Optimization Archives - Website Beginners Guide

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.

Web and Search – How to Optimize your pages

Filed Under: SEO

I wrote my last post some weeks ago here, and know its time to get back to speed with the articles about Search Engines and future and current search options through all engines.

Search Engine Ranking factors

Here is a short recap of the things that you should have in place for your current Search Engine Optimization, it really is just a recap of the Search Engine factors by SEOmoz (if you haven't read that one? GO There! now? Please…?)

Keyword use in Title Tag
Anchor text of inbound links
Global link popularity of the site
Age of site
Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure
Topical relevance of inbound links
Links popularity of site in Topical community
Keyword use in body text
Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
Topical Relationship of Linking Page

There are some more factors to consider, which you can read from the link above.

My most recent website building project however showed my that the “Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)”

was one of the most valid actions done to get very good rankings for the keywords targeted….

One page was already in a top position with an 8.5 million competition on Google after just two Weeks, point here was that the page did not have any content yet…..
It was in the right place and had a good Title tag and Metadescription…thats was it…
The site however was build with Joomla and I build it with the How Joomla helps with LSI in mind.

Which however shows very clearly that you should build a website with Search Engine Optimization and a relevant site Structure for helping your visitors in place.
That means that you really should have your keywords research done before even thinking about starting to build the new site!

Finding Your Niche Competitors and Authority Sites

Filed Under: Joomla Seo, Search Engine, SEO Optimization

Last time you could read about finding related keywords to incorporate in your website, know there is a nice tool to find the websites to link to…

Why Links out? Because it shows the search engines where to position your website in the large scheme of topics on the Internet.
As Matt Cutts stated several times, also on the paid-links discussions, Links should be as relevant as possible and should be off benefit to your visitors.

Learning from Problogger

Reading the post from Problogger about “Graphing your Blog Connections” is tried the Tool myself.
You have to read the Getting started on the website off http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html to get it to work, but it was a pretty straight forward experience.. works great!

But as I tried some queries to see how is linking to my sites, it suddenly hit me…. this is great!
If you out in the keyword your are planning your niche in, you instantly get the mayor players in that field!

For instance I tried “Joomla SEO” (go figure..) and this is what came up.

Notice the Big Rounds, those are the Mayor players in this field!

Linking out to those site right in the middel of the biggest cirkels shows Google that your website is related to that topic.

On the site off TouchGraph your can read the following: “The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites.”

And I guess this Blog is doing oke on the Topic its setup for..

Now go and try it yourself for your Keywords and find out who to link to !!
And look at there site to learn…

Working with Feedburner options to Brand your Feed

Filed Under: Optimization, Search Engine, SEO

You might have seen the test post…

Did not work out the way I planned, sorry.
I hope this one does, you see if it works once you get the feed of this post.

Some time ago I did a post on the evil part of Feed scraper sites.

So I thought I would check out some features of Feedburner to see if there was a way to post a standard image with each post, just to let people see where the post really came from.

Turns out that there is an option to include something just like that!
Under the optimize tag of your Feedburner Feed there is this thing called “Feed Image burner”.
Standard there is the Feedburner image, which makes sense, they want to promote them selfs of course, so because I am doing that already here.. I will use it for myself…

Seriously, you can link to your own image, give it Metatag description en point it to you own Blog, so I did.
I created an image 144px width and pasted the text URL to this Blog on it.
Set up the parameters, and hope it will work.

Spamming the spam sites

What I always like are favicon.ico files… did you know that every time a browser opens a URL it also looks for a favicon.ico file? Don't believe me? Check your error logs…
If you don't have one, I suggest you create one and upload it to your root directory.
Don't know how? Use this link to create a favicon from an image.
And then tell Feedburner you have one on the “~~Optimize~~” “Publicize” tab and the option “Buzzboost”.

So I am hoping that will work as well..

And I am looking for the payout of this feature on those scraper site, or will the ban my feed if it does?

P.s. is this spamming the spam-sites ?

Joomla or WordPress? Which one to Choose?

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

Update! This post will tell you how to use WordPress and Joomla together for better SEO results. If you are looking for some ideas on how to choose between the two, you could read the Page How to choose between WordPress and Joomla!

If you look at these Opensource Content management systems, then people use them for Blogging and Building websites.

Joomla
Now Joomla with al its extensions is great for building a good solid website with all the features you want. And you can bring it to high rankings in the search eninges as well, if you start with the proper technical improvements.

Templates in Joomla make it easy to get a good layout for the site, and you can find lots of good free Joomla templates. For a good business website I suggest you look for a good commercial template based on a Table less design with external css files.

WordPress
For Blogging you cannot beat WordPress, especially if you do the right setup, making the permalinks work right the .htaccess file and set the options to /%postname%/. Creating posts and giving it the special keyword tags is really easy.

