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Basic SEO Settings in Joomla 3.x

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

With the new Joomla 3.x version, you get a completely different Administration panel with basic SEO Settings.

Joomla! 3.x Global Configuration
Joomla! 3.x Global Configuration

Once you are logged in, go to the Global Configuration. It will open with the Site tab on which you can manage the main site setting. You will also find the SEO settings and the Metadate settings on this Tab.

Joomla Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Settings

Joomla! 3.x Search Engine Optimization Settings
Joomla! 3.x Search Engine Optimization Settings

As you can see there are no checkboxes but slider buttons. This makes it clear to what option is active and what's not.

You should always use the Search Engine Friendly URLs, so set that to on.

If you want to use URL rewriting, make sure you are on a hosting server that supports .htaccess. With that option on, you get the best results.

If you are unclear about an option and need more information, hover over the text in front of the slider buttons and you will see direct help information.

Joomla URL Rewriting Explained
Joomla URL Rewriting Explained

With the add suffix option on your get a URL suffix .html as ending part of your URL.

The last option is for getting your site title into the Page HTML title. Either Use No or After. You want the article title as the first part of your HTML title for best results, use the after option for branding purposes.

Joomla! 3.x Metadata Settings

Joomla! 3.x Metadata Settings
Joomla! 3.x Metadata Settings

The Metadate settings are also on this Site Tab.  Site Meta Description and Site Meta Keywords in a global setting has always been a point of discussion for me, I don't like it.

You are better off writing the Meta description on content items and not fill in the same date for every article from this setting. Clean it! Meta Keywords are no longer used by several Search Engines like Google.

The Author Meta Tag is good so set that to yes. Showing the Joomla! version will only help Hackers and Crackers, so set that option to No. As an administrator, you can see the version you are running once logged in.

Joomla 3.x Cache Settings

Using a Cache can really make a difference in your page load. For SEO you want your pages to load as fast as possible as it is a measurement that is used by Google.

It also gives a better visitor experience. Your page load time can determine if a visitor will open and stay on your site or not.

You can find the Cache Settings on the System Tab

Joomla! Cache Progressive Settings
Joomla! Cache Progressive Settings

You get to choose from

  • OFF – Caching disabled
  • ON – Conservative caching
  • ON – Progressive caching

Check with your hosting provider if they have a caching component active on their server. If so you want to keep this caching off as it might interfere with the server caching component.

If you run into trouble with the Progressive caching try the Conservative option. Check your speed via http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ and run some tests with different settings.
The Cache Handler is set to File, which is basic. There used to be a Database option, but that doesn't make sense.

Cache Time is something you need to think about. If you have a news based website where you post several times a day, keep it limited to your standard posting timeframe.

For me, a 24 hour period works just fine so time is set to 1440 / 60 = 24 Hours. After that, the cache is cleared and with a new visitor rebuild again.

So these are the basic SEO settings you need to get into place in Joomla 3.x. Next time: How to SEO your menu and content items.

It’s Done… The Joomla 1.5 SEO Book is out Now!

Filed Under: Joomla, Joomla Seo, SEO

For those who have missed my writings, this is why you did not see much blogging going on here over the last 10 months…

Joomla 1.5 SEO Book

As it is just released Packt is promoting the Book with a special discount that will expire on the 24th of Oct 2009.

So get your copy NOW with the special discount at http://www.packtpub.com/article/exclusive-discount-offer-joomla-seo before it expires.

And I promise I will start blogging about SEO again on a regular base :-)

Need more info on what you can find in my book, check out http://www.packtpub.com/joomla-1-5-search-engine-optimization-seo/book

I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

P.s. A big Thank YOU to all the people at Packt Publishing that have worked with my on the creation of this book!

Learn SEO from Google’s webmasters

Filed Under: Joomla Seo, SEO

If you don't have an RSS feed subscription on the Google Webmaster Central Blog yest, I strongly advice you te get one…

On there latest post they included an nice basic SEO Starters Guide from Google which you might want to forward to some of your customers.

What better way to educate them then sending them a document produced by the Guys that know Google the best.

Af course it is just a basic SEO Guide, but it shows some fine examples of things you need to get done for better rankings.
I personally like the explanation about why you need to have the best URL possible.

For Joomla webmasters this is still an issue, although Joomla 1.5.x “out of the box” is a lot better then Joomla 1.0.x but still not the way I want them.

