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Basic Joomla 1.6 SEO Settings Do’s and Don’ts

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

Joomla 1.6 is stable and very good to start a new website on, but for Search Engine Optimization you have to set some basic parameters for optimal results.

So here is a short overview of basic Joomla 1.6 Do'and Don't for Search Engine Optimization. Let's start with the Do's…

Global Configuration SEO Settings

Like the SEO Setting that you can reach via -> Global Configuration -> SEO Settings.

Joomla 1.6 SEO Settings

Joomla 1.6 SEO Settings

For Search Engene Friendly URLs should always be active to convert your article title to a clean URL.
The big difference with previous versions is that this will work even without .htaccess by adding /index.php/ into the URL!

If you don't want that you should activate the second option Use  URL Rewriting and follow the advice given in the Exclamation mark! That means you have to change some settings on server level or start using .htaccess on an Apache Based hosting program (Most of the hosting providers use Apache)

Adds Suffix to URL means that the extension .html is added to the URL. So instead of http://www.example.org/using-joomla you get http://www.example.org/using-joomla.html

This is a small change but it gives you the benefit that people will see that this is a content page and not a category directory, so it creates a real clear endpoint.

Metadata Settings

In the Global Configuration you can also set some basic Metadescription and Keywords, but I never use that option. But keep the last two options active!

Joomla 1.6 Metadata Settings

Joomla 1.6 Metadata Settings

As I mentioned you have to keep the last two options active because you want to see the following options in you articles writing panel.

Joomla 1.6 Article Metadata Settings

Joomla 1.6 Article Metadata Settings

Use the Metadescription on every page for the best results, just write a short excerpt of the page with the keywords you want to target and make it like a small advertisment for you page. Google and other search engines can use these text just under the Title of your page and it can give you a better click through rate from the search page.

Keywords is debated because Google and Yahoo won't use them. I do put in some main keywords, but never more than five, you don't want to stuff that field! Stuffing will get you worse rankings…

Joomla 1.6. SEO Don'ts

With Joomla 1.6 you don't have the previous unclear function's like Section's and Categories in those sections. Instead you can now have nested categories.

Joomla 1.6 Category Nesting

Joomla 1.6 Category Nesting

And although it is a good thing to have a better user experience and people can create content a lot easier, there is also a drawback.

You can now have a category in a category in a category in a category… and that can make the URL for you article very, very long as every category name will be in that URL.

For example http://demo16.cloudaccess.net/index.php/using-joomla/extensions/components/content-component

Don't go overboard with this feature! Just do like you did before, make a small number of main categories with only one level deep extra categories so your URLs stay short! Also keep the naming off this categories short..

Keep these thing in mind and your basic is set for SEO, all that is left now is for you to create Quality Content that Google and your visitors will like :-)

Joomla Multimedia – A Book Review about Images, Video and More…

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

I received a review copy of Joomla 1.5 Multimedia from Packt Publishers and was expecting to read a lot that I already knew about Images and the image manager in Joomla!.

But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your visitors.

This book is a great addition to your search engine optimization efforts as we all now that video, mp3, podcast en mobile web interfaces are becoming more important everyday.

Joomla Multimedia

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia will have some information for you that you can skip through if you are building Joomla! websites for a longer period of time, but the main part of the book will help you to further improve your and your customers websites.

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia

I am not going the repeat the complete list of chapters of this book, you can follow the link above to get a better content listing than I can do… what I will tell you which chapters captured my special interest:

  • Chapter 3: Text, Characters and Fonts: This shows you some good information on how to improve accessibility and still play with fonts in your design.
  • Chapter 5: Using Audio: How to set up podcasts and the handling of mp3 files which is very good in combination with normal blogging.
  • Chapter 6: Using video: Of course information about Video including a few extensions that will aid you in your efforts to use video in Joomla!
  • Chapter 7: Collaboration with external resources: You don't need to produce all the videos yourself, you can also pull from other resources and this chapter shows some very neat information about how to do that the right way.

Chapter 8 about templates is also good, but for me personally not that interesting, Chapter 9 gives you a complete step-by-step overview of the building of a Multi Media Joomla! based website and can be a great help if you start out to implement the other ideas that come from this well written book.

Don't take my word on it, check out this sample Chapter 4 from the book: Adding and Managing Image Content.

