• Home
  • Sitemap
  • Privacy Policy
  • About
  • My Resources
  • Contact

Website Beginners Guide

Learn How to Start Your Own Internet Site & More

  • Blogging
  • Drupal
  • Joomla
    • Joomla Blog
    • Joomla Optimization
    • Joomla SEF
    • Joomla Seo
  • SEO Articles
    • SEF
  • Search Engine
    • SEO BLogs
    • SEO Optimization
    • SEO
    • Optimization
  • Webdesign
    • Affiliates
    • Open Source CMS
  • WordPress

No. 1 on Google and No Clicks

Filed Under: SEO, WordPress

In the last few months I have been moving some websites from subdomains to new domains and sometimes changing there apperance.
Here is what happened on one of them…

The site was number One on Google for a long tail keywords phrase and it site was getting some nice traffic from this term.

After the move from its sub-domain life and going into its own domain I changed the template to a more suitable one and optimized the site to get more traffic.

One thing I did was the craft the Home page title so it would get even more traffic and it worked out nicely. The new theme was search engine optimized and I did not feel like I needed to do anything about it…

As I said, the site had a No. 1 position on Google, but after I wrote a new post on this site this happened to the traffic.

Title Problem Effect

Click to enlarge

Once I noticed the drop in traffic I checked Google and saw the site was still No. 1 but not with the title of the homepage anymore.

The title shown by Google was the title of the last post and no longer this traffic attracting title of the Homepage!
This title was not really on topic of the search term so nobody clicked on it to check out the site!

I checked the theme and changed the header option to make sure I got the Homepage title back into place.

Bringing it Back on Track

So everything is technically set back to how it should be, and now it was time to get Google's spider to re-index the site so the homepage title was back where it belonged.

Writing a new post that to update the site did the trick and the site was back in a few days.

All looked good, but a day later there was again this drop in traffic. Now I can explain the first drop, then the recovery but not the second drop.

The only thing I can think of was the short time upgrade followed by something Google might do like switching back for some time serving search engine cached indexes if they upgrade the primary index.
If you have another explanation, I would love to here it!

After this initial drop and kick back the site is now doing well, thank you for asking.
It is still growing in traffic.

Conclusion: Keep track of your site after you do a mayor upgrade like changing themes or even system upgrades.
The thing you need to watch closely is that the so carefully crafted title of you homepage is still the same so it will keep getting you the traffic. Especially it you have the No. 1 position on Google that you wanted to get.

Tagged With: Blog, Google, Search Engine Optimization, WordPress 3 Comments

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.

Tagged With: Drupal, Joomla, Search Engine Optimization, SEF, WordPress 39 Comments

Lost and Regained Traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing the Easy Way

Filed Under: Optimization, Search Engines, SEO

Above is a little picture I wanted to show you.

For those among you who are used to looking at website traffic graphics you see that something strange has happened here…

You see, the picture above is from one of my websites and shows clearly what the impact was of the following story.

I made a mistake, a simple one but with large consequences as you can see.
Because of this mistake traffic for this site almost went done to zero.
But if it had gone down to zero it would have been clear what happed right from the start, but it did not, I “just” lost traffic from the mayor three search engines.

What happened?

In simple terms: the site was hacked via  a remote inclusion attack from several forum like websites, one of them was successful.
There was just one file affected but one of the most important ones, the .htaccess file.
There were four lines of code injected at the bottom to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^
http://example.com/ [R=301,L]three - code used

The code in line three redirects those search engine robots too the site in line four (which I changed, the real site got enough traffic from me).

How was this possible? Simple, because I forgot to reset the security on .htaccess after doing some previous test.
The file was still set to 707 = also public write access, and yes its security is set back to the right access now.

How to find out your site is hacked

As I said before if the traffic had gone to zero you most probably would have checked your site and see a defacing of the site itself of some kind. The site would not work the way you would expect it to.

In this case the only problem I could see was that the traffic dropped hard in the statistics.
Upon looking further into the details I checked the ranking of previous Google search terms the site was ranking for.

I found that all the top 10 ranking pages ware gone! All my efforts to rank for those keywords were lost.

So I logged into Google webmaster to check if there was something horribly wrong with the site and the site had received some kind of penalty.