P.s. don't forget to update your Joomla 1.5.x to the new Joomla 1.5.8 version! ?(if you use the SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com you better wait for the update… looks like that could take some days.

Theming a Joomla site for SEO

Filed Under: Joomla Seo, Seo Basics

Theming? You mean Joomla SEO Template, right?

Wrong, I really mean Theming your Joomla site. Theming here is about the way you structure your website to show the real main topic of your website.
You do have the main topic, don't you…

Joomla SEO Theming

So let's see what you can do to improve the “Theme” of your website.

It all starts with finding the right keywords for your website, do some research on finding related topics for your main content.

Write those keywords done on a piece of paper, or in a spreadsheet.

I tend more to using a spreadsheet since I can then just copy and paste my keywords into columns an sort them very easy.

 But for other people, the choice for paper is a more valid one, since you can easily draw lines between related items.

 Theming your website is also called LSI and Joomla with it's so-called inflexible content structure is actually great for theming your site.

 Joomla SEO Structure Theming

 Theming with keywords is simple, just look at the subject of your website and think about what the main subjects of your topic are.

For example, take a look at WordPress, a free blogging platform and a simple CMS system.

For WordPress, there are three main topics, WordPress usage, WordPress Themes (templates), WordPress Plugins and WordPress widgets.

 Once you know these main subjects, you can see that a website about WordPress will need at least four menu items that will reflect the main topic.

If you go to a website about WordPress that ranks well for “WordPress” you will see the first once of course be wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

Tip: Do a search in Google for your main keyword and look at the bottom of your search results page, Google shows you “Searches related to”. Write those searches down, since those are the keywords that Google thinks are Topic related!!

 The other sites you can find on that topic do have more to do about WordPress themes since these are the most linked to site via promo-links and because most people will search that first, just like most people will search for Joomla Templates.

 Content and Menu structure

 If you have found the keywords you want to use, create a section in Joomla that will hold the categories with that topic.

For WordPress, you could create a section “WordPress” and then put categories in there like “WordPress Themes”, “WordPress Plugins”, “WordPress Widgets” and “WordPress manual”.

 You can then create a menu “WordPress” and create menu items that will show you the category content. Name those menu items just like the categories.

You are now ready to start putting content into those categories and build your website.

Search engines will recognize the structure and put you into the WordPress search results pages and other terms.

How well you will do is, of course, depending on how well you write and how competitive your market is.

But with the right Theming setup, you will notice that ranking well is much easier to do than without Joomla SEO Theming.

WordPress SEO Post and Joomla Lessons

Filed Under: Joomla Seo, SEO Articles

Joost de Valk has written a great article on his new website about WordPress and SEO, Calling it "The Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog"  and I must say, he does a splendid Job in working through all the aspects of SEO for WordPress.

And indeed the Blogging world is raving about this article as well:

Here are few links:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-seo/7096/
http://www.searchengineguide.com/sage-lewis/yoast-should-boast-its-wordpress-seo-gui.php
http://www.jaankanellis.com/wordpress-seo-in-a-nutshell-by-joost/
http://sphinn.com/story/52017

And Yoast (that's right -> Joost ) also does a great Job in monitoring all those incoming links and as a true blogger reacting on every one of them :-) 

You will know by now that I use WordPress,Drupal, Typo3 and Joomla for a number of websites, so I can related to the technical aspects of his WordPress Guide as well as the real Search Engine Optimization stuff.

And this were you can learn as an Search Engine Optimization fanatic, looking at several aspects of this guide and pick the right stuff for improving any website.
That also means Your Joomla based website.

Some of the point you can look at are:
Basic SEO

Permalinks = Search Engine Friendly URL's

Titles
Descriptions
More text
Image optimization

Than there is more advanced stuff and some great advice on coding and more, you can really do well if you follow his advice on:

Point 5 – Conversion Optimization
Point 6 – Comment Optimization
Point 7 – Off site site Blog SEO, like using Twitter SEO 

I am looking forward to implementing some of his advice here on this Blog and on my other Joomla SEO Blog

Both are build with WordPress to Promote my Joomla sites about Joomla SEO and Open Source CMS SEO

And I must say, that Joost already has inspired me to write a similar post about Joomla and SEO, that is if you as a reader would like to see that as well, covering several technical aspect on how to do this advanced and basic SEO for Joomla.

