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Building Websites with Joomla! Hagen Graf

Filed Under: Building a Joomla website, Seo Basics

I have had the pleasure of reading Hagen Graf’s book, Building Websites with Joomla 1.5, no the first version of the book, which was for the RC1, but the latest one based on the Final 1.5 Joomla! release.

Note, Joomla is now on 3.6 and you can get that book from Amazon here. Joomla! 3.0 in 10 Easy Steps

As you might have guessed, I am not new to Joomla, and I have also worked with Joomla 1.5 as well.
But if you want a manual to go with Joomla 1.5 you should really get this book.

If you look at the chapters in the book, you will see a clear path to where you want to go, getting your Joomla 1,5 site installed and ready.

A Short Chapter overview

The book starts with a Chapter called Terms, Concepts, and Deliberations, and here you will read some things about the History and Changes if the different versions of Joomla!.
For me a chapter that you might want to skip though as it will bring you some knowledge on Joomla development, but does it really bring you something in terms of building knowledge? No, don’t think so.
The examples on the last pages are nice to look at, just to see how different Joomla sites can evolve.

In Chapter Two you get the basic installation with XAMPP on your local pc if you want to, and some tips on how to install it on a hosting platform of your choice.

(You might want to consider using basic hosting on (l)Unix servers instead of Windows servers)
Joomla installation is not that hard, and what is described with screenshots as well pretty much covers what you need to know to get your Joomla site running.

I think it is also a good idea to put more information in this chapter on how to check and solve Read and Write access if you are on a hosting platform.


TIP. if you are done with your site, Check your System menu and you will find a Tab there that will show you what you still have to change.

In Chapters 3 till 12 that is where the real meat is!
Ranging from A tour, through Customizing Joomla, Configuration and Administration you go to the chapters that can help you best.

Chapters

  • 6 – Site Menu
  • 7 – Menus Menu
  • 8 – Content Menu (including article writing and categories)
  • 9 – Components Menu.
  • 10 – Extensions Menu
  • 11 – Tools
  • 12 – More on Extensions (with some great components and how to install and use them)
  •  

In all these chapters you get clear information on how to get more out of Joomla! site in a well written and easy to understand way.

As for his advice on SEO setting in the Global Configuration for Meta descriptions and keywords, I suggest you might want to read more on this site because here I don’t agree with Hagen…

In Chapter 8 he writes about the robots field in your article, here he does not understand the field, as he mentioned you should enter the words for robots, but those go into the keywords field.

In the robots field, there should be values like, follow, index or nofollow, noindex or any other option you would like the Search Engine Robot to do with your article.

In Chapters 13 and 14, there is a lot of information on how to create your own Joomla template and how to make your site better for more visually challenged visitors.

For these and chapter 15, on Your own Components, Modules, and Plugins you really need to have some experience with HTML and PHP to go through the process described.
They are nice introductions to the subject and might interest you in reading more on these subjects.

A Website with Joomla!

In Chapter 16, Hagen takes you on a trip from Idea to realization of the website for the Winery for the Bertrand family.

Here you can read more about the whole process of building the site from a non- to a semi-technical way of getting started with a Joomla website.

This is fun reading! You see how the site grows and what decisions are to be made in the process.

Chapter 17 is just a short introduction on other templates and the appendixes are also more technical.
Appendix E, Forgot the Admin Password shows you how to fix that on a MySQL Database level.
Appendix F gives you some information on how to migrate from 1.0.x to Joomla! 1.5.x

Conclusion

This book Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is great for getting to know Joomla 1.5 from the ground up.
It is more than a Beginners guide, some webmasters that are used to Joomla 1.0.x will find more detailed information on the differences between Joomla 1.5 and 1.0.

Is it worth the money? I think so, you can read it as it is, or you use it as a base reference.
For me? It is definitely a book I keep close at hand for reference and on my desktop as I develop more Joomla! 1.5 websites.

Title: Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5
Author: Hagen Graf
ISBN: 978-1-847195-30-2
Publisher: Packt Publishing

How to Find Your Best Domain Name

Filed Under: Webdesign

After a long time of inactivity on this Blog, I just got started again.
Coming back to you while setting up a new WordPress 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 easy to remember.

Using Keywords in Your Domain Name

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

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 you and start asking you to give that domain name to them 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 (now Joomlaschak.com) which is short, sounds good an is through its website content is 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 Bing.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 used to rank nr one in Bing.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 (it’s a now a WordPress site and I am still learning SEO for WordPress 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 “Wayback machine” 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 a link to you with the keyword you target.
Mostly they will use the title of your 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 fine too).

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 another 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.

How To do Keyword Research to Build a Keyword List

Filed Under: Featured

Doing Keyword research and Using the right tools to get the keyword information you need is essential if you want to build a successful website.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the most essential part of website creation, especially if you want your website to out perform your competitors.
And Since you are here reading this Blog, you must be looking for a way to do that and improve your Search Engine Rankings and user experience on your website.

Improving your website to get beter performance is in the first place a matter off creating a good website structure and for that, you need to understand two things:

  • Your website topic
  • What terms are used in search engines related to your topic

For the first part, you probably already know more than you think, so first thing to do is to get a piece of paper (or open a text editor) and start writing down all terms you can think of about and related to you website topic.