For my, this book will stay on my desk for a longer period of time as I am going to use a lot of information from it :-), thank you Allen Walker and Packt Publishing for this great new book.

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.

How to Find Your Best Joomla Domain Name

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

After a long time of inactivity on this Blog, I just got started again.
Coming back to you while setting up a new Joomla 1.5 website to write some stuff about finding your best domain name.

First of all, did you do your homework on finding the right keywords?
You will need them in this process, or not :-)

You see, there a two ways to go about this domain name searching, one is to incorporate your main keyword in the domain name, like -SEO for instance.
The other one is to look for a domain name that is short and sweet and easily to remember.

Using Keywords in Your Joomla Domain Name

Best option of course would be to have both… like joomlaseo.net which is short, easy to remember and contains the two main keywords Joomla and SEO.
Problem with this now would be that Joomla! is more protected than before and the use of Joomla in a domain name should be approved by the Joomla.org website.

This is just an example of how you need to think about using a brand name in your domain URL.
Amazon for instance and Google will contact your and start asking you to give that domain name to theme since they are the holders of this registered trademark.
So be careful if you want to do that, or get permissions first!

Better is to look for a domain name that is simple and gets the right idea and stickiness to it, like alledia.com which is short, sounds good an is through its website content now seen as one of the best sources for Joomla SEO.

As you can see, there is no Joomla and no SEO in the domain name itself, it is the content that works to boost its visitors and rankings in the SERPs.

Google doesn't care much about domain names Yahoo and Live.com however still give you some points for having keywords in your domain.
I have a website about Network Documentation (I am an ICT Manager in my Daily work…)  and it is ranking nr one in Live.com and nr three in Yahoo, just because of the domain name….

I checked Google as well, but could not find it n the first 10 ! pages… so I need to do a lot of work there (its a Drupal site and I am still learning SEO for Drupal as I go along)

Did you also see the main competition? and yes, networkdocumentation.com was already taken so they have a head start on me.
For my own domain name, I had to do a re-inclusion request at Google, since it was a spam site before I got it.
So here is a tip: if you have found a nice domain name and it is free! (check that first with your hosting provider) go to www.archive.org and use the “Waybackmachine” tool to see if it was used before and how it looked like. That is how I found out why I couldn't get it into Google at all in the first place.

Short and sweet Domain names

You could also do some brainstorming sessions to get spunky names or if you are trying to build a brand on the Internet use that brand name.
Like Alledia or Hummerbie as a simple example.

Just make sure the names are short and use a good keyword rich title for your website, since you now want people to use link to you with the keyword you target.
Mostly they will use the title of you site to create a link. So for this Blog you could link to Joomla SEO Blog but you also could use that same link title to link to Joomla SEO Blog ;-)

Use your imagination and you will see how creative you really can be once you start throwing your ideas on a white-board or a piece of paper (electric ones work oké too).

if you want to go into the deep end and want tons of websites or if your customers asks you to help them, you could buy this book Killer Domains from Daily Blog Tips.

Domain Extensions

A short paragraph on domain extensions or tld's , you know, the endings of a domain name?

There are a lot of them and it looks like there are going to be even more if all plans as expected.
The best ones for an international market are .com .net .org which are simply the bests tld's.
But they could be taken and you need to venture out to other tld's or choose an other name.

.info is not that good since some people think if you use that it is a spam site (I wonder why..)
You could also look at some foreign ones like .tv (expensive) or .it but those are just gadget like domains.
.mobi does work very well if you target mobile users.

What works best in extensions is to choose a tld that is locale to the market you want to target.
I use a .nl tld for my dutch web websites and that works great.

In conclusion: look at your competitors and what they use, look at your keywords list and be creative in finding that domain name that works for you!

P.s. If you have some great ideas on how to ease this process, don't hesitate to throw them into the comments.

Joomla Duplicate Content and Dynamic URLs – Google’s view

Filed Under: Joomla Seo, SEF, SEO

In the last few days, the Joomla SEO and Bloggers community have been writing a lot about two posts on the Official Webmaster Blog.
Two posts, one about Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty" and the other on Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs.