And yes there were errors with the URLs in the sitemap.xml, errors about unreachable URLs.
So I checked the files on the site that where modified just before the drop, and there was the .htaccess file with the above mentioned code.

Getting back into Google

After cleaning up the mess and setting the security right I realized the impact of these few lines.

All three search engine robots had gotten notice that the pages where permanently moved to another domain! which is not true, but they don't know that.

Checks on site: reference in Google, Yahoo and MSN showed that the domain was still in Yahoo and MSN Indexes, but had no entry in the Google Index anymore.

So it was time to send a reconsideration request to Google telling them what happened, what had been done to resolve the problem and what steps where taken too prevent it from happening again.

After that, you can only wait and wait…, don't expect an email form Google, just an automatically generated message in your Webmaster control center that they will look into the matter.

After a few days traffic started to build again from Google and Yahoo as well as MSN (Live.com) so you can conclude that Google really looks and acts upon your requests.

Hard Lessons learned

Now for the fun part of this episode, the lessons learned
First lesson: make sure to secure your cms installation and critical files.

Some tips:
– change passwords on a regular basis (use keepass if you have a lot off passwords to remember)
– secure your admin directory or files with .htaccess passwords, most of the hosting companies have this option in their cpanel
– update your system as soon as a new version comes out.

Check your stats once a day, or a least every few days for strange things happening, since this could have taken me a long time to get back if it wasn't for those early warning signs.

As a personal note: I need to get more incoming links from non-search engines to diversify my traffic sources :-)

What I realized after my traffic was back to its old level was that Google is really fast in acting on 301 redirects and changes in their index.
They update their index with a higher frequency than Yahoo and Live, and they really act fast on those re-inclusion request as well.

A hack like this before your start your SEO work for organic ranking would also mean that all your efforts will have no effect… so if a cusomers is really having trouble to get his or.her site into the search engines, check the .htaccess file!

If you have your own horror stories like this one, please share them in the comments and let us learn from those stories as well.

Tagged With: Google, losing, Search Engine Optimization, traffic 12 Comments

Learn SEO from Google’s webmasters

Filed Under: Joomla Seo, SEO

If you don't have an RSS feed subscription on the Google Webmaster Central Blog yest, I strongly advice you te get one…

On there latest post they included an nice basic SEO Starters Guide from Google which you might want to forward to some of your customers.

What better way to educate them then sending them a document produced by the Guys that know Google the best.

Af course it is just a basic SEO Guide, but it shows some fine examples of things you need to get done for better rankings.
I personally like the explanation about why you need to have the best URL possible.

For Joomla webmasters this is still an issue, although Joomla 1.5.x “out of the box” is a lot better then Joomla 1.0.x but still not the way I want them.

P.s. don't forget to update your Joomla 1.5.x to the new Joomla 1.5.8 version! ?(if you use the SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com you better wait for the update… looks like that could take some days.

Tagged With: Google, Guide, Search Engine Optimization 4 Comments

WordPress SEO Post and Joomla Lessons

Filed Under: Joomla Seo, SEO Articles

Joost de Valk has written a great article on his new website about WordPress and SEO, Calling it "The Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog"  and I must say, he does a splendid Job in working through all the aspects of SEO for WordPress.

And indeed the Blogging world is raving about this article as well:

Here are few links:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-seo/7096/
http://www.searchengineguide.com/sage-lewis/yoast-should-boast-its-wordpress-seo-gui.php
http://www.jaankanellis.com/wordpress-seo-in-a-nutshell-by-joost/
http://sphinn.com/story/52017

And Yoast (that's right -> Joost ) also does a great Job in monitoring all those incoming links and as a true blogger reacting on every one of them :-) 

You will know by now that I use WordPress,Drupal, Typo3 and Joomla for a number of websites, so I can related to the technical aspects of his WordPress Guide as well as the real Search Engine Optimization stuff.

And this were you can learn as an Search Engine Optimization fanatic, looking at several aspects of this guide and pick the right stuff for improving any website.
That also means Your Joomla based website.