An Other great article to read is Meet Yoast in which Joost writes about the redesign and the new domain name… also read the comments like "How does it feel to commit Technorati suicide" since your Technorati rankings won't follow you to the new domain like your FeedBurner readers will.

Thank you Yoast for a great post a great new site and insight into the basic off really well done SEO!

How to Loose 623 Feed subscribers with one Update

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

So you think I have made a wrong update on this Blog, do you?
Well, guess again… it was not my update!

First let me tell you I am a big fan of Netvibes and Feedburner as well, because they both supply great free services for keeping tabs on the Internet moving around.
I even wrote an article on how to Run your Joomla feed through Feedburner

Now for the issue mentioned in the article title, here are some Graphical illustrations of the drop:

Feedburner stats overview

Details of the Day Before…

Feedburner details the day before

And the Day after the Great Update…

Feedburner stats after the great Netvibes upgrade

See the difference? I do! There are no more Netvibes subscribers…

Feedburner or Netvibes?

So who is to blame? Feedburner for not picking up the right stats from Netvibes? or Netvibes for not sending the right statistics to Feedburner?

Or are there mayor problems at Netvibes?

It did not take long to find out where the problem resides since Netvibes did indeed do a mayor upgrade on the 23 of April as they said the would.

So now everybody is on Ginger and there are going to be big improvements on the new Netvibes, and yes they did offer their apologies for the Downtime because they run into some unforeseeable technical problems.

But I did not see any remarks in the comments that stated that the feed subscribers count is going the be restored.
In the mean time people are calling on Google, as the new owner of Feedburner about why they do not report the right feed count.

You can read more on the problem at the issues already started in Januari.

Why does it matter that the feed-count is down from an SEO Point of view?
Because Google also looks at the Feed-count to see if there are a lot of followers so they can see if your site is an authority site or note.
And they do own Feedburner… and the Feed count is one item of the Webmaster tools..

Besides that, if you already show a larger count of subscriber numbers, people are more willing to subscribe as well.
Finally I am just hoping they will solve this problem as soon as possible!

A Joomla SEO Post I didn’t want to write…

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

This is really a post about Joomla and SEO I would rather not have written…. but it is a great case studie, so here we go…

About 3 weeks back I did some work on my major dutch website, replacing a SEF component, replacing the template and also updating the site to Joomla 1.0.13 which I should have done some time ago.. (no not to Joomla 1.0.14 yet, but you will see in the end why not).

The SEF Components

I wanted to replace the OpenSEF component with sh404SEF, mainly because of the way the later works by sending real 404 headers.
This site had more pages in Google than there were actual pages… I must admit I did some heavy testing with different SEF components in the early days , thus creating more URLs pointing to the same content.
But they al said to the search engines:
He I am OK look Ma, code 200! So all pages stayed in the index.

So cleaning that up was one of the aspect to choose for sh404SEF, the other reason was that OpenSEF is no longer under real development.

Oke, back to the site in question. All things with previous site conversions went without any problems, but with this site I also wanted do a little change in the URLs.
I covered that by redirecting the old URLs to the new ones with 301 redirect in the .htaccess file, so that was covered.


The new template and site upgrade

This was not a great undertaking, as Joomla works great with templates and this one is really clean and fast, even more then the old one.

Upgrading a Joomla website within the 1.0.x range isn't hard to do as well.

Both items were ready in about 30 minutes with some tweaking here and there.


The Google results

After a few day however I found that my visitors number were dropping dramaticly…

The need for the SEF Patch for Jooma

Is this new SEF component the cause of this problem? That was the mayor change on the site?

But I did redirect all those pages, so this could not have caused such a dramatic drop!

Now one thing I always do if I have to look at a site in trouble is run the command site:www.example.com in Google.
And there it was! The problem I was having with the site was the basic one with any not optimized Joomla website!

Standard Joomla gives out the HTML Titles composed of [sitename] – [pagetitle] and this site ad a long title.
So there were a lot of hits showing… my site title and not my carefully crafted pages titles.

Then it hit me, I had upgrade the site to 1.0.13, but had forgotten to install the Joomla SEF Patch by Joomlatwork.com after that.

The Solution to the problem

For those of you that don't now the SEF Patch yet (shame on you), one of the things that is done by the patch is that it changes the way the title of the pages are shown.
Basically it just shows the page title as the HTML title tag, you know, the number one SEO Ranking factor?

