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.
How to search engine optimize your Joomla website in 10 easy steps.
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). This isn't exhaustive, for that you should check out my Complete guide to Joomla SEO or Alledia's SEO guide. 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. Much of the information here is based on two 2007 studies about ranking in Google from SEOmoz.org and Sistrix.
1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
and appear in the blue bar of your browser.The number one factor in ranking a page on search engines is the title tag. These are the words in the source of a page in
Choose the title of an article very carefully. Joomla will use the title of the article in the title tag (what appears in the blue bar). It will also be the text used in any insite links (see #5 and 6)
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
Anchor text is the text that appear underlined and in blue (unless its been styled) for a link from one webpage to another.
Try to get some inbound links to your article using the keywords you want to be ranked for. Two ways are to do this are through online press services such as PRweb.com or simply by networking.
3. Global Link Popularity of Site (PageRank)
How many pages are linking to your page is called link popularity, or in Google, PageRank.
The more sites link to you, the better. Joomla is a CMS that helps you add content quickly. Create one quality content page per day. Quality content is the most important factor to getting bound links. For a site that will perform well, you eventually need 200 odd pages of content. This is the important point. QUICK SEO IS DEAD. The only way to perform well in SEO now is to have a rich content site.
4. Age of Site
When was the domain of the site registered?
Nothing you can do about this, but there is evidence that suggests that how long you have your domain registered for makes a difference (spam sites are not registered for long). Go and extend your domain registration for a couple of years.
5. Link Popularity within the Site
This is the number of links to the page from inside your own domain.
Because of #2, its critical that you link to articles from within your site using the right anchor text. Make sure that you:
- Use the linked titles setting
- Make good used of the Most Read, Related Items and Latest News modules.
- Have a sitemap component linked to right from your homepage
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links and Popularity of Linking Site
Its important that you get quality inbound links. This means they have to be from a site that is topically related to your, and one that has a high PageRank.
- Its worth submitting once to directories (then forget about it).
- Type related:www.yoursite.com into google and contact the top 20 returns for links.Link Popularity of Site in Topic Community
- Make sure you have a blog on your site, and network with others in your topical community. Make sure you frequently link to other blogs in your topical community.
7. Keyword Use in Body Text
The keyword density of the phrase you are optimizing for in the content of the page. Still important, the German study from Sistrix identified some interesting results.
- Targeted keywords in the first and last paragraphs. There is a simple trick here, write your quality content, and then use the tool of your choice to find the keyword density. THEN, take the top three words and add them to the meta keywords in the parameters part of the page (in Joomla admin). This is somewhat backwards for some maybe, it optimizes a page for what you actually wrote, rather than trying to write a page optimized for certain words (which I always find difficult).
- Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags seem to be getting less valuable. Modify the output of the core content component through a template override file.
- Using keywords in bold or strong tags - slight effect, same with img alt tags and filenames.
Additional notes:
A couple of other factors at the bottom of measured/estimated influence.
8. File Size
The file size doesnt seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings. Optimize those images!
9. Clean URL (Joomla SEF)
Although Keywords in the file name (URL) dont seem to have a positive effect (based on the German study), a URL with few parameters (?id=123, etc.) is important. Turn on Joomla SEF but dont get anal about it.
Other Notes
10. Utilize Your Error Pages.
Too often companies forget about error pages (such as 404 errors). Error pages should always re-direct "lost" users to valuable, text-based pages. Placing text links to major site pages is an excellent practice. Visit www.cnet.com/error for an example of a well-utilized error page. To make the error page fit with the rest of the theme of your site, create an uncategorized article and then copy the source as viewed on a webpage, and put that into the 404 file.
Whats not here?
Youll see much of the discussion about SEO revolving around various SEF components. These components allow for advanced manipulation of URLs and meta tags. Neither of these was identified as a major factor in either SEO analysis. Turn on the default Joomla SEF, but I am not sure there is much evidence that its very influential after that.
Note:
- Last year sometime on my old blog (2005), I coined the phrase Human Readable URL's or HUF to describe what people commonly refer to as Joomla SEF. I did this to point out that easily readable and memorable URL's like www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog are much more important for humans than they are search engines. Joomla SEF fixes a major usability issue not a SEO one.