Some of the point you can look at are:
Basic SEO

Permalinks = Search Engine Friendly URL's

Titles
Descriptions
More text
Image optimization

Than there is more advanced stuff and some great advice on coding and more, you can really do well if you follow his advice on:

Point 5 – Conversion Optimization
Point 6 – Comment Optimization
Point 7 – Off site site Blog SEO, like using Twitter SEO 

I am looking forward to implementing some of his advice here on this Blog and on my other Joomla SEO Blog

Both are build with WordPress to Promote my Joomla sites about Joomla SEO and Open Source CMS SEO

And I must say, that Joost already has inspired me to write a similar post about Joomla and SEO, that is if you as a reader would like to see that as well, covering several technical aspect on how to do this advanced and basic SEO for Joomla.

An Other great article to read is Meet Yoast in which Joost writes about the redesign and the new domain name… also read the comments like "How does it feel to commit Technorati suicide" since your Technorati rankings won't follow you to the new domain like your FeedBurner readers will.

Thank you Yoast for a great post a great new site and insight into the basic off really well done SEO!

Tagged With: Blog, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, WordPress 3 Comments

Free Search Engine Optimization Video’s and Website Analyses Tool

Filed Under: SEO

I have been following the Stompernet guys for some weeks now, as they are moving into the next Stompernet teachings.
Just have a look at Stompernet Going Natural 3 but you have to leave your name and email address to get to the real goodies.

Stompernet Sign Up screen

Inside you will find some great videos from guys who really know there business.
Here are some of the video titles:

  • ClickFu & the LOST video
  • AdWords Triangulation Method
  • Keyword Research
  • Stomper Site Seer Introduction
  • Stomper Site Seer How To
  • Member Case studies
  • en some more…

But make sure you got some time on your hands, because most of the video's are about 30 Minutes and bring some great tips.
My Favorite is the one from Keyword research.

The Site Seer Tool
Looking at the tool that they provide, you can get even better keywords targeted to your website.
Using the tool is simpel, just fill in your website URL and two times your email address and the link to the full report is mailed to you.e report shows in one of the fields " How Google sees your site"  and that will bring some great information.

It shows you the main keywords that Google thinks what your website is about, but you can click on these words to get even more related keywords.In my case it showed me that one site was not on the keywords I wanted to target, but another one was spot on.

Further looking at the first site I found what was wrong so I can improve it.Please be aware that you can only get 5 reports within 24 hours, so take your main sites first.
There is other software like IBP SEO that can do a website analysis like the Site Seer tool, but they compare your site to the top ten websites for you keyword.
And I must say it is a great tool that I frequently use.
But the above mentioned Site Seer report part shows you if your Website theme is setup right.  

Stompernet
Now the new Stompernet is open, but still out of my reach with a Membership price of  " Just"  $797,00 per month, but it seems that it is well worth the money.

For now, I just have to settle for the free video´s and the tool, but that is really great offer to start with.
One more thing you have to look at once you have access to the free video´s is the way they have set this up over a short period of time, using the the AIDA formula to get people to want to sign up before the deal was on-line.
They get your Attention with the first video, build Interest with the full range of following video's, got you to Desire for more with the tool, and set you up for the Action to sign up for the full package… 

The video's are really master pieces of soft selling the deal, something to keep in mind for your next product launch.

Tagged With: Google, Search Engine Optimization, theme, video, website Leave a Comment

A Joomla SEO Post I didn’t want to write…

Filed Under: Joomla Seo

This is really a post about Joomla and SEO I would rather not have written…. but it is a great case studie, so here we go…

About 3 weeks back I did some work on my major dutch website, replacing a SEF component, replacing the template and also updating the site to Joomla 1.0.13 which I should have done some time ago.. (no not to Joomla 1.0.14 yet, but you will see in the end why not).

The SEF Components

I wanted to replace the OpenSEF component with sh404SEF, mainly because of the way the later works by sending real 404 headers.
This site had more pages in Google than there were actual pages… I must admit I did some heavy testing with different SEF components in the early days , thus creating more URLs pointing to the same content.
But they al said to the search engines:
He I am OK look Ma, code 200! So all pages stayed in the index.

So cleaning that up was one of the aspect to choose for sh404SEF, the other reason was that OpenSEF is no longer under real development.

Oke, back to the site in question. All things with previous site conversions went without any problems, but with this site I also wanted do a little change in the URLs.
I covered that by redirecting the old URLs to the new ones with 301 redirect in the .htaccess file, so that was covered.


The new template and site upgrade

This was not a great undertaking, as Joomla works great with templates and this one is really clean and fast, even more then the old one.

