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Why Joomla, WordPress and Drupal all Fail at Search Engine Optimization

Filed Under: SEO

Yes, that is right, they all fail at Search Engine Optimization…

I have been reading several new posts about how well WordPress is doing SEO compared to Joomla! and how good Drupal is in SEO compared to WordPress and….well, you get the general idea.

it seems that every time people are defending their choice to use a certian Content management system. Which is a good thing, you can show people the reasons why you love the system(s) that you use.

We all do, we all like the system of our choice, whether it is WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Modx, Typo3, etc,etc. They are all great open source content management systems.

The Big Three, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

I have written before how Search Engine Friendly WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal can be, but they don't do SEO…, YOU do SEO…

That is right, they don't do anything else then giving you the tools to get your website ready for higher rankings and better performance in the search engines!

You are the deciding factor in how well search engine optimization is done. You and the webmaster and content writers of your website.

None of the content management systems will come up to you and say, here is a great keyword rich title for your post. None of them will provide you with the keyword rich quality content that attracts visitors and back-links.

That is all up to you.

None of these content management systems will give you the right structure and internal linking ideas for the content of your site based on relevant keywords and none of them will do that keyword research for you.

They are just what they say the are, content management systems. You can use them for building websites, for building blogs, for building community's, but they still remain content management systems.

They are the engines that drive your website and/or Blog, but you have to work with them to get a really search engine optimized website.

The deciding factor for great search engine optimization

It is up to you to get the most out of the system of your choice and you will see that you can do it!

Either with WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, or any other system, you have the knowledge and the ideas to get better rankings for you site.

You know your system of choice and you are the engineer that knows how to fire up that engine to drive it up to the best possible spot in the search engine results pages!

So don't blame or praise a website building engine for getting search engine optimization done right, praise yourself for doing a job well done.

Setting up a Joomla 1.5 website The Case Study

Filed Under: Featured

I am currently in the process of building a new website for my own pleasure, and I thought I would tell you about to process involved in setting up a search engine optimized website with Joomla 1.5.x

You might thinks, well that should not take long… just grab a copy of the new Joomla version, install it en you are ready to got, that easy.

But that would be just a tiny little to simple… there is just more to do BEFORE you install Joomla (or any other CMS for that matter)

In the next weeks or so you can read here about how to get started once you have gotten an Idea to create a website about.
You will be reading about:

  • Domain name selection
  • Keyword research
  • Getting into the mind of your visitors
  • Setting Up a website structure that is easy to use, good for your visitors and search engines
  • Choosing a hosting company
  • Choosing your template and layout
  • Installing and fine-tuning Joomla SEO Components
  • Writing Content and what to write Search Engine Optimized content
  • Tracking visitors
  • Promoting your website

As you can see there is a lot to cover and at the end I (and maybe you to) should have a website that is doing well in the Search Engines and is also great for your visitors.

What I am nog going to tell you, is what the sites URL is, just to keep things clean in the process.
Some of the things I am going to tell you will see at the end of the serie, but by then it should not have a large effect on the visitors number.

Warning! Don't expect a high frequency of posts about this project, since some thing really taken time, however once a week I guess there should be an update on the project.

P.s. most of the things will also be applicable to a Joomla 1.0.x website.

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)


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!

Joomla! Best PHP Open Source Content Management System

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

Joomla! Best PHP Open Source Content Management System…

Don't take my word on it, this is the what the Packt Publishing Award judges say:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/joomla-wins-best-php-open-source-content-management-system

Joomla Wins Best PHP Cms

But it is nice to see “Once again, judges commented on the size and responsiveness of the community, which translates to potential problems being dealt with quickly.”

 Joomla Wins best PHP Open Source Cms Award

The New and Improved Joomla DS Feed Syndication Component

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

If you have read this Blog for a Longer period of time (or have gone through the Sitemap..:-)) you might have read about the DS Syndication Component in my post Overcoming the Joomla RSS Feed Problem Well, there is a new version of this component since August of this year and I must say it is better then before! Putting in multiple categories in to one Feed. Not limited to the Frontpage any more.. choose to show HTML, Images or not in your Feed, using your special images. You can create multiple feeds with different categories and different images for the feeds. There is also a module that can show each of these feed images to subscribe to or just the ones you selected Running your Feeds through Feedburner I always like to run my Feeds via Feedburner, because they have some great options! So for my new website a used the DS Syndication component to get two separate Feeds Joomla and WordPress Feeds from Hummerbie.com And I have written a Tutorial for you on how to use the DS Syndication Component and where to find it! You can find it on Improve you Joomla RSS Feed and if you don't know why you should have Feeds? Read Why Every website should have a Feed

How To Solve the Joomla Read More Problem

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization

I was reading a post from Brain Clark on Copyblogger about the “Click Here problem” and I just had to think about Joomla.

