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Optimize your Joomla website from the Back-end

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

If you want your Joomla website to run as smooth as you can, you have to optimize your MySQL tables at some point.

If you work with your PHP Admin software, you now how time consuming this can be, although you can have some scripts made up to do this maintenance task more easily.
But it would be great if you could do this just from withing your Joomla admin panel, instead of login into you hosting admin panel and then into the PHP Admin?

Well, it's possible… with the SM2 DB Health Check Component from http://www.sm2joomla.com/.

Joomla! Database Health Check Component 

Its a simple component to install, and for most part you don't even have to set the configuration  parameters like the Name of the Database Table, User name, server of password.

Please make a back-up of your database before you run this component, although I have had no problems any time I ran the component.
It runs fast, and gives you a nice list of what tables where repaired and which ones where optimized!

Yes, it even optimizes your database tables!
A very nice component, that you should use once a month ar so.

And as a bonus they have another nice Plugin for you to keep you site optimized and running, you can read more about that on my http://seo4joomla.wordpress.com site.


A great new Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

Maybe you already noticed, but the overture keyword suggestion tool is really working sometimes and most of the time not at all.

But there is hope for you since one of the major players i this field is promoting there own tool:
free keyword suggestion tool from WordTracker

I have tried it, and it works great, and even faster then the Overture tool…
You get 100 related keywords And you can also get a estimate on the daily search volume at the end of the list.

Use the tool and add your results to you Google output that you created.
Form those two tools, you will have some good keywords to target based on what people are really searching for.

But of you don't want to do the hard work, here is a short list of commercial software tools that can make your life a lot easier.

I suggest you use these if you do a lot of research for customers to reduce your time.
If you just are working on SEO for your own website, the above mentioned free tools will do fine.

Sitemap.xml standard like Robots.txt for Google, Live and Yahoo and Others

Filed Under: Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

If you think the big three Search Engines cannot work together, just read this post

Google, Yahoo and MSN Team Up for Sitemaps.org 

So I went ahead and checked out http://www.sitemaps.org/
The protocol is just one line of of the Google sitemap, just the definition line is different.

Now I have several sites, including a recent one.
Since that has not much visitors yet, I decided to run a test there :-)

Testing the new Sitemaps protocol.
It is a Joomla based website with the Open-Sef component.
For You who don't know this component, it has a build in Google Sitemap XML creator.

I generated the file which I now have named sitemap.xml instead of gsitemap.xml.
The generated file has the google definition, so I needed to change that.

Downloaded the file, changed the protocol header to xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 and uploaded the file again.

Via Google's webmaster central I did a resubmit to see if I got any errors.

Result: No Errors, It worked straight away.

Went over to Yahoo's site explorer, which already has a backlink to Sitemaps.org !
Put in the path to the sitemap.xml file in the Feed….
It didn't give me any errors….

For Live.com I am waiting and reading Live Search Weblog to see how they progress at Microsoft.

Work Sitemap.xml the same way as Robots.txt  

What I would Like most for all of them to do, is working this thing like the robots.txt file!!!!

You Guys and Girls making this a standard, take some of our labour away from saying where and how the file is placed.

Make it a standard crawl !! Instruct your robots to look for a file called sitemap.xml the way they look for robots.txt.

Now that would be really, really Cool.

Robots.txt tells the spider what not to crawl, Sitemap.xml tells them what they should crawl…
Then it would be a real win-win situation and we would even benefit more from this initiative.

Update !! Read Autodiscovery of Sitemap.xml via Robots.txt

Is Google Custom Search Engine a new SEO Tool or Threat

Filed Under: Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Webdesign

Google has brought us webmasters a new and exicting tool !

Google Custom Search Engine, with this option you can promote some websites you think should be better found because of the content they have on a the specific subject of your website.

You think they don't get enough results on that special search term, but you know there content is of high quality and they should be in the top results……

Well, now you can help those website to get into the top, on your own search engine that is…

The process of creating and implementing the Google Custom Search Engine is pretty simpel, leave it to Google to make it work that way.

I even placed it in my pathos-seo.com Joomla website without any problems
And there is also a Tutorial on How to Integrate Google CSE Custom Search Engine in Joomla

So, a new cool feature..
But what is in it for Google?

  1. They get to Us with a new feature we can use, so we give them credit for it , so they create some Goodwill.
  2. Google gets an extra platform from us to place their Adwords Adsense promotionel links, that brings (us* and) them more money….
  3. We provide them with highly rated websites on specifick keywords….they analyse their database and find there are some websites with authority that people put into the sites section of there custom search eninge…social networking on a new level…
  4. The database gives better search results, that benefit us all.

So if your website is stored in the favorites sites section of a Custom Search Engine, does that boost you ranking?
If so, how many links do you need?

How much weight does it get in the long run, and do our Search Engine Optimization technics still bring the same results?

Is it a new factor we should look at as a Blessing, a Tool or a Threat?

* If you have an adsense account and set the right option in your control panel.