Upgrading a Joomla website within the 1.0.x range isn't hard to do as well.

Both items were ready in about 30 minutes with some tweaking here and there.


The Google results

After a few day however I found that my visitors number were dropping dramaticly…

The need for the SEF Patch for Jooma

Is this new SEF component the cause of this problem? That was the mayor change on the site?

But I did redirect all those pages, so this could not have caused such a dramatic drop!

Now one thing I always do if I have to look at a site in trouble is run the command site:www.example.com in Google.
And there it was! The problem I was having with the site was the basic one with any not optimized Joomla website!

Standard Joomla gives out the HTML Titles composed of [sitename] – [pagetitle] and this site ad a long title.
So there were a lot of hits showing… my site title and not my carefully crafted pages titles.

Then it hit me, I had upgrade the site to 1.0.13, but had forgotten to install the Joomla SEF Patch by Joomlatwork.com after that.

The Solution to the problem

For those of you that don't now the SEF Patch yet (shame on you), one of the things that is done by the patch is that it changes the way the title of the pages are shown.
Basically it just shows the page title as the HTML title tag, you know, the number one SEO Ranking factor?

Installing the free Patch is just uploading the Page via FTP, or if you have the paid version, which is installed as a component, but thus giving you even more controle over the HTML title (costs 8,33 Euro, which is really a bargain)

I Installed the SEF Patch, and run a new sitemap.xml creation to see if all page titles were back the way they should.
Then off to the Google webmaster tool, removing the old sitemap and telling Google there was a new one.

The results of this action you can see in th graphics above, the site is doing oke again and is now back to where it was before and slightly growing further.

Conclusion:  if you upgrade a Joomla site, even if it is your own, you should always make sure you have the SEF Patch in place!

P.s. Why no upgrade to 1.0.14? There is no patch for this version yet :-) (to my knowledge that is, maybe Richard can shed some light on this) 

 

Update: The Joomla SEF Patch for 1.0.14 is now ready for download at http://www.joomlatwork.com/downloads/

Tagged With: Component, Patch, Search Engine Optimization, SEF 2 Comments

A new Blog? No, it just moved..

Filed Under: SEO BLogs

Most of you, have found this Blog to be on a sub-domain from the main site Design Cars.

And although that was were it started, it soon became obvious to me that it was not the best place for it.
No, Design Cars and this Joomla SEO Blog did not really match…from an SEO point of view that is.

Next to my other site and Blog about Joomla! Pathos Seo and that Joomla Blog I wanted to give you more information on search Engine Optimization for Joomla and WordPress and in a later stage also on Drupal.
All of them find examples of Open-source Content management systems and now you find that information in just one place.

So now the basic work is ready, the domain is claimed and then it was time to move the Blog here, to its new home http://herbertvandinther.com/

On the main site http://www.hummerbie.com/ you can find lots of articles already, but it will be growing fast, I hope you find the articles on the site just as helpful as my Blog posts.

With this move, I also changed the Template for the Blog, not much, but it has a wider view, new headers and somewhat new lighter colors.
For me the best improvement is the wide of the theme, so I can show you larger images and screen-shots, I hope you like it as well as I do.

If you find there is anything missing that was here before, please tell me so I can fix it…

In one of my next posts I will write about the how and what of the move, the difficulties and costs from an SEO Point of view of this kind of Blog moving, stay tuned!

Tagged With: Blog, Joomla Blog, Move, Search Engine Optimization, WordPress Leave a Comment

Why Joomla SEO isn’t that easy

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

If you want to do a really good job at doing the right stuff for your website, then don't use Metatag generators or even worse On the fly Plugins or Mambots that create Metatags stuff for you.

They might seem a good idea and if you really don't have the time, or the knowledge to do proper Search Engine Optimization, then use a Metatags generator.

You can find several ones at the Joomla extensions site.
You can also find some on the fly Metatags generators, who change everything for you if you change a few of the first lines of your page.

Here is why I don't link to use them:
– They are not as good as you in creating good titles
– They are not as good as you in giving a good an well thought through Description of the content of the page
– They are just stuffing some keywords in the keyword tag, and you still have to change them for maximum results.