Installing the free Patch is just uploading the Page via FTP, or if you have the paid version, which is installed as a component, but thus giving you even more controle over the HTML title (costs 8,33 Euro, which is really a bargain)

I Installed the SEF Patch, and run a new sitemap.xml creation to see if all page titles were back the way they should.
Then off to the Google webmaster tool, removing the old sitemap and telling Google there was a new one.

The results of this action you can see in th graphics above, the site is doing oke again and is now back to where it was before and slightly growing further.

Conclusion:  if you upgrade a Joomla site, even if it is your own, you should always make sure you have the SEF Patch in place!

P.s. Why no upgrade to 1.0.14? There is no patch for this version yet :-) (to my knowledge that is, maybe Richard can shed some light on this) 

 

Update: The Joomla SEF Patch for 1.0.14 is now ready for download at http://www.joomlatwork.com/downloads/

How to Optimize your Joomla site with Keywords

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

If you have read several topics on Search Engine Optimization, you will find that the term “Keywords” is used to indicate several different items of SEO.

Like:

  • Metatag keywords
  • Search keywords
  • Targeted keywords

And the latter is what I am going to give you some extra inside information on, and it will show you how easy it is if you really want to boost your sites ranking for your mayor keyword that you are targetting.

Optimizing your site structure

First things first… do your keyword research and find the topics related to your website main topic.

Then reorganize your site structure to reflect that relations.

So if you would create a website about, well lets say eheh… Joomla! then you know it will be very difficult to rank for the search term Joomla! itself.
But there are a lot of keywords related to Joomla, like Templates, Components, Modules, Plugins, Mambots.
See how these terms kan create a cluster of keywords?

Here is an image of elliance infographics that shows it all:

keyword clustering for better rankings and SEO

And the best part is… Joomla will actually force you in to structure it the right way, if you do you keywords research!

You see, where may people think of the rigid structure of Joomla for placing content is a bad thing, it is actually a great thing for SEO.
In Joomla you have to set up a structure in Section, Categories and Items which is pretty simple as you can read on Understanding the Joomla structure

But clustering you keywords in categories within the a section is the best keyword cluster you can create!

In a more diffecult term this is called LSI, Latent Semantical Indexing which is covered in Joomla and LSI for SEO

So if you really want your site to rock in the search engines, get your keywords together, create categories for them and start writing your content items accordingly…

Oh, one more thing… if you are going to restructure you Joomla site, make sure you 301 redirect your old URLs to the new ones!

Placing your Keywords in Joomla!

To get your keywords into your Joomla! articles you need to open the Metatags section on the left of you article writing screen:

Placing Joomla Keywords

You will most likely see a screen with lesser options, as this screen is taken from a website that allready has the Joomlatwork.com SEF Patch installed, which I highly recommend.

You will have a field called Meta Tag Keywords and that is where you place your keywords. Make sure those keywords are also in the text of the article and keep them limited to a maximum of 10.
Also be aware the Google doesn't use these Meta keywords to index your pages but other search engines still use them.

There is a place for Keywords in your Global configuration screen, my advice… don't use that option…

Global Configuration Metadata Settings
Joomla! will use that data on every article where you don't use the Meta Data fields in your articles and thus giving the search engines the same values over and over again.

You can check if this happens with your website by searching Google with the term “site:www.example.com” ( without the ” ” and replace example.com with your own domain name)


One of the fastest ways to get into Google… Blog and RSS Feeds

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

If you want to know how fast you can get into the Google index…

My best time is 38 Minutes :-)

No really!, I wrote the post about Joomla 1.5 RC 4 and the SEF patch just about 40 minutes ago….

I do have a Google alert on “Joomla SEO” which should inform me if anything with Joomla SEO is posted or written on The Internet.
And I got an email with the alert that my Post was “discovered”, so I did a search on simply “Joomla sef rc4”, about 11.800 results showed up, and the post was ranked at a Nr 5  position.

Just above a Feed scraper website that reposts an excerpt of my post via Technorati I guess.

Yes, that is the drawback of RSS Feeds…

So here are some screen shots to prove it (no, no photo-shopping is done)

search results on google

Getting into Google fast:

blogging_the_fastest_way_into_google.jpg

A fast scraper….

scraper_site_for_adsense_also_fast.jpg

(No, no link here!)