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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)


Joomla explanation of section, category and content

Filed Under: Joomla Basics, Seo Basics

The Joomla Structure of Sections, Categories, and Content

Most people that just started out with Joomla have problems with how to handle the different parts that make up the Content Structure of Joomla.

Especially the Section and category part seems problematic to understand.
But it is actually quite easy to work with if you understand the basic principle.

Start simple and think about a book that You want to write!

Remember this, because with this book reference the idea of giving structure to your website is much easier to handle.

use content structure in joomla

So how-to structure your website?
As said, act like you are going to write a book.

Joomla Section:
These are the parts of your book, not the Chapters!
Let's say we are going to build a site about Microsoft Word, then parts of your site could be like:
• Basics
• Layout
• Documents
• Standard documents
• Scripting Macros and Working environment.

These Book parts can then be divided into different Chapters.

Joomla Category:
Now, these are your chapters!
Here you make the chapter structure of your book part, for instance, the book part about standard documents:
• Standard settings
• Templates
• Layout profiles
• Menu creation and editing
• creating Forms macro's

Joomla Content:
Now You are going to write your pages, your articles for your book.

And again reference your book on word an example:
Your write an article about managing templates in MS Word.
This article is placed on the site under the section(Book part) “Standard Documents” and into the category (Chapter) ” Templates”.

Now Your site has the book structure build in and every visitor can find its way through the site much easier because he/she will see the way it's structured.

If you, later on, should decide that an article is misplaced, you can move it into a new category with the “move” function of Joomla.