theme

Theming a Joomla site for SEO

Theming? You mean Joomla SEO Template, right?

Wrong, I really mean Theming your Joomla site. Theming here is about the way you structure your website to show the real main topic of your website.
You do have the main topic, don't you…

So let's see what you can do to improve the “Theme” of your website.

It all starts with finding the right keywords for your website, do some research on finding related topics for your main content.

Write those keywords done on a piece of paper, or in a spreadsheet.

I tend more to using a spreadsheet since I can then just copy and paste my keywords into columns an sort them very easy.

But for other people, the choice for paper is a more valid one, since you can easily draw lines between related items.

Theming your website is also called LSI and Joomla with it's so-called inflexible content structure is actually great for theming your site.

Joomla SEO Structure Theming

Theming with keywords is simple, just look at the subject of your website and think about what the main subjects of your topic are.

For example, take a look at WordPress, a free blogging platform and a simple CMS system.

For WordPress, there are three main topics, WordPress usage, WordPress Themes (templates), WordPress Plugins and WordPress widgets.

Once you know these main subjects, you can see that a website about WordPress will need at least four menu items that will reflect the main topic.

If you go to a website about WordPress that ranks well for “WordPress” you will see the first once of course be wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

Tip: Do a search in Google for your main keyword and look at the bottom of your search results page, Google shows you “Searches related to”. Write those searches down, since those are the keywords that Google thinks are Topic related!!

The other sites you can find on that topic do have more to do about WordPress themes since these are the most linked to site via promo-links and because most people will search that first, just like most people will search for Joomla Templates.

Content and Menu structure

If you have found the keywords you want to use, create a section in Joomla that will hold the categories with that topic.

For WordPress, you could create a section “WordPress” and then put categories in there like “WordPress Themes”, “WordPress Plugins”, “WordPress Widgets” and “WordPress manual”.

You can then create a menu “WordPress” and create menu items that will show you the category content. Name those menu items just like the categories.

You are now ready to start putting content into those categories and build your website.

Search engines will recognize the structure and put you into the WordPress search results pages and other terms.

How well you will do is, of course, depending on how well you write and how competitive your market is.

But with the right Theming setup, you will notice that ranking well is much easier to do than without Joomla SEO Theming.

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.

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.

How to use the All-in-One-SEO-pack plugin

Filed Under: Seo Basics, WordPress Plugins

Using the All-in-One-SEO-Pack plugin is one of the best plugins to use if you want to optimize your WordPress installation for better Search Engine results.

Installing All-in-One-SEO-pack

Installing the plugin is simple and straight forward like any other WordPress plugin.

Download
Unzip
Upload via FTP to wp-content/plugins
Activate the plugin and you're off

One thing to be aware of, make sure your template uses the code in the header.php of your template.

This is where the All-in-One-SEO-pack will write your Metatags Description and Keywords so they will show up in your code.
Check this by looking at the source code of your blog post to see if it works!

There are a lot of options in the general options of All-in-One-SEO-pack and you should check the ones you want to use.
Personally I don't use the Title rewrite option because those are handled by the SEO Title Tags plugin.

Using All-in-One-SEO-pack

After the installation, you will see a new field way down below the article and page editing fields.

if you use the Title rewrite option, you can write longer Titles with more keywords, this title is the one that Search Engines Pick-up and is the one shown in your browser Title bar.

Description can be used to write your Metatag description, but might I suggest to use the Optional Excerpt for this?

Keywords are of course the metatag keywords…

Benefits of Using the Optional Excerpt field

Using the Optional Excerpt for better ranking and Click through rates

The All-in-One-SEO-Pack plugin uses this field to get the metatag description, so if you use this field, you don't need to fill the description field.

But this Optional Excerpt field has two major benefits over the Description field:

It shows up as content on your Category pages if your Theme uses the excerpt tag.
Is also will show up on your archives pages as the intro text to your full page.
You can use images in this field that will only show in the pages I told you above.

How to put images in there? Use the full Html code for images and insert it on the place you want them to show up.

Tip: Upload and place the image you want into a post or page, set the right options and then look at the code field.
Ther you can cut the code and past it into the Optional Excerpt field.

Putting image code into the Optional excerpt field

After that, save the page and look at the results of your category and archive page… the images don't show on the post, just in the excerpts…

A great way to improve and pimp your archive and category pages!

Here is one of the results:

Putting an image in your category and Archive pages

Focus for Search Engine Results

Filed Under: SEO

If you are building a blog or a website, you need to focus on the topic of your online adventures.

Why? because search engines love websites and blogs that have only one or two topics, if there are more than two, they need to be related to the main subject.
The relevance of the site that is focused on just one topic is much easier to classify for them.
If you have pages or blog entries and categories that are “all over the place” you will have a hard time trying to get into top search results.

If however you are building a site that is highly focused on just one topic, it becomes a lot easier…

If you read How search engine help finding keywords then you have noticed that the keywords suggested are allmost always “on topic”.

How to Build a Theme based site

A theme based website means that you can have several “silos” where you can put the content.

Lets take the example of the Music site again.
If you are trying to build a website that is about music in general, you will find your self in a challenging competition with a large number of websites:
From Ask.com Showing 1 -10 of 548,040,000
From Google.com Results 1 – 10 of about 1,110,000,000 for music
From Yahoo 1-10 of 2,660,000,000 formusic

So get realistic and focus on a more specifick group to target (find your “niche”) and bring them relevant information.
A website with just information about Anastacia is not going to do it as well, as Anastacia herself can do that a lot better and most probaly a Big fan will have something similar.

But if you want to build a site about female singer-songwriters, now that could be a lot easier.
Doing the search on google for the term “female singer-songwriters” give you about 503.000 results.

But how many people will be searching on that term? I guess its not going to bring you masses of visitors to your site…

So how can this term help you?
It's not that difficult, you just have to use your imagination.
Check the results that came up like the one from Amazon “best female singer-songwriters”

On that page you will find a nice selection of artists like:

Jewel

Fiona Apple

Alanis Morissette

Sinead O'Connor

and more

And looking at other related singers on the term Anastacia like Pink, Gloria Estafan, Beyonce, Shakira, Joss Stone and Natasha Bedingsfield.

So if you would build a website with information on those realted artists, you are more likely to score on the individual keywords from those female singers.
Because they are all related and the search engines will look for information that has a relation to the topic of your site.

So you could build a site with silos like Biographys, Lyrics, Music CD's and Music Videos.

A more simple example

Lets say you want to build a website about Joomla, what might be the related keywords?

Joomla CMS
Joomla Templates
Joomla Components
Joomla Modules
Joomla Plugins
Joomla Books… the list goes on…

Next is to find the search volume for each item so you would know where to focus first if your start building the site.
But you already know how to do that…

Does building a themebased website work? Yes!
How do I now?
I just recently started building a Dutch website and I had only the Theme based structure setup, so there was no content yet on the pages…
But the site is already ranking in the first 10 results of about 1.860.000 hits with a two word search term I was targetting.
And again, there was no content on the pages, just the Themebased menu structure!