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How to Find Your Best Domain Name

After a long time of inactivity on this Blog, I just got started again.
Coming back to you while setting up a new WordPress website to write some stuff about finding your best domain name.

First of all, did you do your homework on finding the right keywords?
You will need them in this process, or not :-)

You see, there a two ways to go about this domain name searching, one is to incorporate your main keyword in the domain name, like -SEO for instance.
The other one is to look for a domain name that is short and sweet and easy to remember.

Using Keywords in Your Domain Name

The best option, of course, would be to have both… like wordpressseo.net which is short, easy to remember and contains the two main keywords Joomla and SEO.
Problem with this now would be that WordPress is more protected than before and the use of WordPress in a domain name should be approved by the Automatic.

This is just an example of how you need to think about using a brand name in your domain URL.
Amazon for instance and Google will contact you and start asking you to give that domain name to them since they are the holders of this registered trademark.
So be careful if you want to do that, or get permissions first!

Better is to look for a domain name that is simple and gets the right idea and stickiness to it, like alledia.com (now Joomlaschak.com) which is short, sounds good an is through its website content is now seen as one of the best sources for Joomla SEO.

As you can see, there is no Joomla and no SEO in the domain name itself, it is the content that works to boost its visitors and rankings in the SERPs.

Google doesn't care much about domain names Yahoo and Bing.com however still give you some points for having keywords in your domain.
I have a website about Network Documentation (I am an ICT Manager in my Daily work…) and it used to rank nr one in Bing.com and nr three in Yahoo, just because of the domain name….

I checked Google as well, but could not find it n the first 10 ! pages… so I need to do a lot of work there (it's a now a WordPress site and I am still learning SEO for WordPress as I go along)

Did you also see the main competition? and yes, networkdocumentation.com was already taken so they have a head start on me.
For my own domain name, I had to do a re-inclusion request at Google, since it was a spam site before I got it.
So here is a tip: if you have found a nice domain name and it is free! (check that first with your hosting provider) go to www.archive.org and use the “Wayback machine” tool to see if it was used before and how it looked like. That is how I found out why I couldn't get it into Google at all in the first place.

Short and sweet Domain names

You could also do some brainstorming sessions to get spunky names or if you are trying to build a brand on the Internet use that brand name.
Like Alledia or Hummerbie as a simple example.

Just make sure the names are short and use a good keyword rich title for your website since you now want people to use a link to you with the keyword you target.
Mostly they will use the title of your site to create a link. So for this Blog, you could link to Joomla SEO Blog but you also could use that same link title to link to Joomla SEO Blog ;-)

Use your imagination and you will see how creative you really can be once you start throwing your ideas on a white-board or a piece of paper (electric ones work fine too).

Domain Extensions

A short paragraph on domain extensions or tld's, you know, the endings of a domain name?

There are a lot of them and it looks like there are going to be even more if all plans as expected.
The best ones for an international market are .com .net .org which are simply the bests tld's.
But they could be taken and you need to venture out to other tld's or choose another name.

.info is not that good since some people think if you use that it is a spam site (I wonder why..)
You could also look at some foreign ones like .tv (expensive) or .it but those are just gadget like domains.
.mobi does work very well if you target mobile users.

What works best in extensions is to choose a tld that is locale to the market you want to target.
I use a .nl tld for my dutch web websites and that works great.

In conclusion: look at your competitors and what they use, look at your keywords list and be creative in finding that domain name that works for you!

P.s. If you have some great ideas on how to ease this process, don't hesitate to throw them into the comments.

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)

How Images get into the Search Engines

Filed Under: SEO

The next thing we want to look at are the Images options in the search engines, and although I explained this some time ago in Working with Images for SEOï¿½there are still some things to look at.

Because with most content management systems the image directory is blocked by the robots.txt file to prevent the search engines to crawl and index those files….

Open it up, remove that block! It will give you more traffic and especially if you have a website that is heavily loaded with pictures you will see that the visitors start looking for more on your site.

One thingï¿½that even the largest websites seem to forget that Images can help you get relevant visitors.
Naming your images and using alt / title tags is not “advanced” is Matt Cutts will explain in the video below, it should be your standard!

You can look even at big websitesï¿½and find them using very well named product images link 12456789.jpg … and sometimes even without a proper alt tag.

But one point of warning here, don't go overboard with the tags, just give a short description of the picture in that alt tag, no more, no less!

ï¿½

Looking for a Mercedes C Class Car? for example!

Do you know if your site is Down?

Filed Under: Joomla Optimization, Joomla Seo

If you run a site, you will at some point in time encounter a site outage.
That is not only with a Joomla site, it can also happen with WordPress or Drupal or any other Content Management System.

I am now talking about the fact that a complete server is down or that the Internet Connection of you Hosting Provider makes it impossible to reach your website.

No, the error I am talking about is that the connection to your database is lost…

In Joomla there is a special page that is presented to you visitors telling them there is something wrong, asking them to contact the administrator.

Now that is nice.. or isn't it?
…ehhh how do I contact the System Administrator?

Change the Standard

Well in a standard installation you get these lines in your Global Configuration.
And most of use leave it as it is… of you take the site offline for maintenance it works just fine, so why change anything?

The second field in you Global Configuration is where you should make a little change.
Just ad a line with your email code in it like Hummerbie ( at ) Gmail (dot) com

Its even possible to change your entire offline page if you want to, but thats an whole other issue.

For now its really important that you know of your site outage before Google takes you out of the Index… and that can happen withing 48 hours if you have a really busy website.

Besides the contact information that you can easily edit into the Global configuration there is also an external service that can monitor your website for you.

Site24x7 gives you the opportunity to check you site one per hour and in case off a failed check you can get an email,sms or RSS alert.

Its free for up to 2 domains, but the paid service comes at a small price starting from $0,50 USD per month per domain..

Here is my configuration:
Configuration of Domain check

This is a check for the keywords in the error page.

And yes, there are reports with graphics and data to see the response times of the site.
Definitely worth a try , but just one warning… you might find out your have to talk to, or even change your hosting provider if you don't like what you see…