Compass Designs .net

Over the last few months I have posted a few guides to getting better SEO with Joomla:

• Top 10 Joomla SEO tips for Google
• Simplicity - The Hard Core SEO Joomla Template
• 2 tips to get sites indexed faster in google

I was drafting a quick how to at Simplweb and I thought I would hare it here. Its probably what I consider the absolutely most important 2 things to do if you are concerned about search engine ranking.

Two of the most important things in SEO are:

• Keywords in the title meta tag (the text that appears in the blue/top bar on your browser
• Keywords in links that links to pages on your site

By paying careful attention to just a few key steps, you can easily optimize your pages with not too much effort.

Some of the links in this guide go directly to the admin back end of your site. You will need to login BEFORE clicking on any of the links for them to work correctly.

Meta Tag Page Titles

The first step in better SEO is to make sure the title tag contains some useful keywords that you might be found for. You can see in the example below that the meta title (in the blue bar) is "About Hope Chapel". This is much more useful and specific that if the title was just "About Us".

But where does this text come from?

It comes from the Menu Item that is linking to that page in your menu. If we look at the Menu Item Parameters, we can see that the article being linked to is titled "About Hope Chapel".

Unless we define otherwise, the page meta tag title will be generated from the article title.

If we are linking to a section or category, the meta tag title will be generated from the name of that section/category.

This why its critical to carefully choose the titles of your articles. Thinking hard about SEO and keywords when you do this makes everything else much easier!

If the page is reached without going through a menu item, for example, if it was a read more link in a blog, then the article title will again be used as the page title meta tag.

If for some reason we want to override this automated meta tag title creation, we can do so in the system parameters.

Initially the Page Title field is blank. This means the automated default is used as described above. If we enter in some text here, this will be used as the meta tag page title.

Internal Links

The second factor we initially mentioned was having keywords in links to a page. It doesn't matter whether its an offsite or an internal link, its still good for SEO.

We saw above that the link in our example was "About Us". There are not many keywords there, but, if we padded it out, the menu would look terrible. So what to do?

Your site has several modules that will output a series of links to various articles in your site.

• Latest news:
  Creates a series of links to the most recently created articles in selected sections/categories.
• Most Read Content:
  Creates a series of links to the  articles with the most pageviews in selected sections/categories.
• Related Articles:
  Creates a series of links to the articles that are "related". This relation is determined by common words in the keywords in Metadata Information for articles.
  

Use the Content Link modules as "fire and forget" link generation for your site.

Even better, the text in the link will be the title of the article, so if you have carefully crafted the article title, then you'll be getting more benefit out of these links as well.

This tutorial originally from:

www.simplweb.com/how-to/171-how-to-optmize-your-pages-for-search-engines

Its one of the many tutorials and guides that are part of the Simplweb turnkey Joomla site package.