Example for the Topic Games: “Online Games, Download Games, Free Games, Video games, Adventure Games, Joystick, Game Computer, WII, Nintendo DS, Games Console”
Just to get you thinking and do some brainstorming before getting to do online research for the best search terms.

pacman free online kids game

Now, before you take the next step, go to Google or Yahoo and do a search for the Keyword you are most likely to know a lot and want to focus on that term.
For “Games” you get 1,430,000,000 results on Google and 5,450,000,000 results on Yahoo.
For “Online Games” you get 111,000,000 results on Google and 2,690,000,000 results on Yahoo.
You can see that these are still very competitive keywords to target…
So lets take it one Little step further in Google and try two extra keywords “Free online kids game” and now you are down to 11,300,000 results.

So what do these numbers tell you? Well, first place, that there are a lot of Games sites :-)
But looking at it form an SEO Point of view, it will be a lot easier to rank for “Free Online kids game” than it will be for just “Games”.
It is time to Introduce the term Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) and this is a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.
Now the competition factor we have seen above, the popularity factor, that you will read about later on.

Back to getting into the heavy hitters.. there is an the hidden secret in doing your keyword research and building your keyword list the right way:

[Read more…] about How To do Keyword Research to Build a Keyword List

So you want to know how your Joomla site is on SEO?

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

It has been a while since my latest post, but I really have been busy working on new website building projects.

So my time is already limited, because I do all this stuff on the Internet after my normal daytime job.

Why? because I like to share knowledge, get in touch with new idea’s and try them to see what happens, and of course communicate with others about Joomla and SEO.(See the Blog-roll for my favorites!)

But today I found a little website that will gives you an impression on how well your are doing with your SEO efforts.

You do have some idea from your visitor counts I hope! But here is the URL to get a really nice overview of SEO Information like:

  • PageRank
  • Backlinks
  • Indexed Pages
  • Rankings
  • Social Bookmarking
  • RSS Feed counts and more

So go and check your own domain at http://www.xinureturns.com/

Below you can find a sample image of one of my websites.

Xinu Check page for SEO

O, and yes, I will try to post more with the coming weeks and months to come… most will be on Joomla 1.5 I think!

Understanding the Joomla Content Structure

Filed Under: Joomla! General, Seo Basics

Some people have a hard time understanding the Structure that is used in Joomla to organize the Content.

But it is not that hard to understand if you look at it from a different angle.

Joomla is a Content Management System that in the core can be compared with a Study book.

 
Joomla Section Joomla Sections

The section part of Joomla can be look at as the main parts of a Book.

Like for example an Atlas, the Section are the Continents.
Joomla category Joomla Categories

The categories in Joomla can be classified as the Chapters of a Book

In the Atlas example, these are the country’s in each of the continents.
Joomla Content Item Joomla Content Item

The Joomla Content items are the pages in a book, each containing information to make a Chapter.

In the Atlas example, these could be pages that describe the Geological ans Social economics of a Country.

Putting it all in Perspective

If you look at the structure of this site, you will see how its build…
First there are sections about Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

The Joomla Section is split up into categories as:

  • Joomla General
  • Joomla Modules
  • Joomla Themes
  • Joomla Components
  • Mambots and Plugins
  • Joomla Search Engine Optimization

One example of a content Item is this page, which is in the category “Joomla General”

The Joomla Content Structure explained

Keep this structure in mind if you are going to build your website in Joomla.
Make Sure you have drawn the structure on paper before building it in Joomla, it will save you a lot of headache afterwards…

Why do You Need SEO

Filed Under: Planning your Website, Seo Basics

Do You need Search Engine Optimization?

Or is it just a hype everybody is talking about and costs a lot of money?

First, Why did you build your website?
I think because You want to tell people, aka visitors, something.
About your product, about your service, or even give them information they might benefit from.
But in all cases, you want to reach a certain audience!

And because 80% of the people on the Internet use a Search engine to find the Information they are “searching” for You need to be there.
Most of them won’t even look beyond the first 10 results, sometimes two page two or even three……but not much further

Why You need Search Engine Optimization as part of Your Marketing PuzzleSo If You Really want to reach out and get your visitors, You better make sure you can be found !!

Read and Learn more about reaching the best positions in Search Engines and Getting and Keeping your visitors!

How to Build Your own Website

Filed Under: Building Your own Website, Seo Basics

Building Your own Website

 

When you just start getting your own domain to cerate a website you have to start thinking about building your website.

 

There are several options to do this.

 

– Build it using standard HTML page by page by hand.

 

This means learning HTML and CSS which can be pretty complex.
You also have to upload all the files yourself using an FTP
A Program like FileZilla or LeechFTP can do this for You

 

– Use a WYSIWYG editor which takes care of the complex issues of HTML and CSS so you can focus in the structure and content of your website.
MicroSoft Frontpage or the Free Opensouce NVU works Oke, bu there are many More!

 

You upload the files through to FTP part of the editor.

 

– Install a Content Management System so you can do everything on-line.
Editing and creating content where ever you are if you have an Internet connection.

 

Something Like Joomla Cms which also has a load of Templates that take care of your site appearance.