You know the famous “Read more” line that comes up if you split your articles into an Introduction and the main part of the Article.

Reading some of the results in the post got me to change that Text on my Joomla websites..

“Here are the results:

  • Click to continue: 8.53%
  • Continue to article: 3.3%
  • Read more: (-)1.8% “

Change the “Read More..” text

To have another text on your own Joomla site is not that difficult.
First Login to your Joomla Administrator Panel and select the Joomla language manager.

Selecting the Joomla language manager

Then open the English file and use your Browser function “Edit” and “Search” function to find the “Read more…” line.

 Change the read more text in Joomla

Now change the line to the Immortal words.. Click here to continue…, save the file and wait to see if visitors will really read more pages on your website.

Since it is a small change, it could be worth your Time to try it…

Joomla Dynamic Page Title option for Improving Internal Linking

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

So, your are working hard on your Titles and improving them with relevant keywords and making them attractive for users… but do you have the Internal linking also down? 

One of the lesser used options on the Joomla SEO Configuration is the option to use Dynamic Page Titles.
But using this option can also increase your Search Engine Positions, because of the fact that your link to your pages with a link filled with Keywords, that is your article title!

If your use the read more option and show your articles on the Frontpage, you should use this option, it is a simple option to activate.
Just got to your Global Configuration (make sure your configuration.php is writable at this time and set it to unwritable afterwords) and go to the SEO Tab, there your find the two Options.

Use the Joomla Dynamic Page Title Option

The Drawbacks of using Dynamic Page Titles

When you activate this option, you might be in for a suprise… and not always a pleasant one..
Your website, and especially the front page looks very different than before!

So how did this happen? and how can you fix it?

Well, it is a difficult one to give you a simple solution, but it is easy to explain.
If you activate the option the way the page titles are used is different because it call another class from your Template CSS file, so you have to check your Template CSS and probable find a class like a.contentpagetitle that is the one to look for if you want to change the way your Titles look of they are active.

If your don't see any change, you could have a Template that already has corrected this to match the “normal” title or your template does not use a CSS class for the Title presentation.

So for strange behavior check your template and template CSS files first!

Change the options so it matches your site, or gives you nice layout for the titles and see over a few weeks if it works out for your search engine positions, if you see no results and don't like the layout, just uncheck the option.
Although I recommend leaving them on for a longer period, since it take a while for Google and other Search Engines to reindex your site based on your alterations.

Joomla and Missing Metatags

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

If you are like me, you like to have your Metatags like description and keywords filled with relevant content..

You could have Metatag generators for you website, or overviews of the content with a component like OpenSEF.
But what if you don't use OpenSEF but sh404SEF?
In that case you could register and download the Joomla Metatag component form iJoomla.

But if you just want to see what pages still are in need of content for these Metatags.
In that case there is now a very simple but effective and easy to use modules, with two versions, one for the Joomla 1.0.x versions and for Joomla 1.5…

It is written by Dan Rahmel who also wrote two Books about Joomla!
and

And it is easy to install.

The module is installed as a normal module, but it is only for the administrator.
That is why it is listed under the Administrator part of the Modules and has to be published and positioned on the cPanel, which means that it will be visible on you administrator homepage (the first one after you login)

Joomla Missing Metadata Module

After publication you find the items without the Description and Keywords listed on a separate Tab on the Administrators page.

An overview of the Joomla items missing the Description and Keywords

You can download the version you want from JoomlaJumpStart.com where you can even find more information on Joomla and the insights of Dan Rahmel.

There are people who will tell you that Metatags like the Description and Keywords are useless these days.. for Search Engine Optimization that is.

But try to work on writing good solid page descriptions and use just up to a maximum of 10 keywords in the keyword field.
Use the keywords you have used in the page, and in the Title and wait for the next index round of Google.

The Descriptions field mostly show up under you page title and should be written as a small advertisement to bring you the visitors you want.

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