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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)


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.


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

Making a faster Joomla website

Filed Under: Seo Basics

Make Your Joomla websites run faster

 

Any Joomla website can be made to run faster, or at least give your visitor that experience.

 

There are two features in Joomla that can speed up, or slow down your site.

 

Joomla cache!

First there is one feature in the Joomla Configuration Panel that is often overlooked and not used.
This feature is the cache mechanism that Joomla uses.

What is Cache?

Caching means that the pages that are generated by the server are stored in the cache folder.
When the page is called again, even by somebody else, the page is retrieved form this folder, without having to go to the making of the page again.
So this will provide a much faster loading of the page.
An other benefit of this is that your server load goes done, because the pages are already generated.
So what is the drawback? You need space on the server to do this.
Now it doesn't not take much space, but if you are already on your limit, don't use it.
Otherwise, test and see how much it takes, I think you will leave it on!

How to enable cache and what values to use.

The cache is enabled it the back-end configuration panel.
Just look for the cache Tab and set it to "enabled".
The time is given in seconds, standard this is 900 which corresponds to 15 minutes.

I personally think this is to limited for a standard website, for a news site its fine.
On Most of my sites I use 12 Hours, which is 43200 Seconds.

 

For a site that is not updated so much you can even set it to 24 hours that is 86400 second.

 

Enable the Module Cache

If you have the cache enabled you have turn on caching on the modules.
Go to the Modules section and then look at the published modules check if they have a caching ability and active it if they have, especially the Menu's.

 

Joomla Statistics

 

The statistics Joomla provides are very basic, but still they can slow down the loading of the pages, most certainly the first page somebody loads.
Mostly you provider will give you the opportunity to use the log files for you analyses, and this brings even more information that you need to analyse your website.

 

What information do you loose?
Well that is that you don't see what people what browsers they use, which Operating System and from what domains.
Also there are no statistics on the articles, but than again you probably don't have this set because it generates a lot of data.
If you need to see what people are searching for on your site, you can set this to on.
The standard setting is just for browser,OS and Domain.
So if You really need this information, leave it on.