Joomla Metatag generator components

With Metatag Generators components, your database is filled in the right places, and you can mostly edit the tags, either on the page meta-info tab itself or in the generator pages.
OpenSef comes with such a Metatag Generator included in the SEO Assistant tab.
Also, the Metatags generator of iJoomla works well.

For both generators, I suggest you set the options in the configuration fields to NOT overwrite the already filled in Metatag fields.

If you have a large website with multiple editors that don't know how to write Metatags information, it will be a valuable extension.
But if you run your own site, don't use them, think for yourself. You are the expert on your sites topic.

On the Fly SEO?

There are several Plugins that create “on the fly Metatags�.
What they do is basically read the first positions from the text area of your page and take that as the title, and mostly some more lines to create a description Metatag.
With the words included in the text, the keywords are extracted.

For some people, it will work great, less effort, and instant results…..

What I don’t like about it is that you don't have control over the more important parts, it overwrites all your previous work.

But should you call this Search Engine Optimization for your Joomla Site?
Or are you just fooling yourself and taking the easy road?

Search Engine Optimization is more than just letting a program work some stuff into some fields for you.

You have to do research on Keywords, Optimize your text, site structure and more, and that is hard work!
Just running a Plugin or component might look nice to you now, but will it last in the long run and will it provide the right Search Engine Results you are after?

Tagged With: generators, Joomla, metatag, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Leave a Comment

For Joomla SEO you need to be a Rocket Scientist!

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

No, Not really af course..
You just have to work hard and in the right way, getting the technical stuff ready and write good quality content and lots of it.

But I just couldn't resist..
There is a lot of controversie at the moment about some statements and counter statements in the SEO blogosphere where post are made about if Search Engine Optimization is Rocket Science or just simple to do if you follow the standard Optimization Guidelines (SEO Basics Explained)

My mind just flipped matching two post together, the previous one, and the one I am talking to you about below.

I am reading (and get RSS Feeds) form several SEO Blogs, one them is the http://www.alledia.com/blog/
And they have done an Interview with Barrie North and they started with the first question about how he got into Joomla and what's his background.

I started out as a rocket scientist. No – really!

And Barrie mentioned that he started out as a Rocket Scientist and that he has his Masters in Physics!

If you have read this Blog for a while you should know that I think Barrie is one of the best in Joomla SEO.
So the combination is easily made :-)

But besides this little Mind spin of mine, the Interview gives you some idea about the person Barrie North and his drive to share his information on Joomla.

He also points out that SEO isn't what it used to be, that “old school” seo is indeed dead.
And I must admit that I also think SEO is a really fascinating concept and I want to add that you need to analyse your results to improve your knowledge.
So in that sense you could say its a bit like science….

Further there are some quality links to SEO resources in the Interview, so just go and read it yourself, just follow the links to Interview with Barrie North.

 

Tagged With: Blog, Joomla, rocket, scientist, Search Engine Optimization, SEO 6 Comments

Recent Posts

Website Maintenance and Clean Up

Website Clean Up in Progress

I like Yoast.com, not only for the great WordPress SEO plugin, but also the … [Read More...]

  • How to Start A WordPress Website Consolidation Project
  • Google Updates in 2012 With the Biggest Impact
  • Start Blogging on SEO and More…

FTC Disclosure

Disclosure: This website is independently owned and operated. This is a professional website which might receive compensation from the companies whose products and/or services we promote. Read more...

Get Updates!

Subscribe for new articles to land in your inbox for free!

Popular Articles

  • No. 1 on Google and No Clicks
  • How To Solve the Joomla Read More Problem
  • What is the right term? optimisation, optimization, optimalization or optimalisation
  • The Big Four Search engine features compared
  • Joomla Dynamic Page Title option for Improving Internal Linking
  • Google Updates in 2012 With the Biggest Impact
  • How to Optimize your Joomla site with Keywords

Beautifull WordPress Themes

Elegant Themes - Beautiful WordPress Themes

Main Menu

  • SEO Blog
  • WordPress or Joomla?
  • Web Resources
  • Sitemap
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • About Herbert-Jan

Joomla! 3 Book

WP for Dummies

Legal Information

  • External Links Policy
  • Double Dart Cookie
  • Testimonials Disclosure
  • Disclaimer
  • Privacy Policy
  • Amazon Affiliate
  • FTC Statement

Copyright © 2006–2023 Website Beginners Guide· Site Theme Design: StudioPress