomla based website, don't forget to check Remosef for Joomla

How To Solve the Joomla Read More Problem

Joomla Dynamic Page Title option for Improving Internal Linking

Joomla and Missing Metatags

Is Joomla 1.5 RC 1 Ready for Search Engine Optimization?

A Joomla Frontpage changing Module

Joomla SEF and SEO Questions? Here is Where You Get Answers!

Do you know if your site is Down?

Joomla Basics 60 percent of Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors

The Little Joomla SEO Book now also in Russian

The Forgotten Joomla SEF Component

Joomla! 3 Book

WP for Dummies

Joomla! Templates

Premium WP Themes

Programming

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