Templates for WordPress are also very easy to obtain and to implement. Besides that…Google loves WordPress Blogs

My advice?

Use them both!!
Setup your main site in Joomla! and start working on the content, create good quality content.
In a sub directory, or a subdomain, install WordPress and start blogging, using the keywords you also use for your website.

WordPress with its create SEF functions and categories will bring you traffic, this traffic reflects to your main domain.

And with the content on your main website, you work to keep your visitors captured and make them come back.

Yes, I know there is a great Component to integrate WordPress in Joomla from j-prosolution.com (Site is no longer available, but a great Premium replacement that can be Found on corePHP) and I use it also on my website www.pathos-seo.com And if that is not enough, they even use it for the news via blogs on http://www.joomla.org/ !!

Still I like the separate installation better, because there are more features I can use for Search Engine Marketing and Viral marketing.

In my short experience with combining them that the combination of Joomla and WordPress are a killer combination for getting High Search Engine Ranking!

What is the right term? optimisation, optimization, optimalization or optimalisation

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo, Search Engines

I was at a conference a few days ago, and as a follow-up you could visit a website with the presentations in a pdf format.
For me it is a lot easier to handle digital formats to store, than paperwork, so I went and downloaded them.

But as I was reading one of them concerning SEO, I read a definition of SEO that stated it means “Search Engine Optimalisation”
This one was new to me……..
The speaker is a well informed Search Engine Optimizer him self and is very good at it.
But now he got me more then a little curious.

What is the right term for what a Search Engine Optimizer does?

I did some soul searching but in the end I did run some Google queries. [Read more…]

Search Engine Optimization is Simple

Filed Under: Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

What is this SEO all about?

Well, you and some other hundreds of thousands of people are wondering about the same thing.

But actually doing search engine optimization its not that difficult, it is about getting your website into the so called “organic search” results of the Search Engines, that's it!

You can have long discussions on how to do it, but the final results will be the same, getting ranked among the Top 10 Results of the keyword search you think your public will look for and then find the information you are providing!

Ok, let's read that again….
Results? That means the Search Engine Results Page.
Top 10? Most people who use Search Engines won't go further than the first page….

Silly people…they should know that you are on page 1267 of Google, so want don't they just look there?

The Most Important Part of Search Engine Optimization

Keyword you think?
This is actually the most important and hardest part of Search Engine Optimization…
Get into the mindset of the audience you want to get to your site, think like them, dress like them, eat like them, work like them, live like them, and finally Search Like Them!

If you can only manage the last part, you are on the right track!

Find those keywords that your potential visitors are looking for via Keyword tools like Google's Keyword Planner Tool. Once you found them get started by targeting them in your search engine optimization and content plan.

And If you are wondering if a Content Management System like Joomla or WordPress can do this?
I can tell you now, right here, YES they can!

Starting a Content Plan and Site Structure

Your site structure is one of the most important assets when it comes to ranking in the search engines. You site structure should reflect the topic of your website.

For example a website with WordPress as it's main topic should have at least these site topics:

WordPress Themes or WordPress Templates
WordPress Plugins
WordPress Tutorials
WordPress Blog and/or WordPress Website

For a site about Joomla! those topics could be:

Joomla Templates
Joomla Tutorials
How To Install Joomla
Joomla Components / Extensions

WordPress Website Structure

Setting those basic content structure in WordPress is done via Post Categories.

Got to Posts -> Categories and create the categories that you would like to write about on your site.

Once you have done that create a WordPress Menu (Apprearance -> Menu -> Create New menu) give your menu a name and save it. After saving you can add categories to it in a way you like and would help your visitors.

Once saved you can place is as one of the sites primary or secondary navigation menu or as a custom menu widget in your sidebar.

Joomla Website Structure

In Joomla you can do the same as mentioned before, create the categories structure for your website.

Because of the way Joomla is build it just takes more steps to have your topics menu.

Go to Content -> Category Manager -> Add New Category.

Once you set-up the categories you add them to a menu.

First create a New menu via the menu manager.

Add the categories in a way you want them to be shown on the site (Blog layout, List or Page with all categories of you choice listed).

Then publish the menu module on the location you want it to appear on the site. See blow for a finished menu example.

Creating Content for SEO

Now that you have your basic structure set-up start writing your content and keep your main topics in mind.

You can now easily place your articles in their respective categories. While creating your content also think about writing compelling articles titles and meta descriptions.

Your titles are you most powerful tools for attract visitors to you site as they will be shown in the search results pages. A good title will want the searcher to click on it to read the article you created.

A good meta description might help to get theme to read more… Just make sure you deliver or over-deliver on the topic that your articles is about.

Now you are set to grow your rankings based on your site structure and you can get some ideas for your website articles based on that structure.

Do you have any ideas on your own about the above mentioned SEO set-up? Let me know in the comments section below!