Compass Designs

Over at Copyblogger, Sonia Simone made a recent post about Getting Naked. No, it wasn't a college party, but rather the concept of being honest, sometimes painfully so in your blog. Current wisdom among bloggers is that this is a good standard to follow, you'll see popular bloggers ranging from Dooce, SEOMoz and even Joomla's Alledia sharing things that traditionally would be thought of as perhaps private. In each case, the sharing has been well received, and all importantly, worthy of traffic.

Back in October there was a brief discussion about the all important page title tag in Joomla 1.5 and its importance for SEO. Essentially, in 1.0 your page titles would always get appended (unless you had a SEF component) leading to potentially long titles. In 1.5, the behavior was changed so that if there was a page/article title, the global site title would be ignored.

That's all well and good, but the reality of SEO is not so clear cut.

Its been while since I have done much blogging about Joomla SEO, almost a year in fact. I thought I would do some research and see how the collective wisdom of the industry has changed with what matter to get a page search engine optimized (SEO). Use this top ten list if you already have a site ranked and want to see what you can implement to get your ranking higher.

Over the last few weeks I have been putting the finishing touches to 3 final chapters of my Joomla 1.5 book about creating school, blog and restaurant websites with Joomla.

As I have been building the demos, I had a chance to play with the new SEO and SEF features in Joomla 1.5 

I can't recall why, but today I happened to go to that fine "other" about Joomla, http://compassdesigns.net. I was shocked to find that it was an active competitor to my own blog at http://www.compassdesigns.net. It even had its own page rank!

I immediately reached for my research about canonical URL's to get my pagerank back!

I have probably bought almost every SEO ebook out there (I even wrote one myself). I have found that the quality varies hugely. Often, the pricing is low, you get the book, its not very good, but the effort involved in getting back your $10 or $20 isn't worth the effort.

JoomlaJack.com asked for some help in an interview/chat about SEO and Joomla. I was happy to oblige. You can read the full interview here:

joomlajack.com/content/view/977/43/