From a Joomla webmaster point of view, these items look as if they would turn the world of Joomla SEO upside down…
Yes, Joomla can produce multiple URLs that pint to just one content item and Yes, Joomla is a Content Management System and thus will produce Dynamic URLs.
So it seems only natural that Joomla webmasters and Joomla SEO Specialists will read and react on these posts.

Duplicate Content Issues

So lets see what people are writing, first is Arno Zijlstra on his Joomla Blog , he wrote a short post pointing to the first Google webmasters Blog and About how Google thinks about Joomla! and duplicate content which is followed by some fine comments by Steve from Alledia and I really like the comment of Johan Janssens "Finally ! Been fighting this fight for 3 years now …".

Which is really true and people think multiple URLs to one article is a bad thing from Joomla!, but also WordPress and Drupal will do the same.

But as Adam Lasnik already wrote in 2006 Deftly dealing with duplicate content Google does a good job on filtering the best link to an article itself. (That article has some tips on how to improve things from a search engine point of view)
Vanessa Fox did a kind of follow up on that post also on Duplicate Content also giving pointers to help your site to get better SERP results.

Duplicate content is not the same as having different URLs pointing to the same article, most certainly not if the links are on the same domain! Duplicate content is if you publish your articles on more domains, or use the same text on multiple pages on your site.
See the difference? Multiple pages, not multiple URLs.

Steve did a piece on Joomla and Duplicate Content also in 2007 and I did write some articles about it on my other Blog like Simple things to avoid duplicate content , but the best post was this one on The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth (That Title was close to the Google's blog….back in 2007)
Quote "I'm here to tell you that there is no such thing as a search engine penalty for duplicate content. At least not the way many people believe there is. " … now where did I read something similar…?

Also Barrie North wrote a piece about this Joomla duplicate content issue, also pointing to different URLs and the problem about diluting pagerank between those URLs.
Which brings us back to the second posts from Google's webmaster Blog.

Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs

Joomla in standard installation has URLs filled with parameters, Google is now saying that you can just leave them as it is…or not?
Well no, they are telling you that if you want to do rewrites of your URLs to do it the right way, which means make sure that you have one URL pointing to your article.
O, and just to point out one thing… did anyone notice that the Google webmaster Blog itself rewrites their URL to a Keyword rich one?
Or should I assume that they write there pages in a pure static HTML version?

Looking at this post and some of the examples given, it seems that there are some Cms systems out there that really stuff there URLs with a lot of parameters and adding parameters each time new content is added.
But that is not the case with Joomla, Joomla sites with the basic URLs can get good results in the SERPs but in my opinion and based on my experience that once that are using URLs rewrites are doing even better.

As confusing these two posts can be, they also have some great information on how Google robots and indexing is done.
And no, Google is not the only search engine robot out getting your links, Yahoo and Live can also bring in some traffic.
More importantly, people tend to click on better looking URLs more often because they recognize the topic keywords.

So what to do with your Joomla! site?

For me this is simple, if you already have good rankings, keep doing what you do the way you are doing it now.
Changing URLs now based on the Dynamic URLs vs Static URLs post will surely drop your results.

If you are setting up a new Joomla site make sure you use a SEF Component like sh404SEF that will point all duplicate URLs to just one URL and will send a proper 301 redirect from the standard Joomla URL to the SEF one.
One other point why you should use sh404SEF is that it will give Google a real 404 code on a 404 page and thus cleaning up duplicate URLs over time.

I addition to the sh404SEF component, make sure that you have a Google / Yahoo / Live, oké , oké a sitemap.org complaint sitemap.xml file (ore equivalent) that holds the URLs produced by the SEF component.
That way the search engines will know what URL you think is the best if they find duplicate URLs.
Don't forget to set that path in your robots.txt.

Conclusion 

Read the Google webmaster posts and read them carefully, also read some of the comments.
They indeed can be very confusing and send you in the wrong direction as some other Google information looks like it is contradicting to what is written.
Maybe they should follow a short course from Brain Clark on how to write clearly on a technical subject.

Am I changing my advice on SEO on Joomla and WordPress? No! I have seen sites go from page 150 to page 1 on their targeted keywords just by rewriting their URLs.
But if you want to give it a try, just shut down your SEF options, wait for a few weeks and see what happens.
Then please come back here and put your experience in the comments, I would love to read about them then I always look forward to reading about a nice experiment.

 

 

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/

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