- Yes, I know that alot of people disagree with me on this one ;)
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Brian G J Teeman
said:
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... I prefer the term HEF urls. Human Ear Friendly The type of url I can tell you over the telephone or even a quiet pint in the pub |
Sami
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... Good article but the last part of tip #10 was very confusing. What does this mean "- - copy the source as viewed on a webpage, and put that into the 404 file"? |
Administrator
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... @Sami Make a Joomla article/Page explaining that there has been an error, then copy all its source/HTML onto your hosting account as a 404.shtml page. |
Sami
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... I did as advised: copied html from the ungategorised article, pasted that to both 404.shtml and 404.php, then I listed these files to templateDetails.xml in the root folder. I keep getting the red-bar error page: perhaps, Joomla has some setting which must be changed for this file to work. I am using the template provided in this tutorial. |
Sami
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... This source: http://docs.joomla.org/Custom_error_pages with this excellent tutorial perhaps helps others in tip #10. So it seems that in this context 404 page = error.php. |
tim
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... so i have a website sellingcandles and diffusers does that mean the links going to my site have to have my keywords on the or will i still get credit for the link ,just not as much or nothing at all, and does keyword density on the linking page matter?? |
Salon Equipment Wholesale
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... I found that using keyword rich text right after the tag is beneficial to overall SE ranking. I didn't get the part about joomla sef - is it important to have keywords in url or not? I'm using Joomla SEF for my beauty salon equipment store and it's really giving me a headache with all the bugs and errors it provides on a daily basis. What do you think about using keywords in image filenames? |
Compass Design
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... I advise people to use default Joomla SEF and go with that. A 3rd party extension is overkill imho. Keywords in images are good, but make sure they are contextual. |
Sierra Nevada
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... I am using joomla 1.5 in all my projects. First I used smartsef but updates-support finish and seriously have been a big headache. Right now sh404sef in loaded in all my webs and works almost perfect. Many plugins compatible with many components and live support. I think there are betters rankings with good urls structure and this kinds of componets helps but obviously takes times to solve differents problems appears. |
Zonaid Rahim
said:
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... Nice tips to follow.I want more tips regarding different ticks or unusual ways. |
vetweb
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... Hi Barrie... I want to ask a question about joomla store powered by apf (amazon product feed by Mr. Rat). Is it good for SEO especially for google index? In the other hands it will generates thousand pages as amazon do. I want to rebuild my vet store, it is powered by wordpress now, but the site seems didn't work well on it's seo, i thought sandbox occured  what do you think about this? thanks, waiting for your respond  |
Frank cerino
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... oh, nice steps for website optimization, i think it is better way to optimize the website. joomla have a good thinking. i am really impressive. |
Software Gestionale
said:
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... I am using joomla 1.5 in whole-hog my projects. First I used smartsef but updates-support finish further seriously take it been a mungo headache. Right owing to sh404sef pull mortal hold full my webs also workshop halfway perfect. Many plugins such with bounteous components besides efficacious support. I trust professional are betters rankings with apropos urls arrangement also this kinds of componets helps but obviously takes times to negotiate differents problems appears. software gestionale - Pro Data Magazzino il miglior software gestionale. |
stone bathtubs
said:
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... Nice article.i'd like to give my site a try.i'd like to ask my webdesigner to move it to joomla 1.t platform. |
aYs Digital Solutions
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... You are absolutely right about utilizing error pages. Some Webmasters have no idea how much traffic is sent to their site with broken urls and you have all that space to add text, links and anything you want! Thanks for a great article! |
cipek
said:
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... Last year sometime on my old blog (2005), I coined the phrase Human Readable URL's or HUF to describe what people commonly refer to as Joomla SEF. I did this to point out that easily readable and memorable URL's like www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog are much more important for humans than they are search engines. Joomla SEF fixes a major usability issue not a SEO one. |
Jason Webb
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... I think the best way to understand the 3 parts that are important for a website to promote itself these days is SEO, SEF and SEM..in that order of development and attack. |
Rob Willox
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... A couple of options in Joomla!, which are important from an SEO perspective that you didn't mention, are located in the 'Metadata Information' section of each article. The Title tag is important for the reasons you outline but so is the Description tag and when used together provide both an overview and context to the page content. The Keywords tag although not as important is still regarded worthwhile including. Google's guidelines make this plain, and in Sitemaps section of Webmaster Tools report pages with duplicate description tags, explaining that there proper use can contribute to higher serps. As far as SEF urls is concerned there is general agreement that they are beneficial, perhaps not critical to SEO, but particularly for visitors, again providing a visual human readable page link and together with both Title and Description displayed in serps can be the stimulus for a searcher to click on your page link. Again from a human readable context they are very helpful from an analytics perspective when analysing Google Analytics reports for optimising web pages. Having understandable page names displayed in reports rather than non-sef Joomla! urls is a great time-saver. Lastly, but not least, is the Title option for menu links (under Parameters (system)). When not entered the menu link is displayed which may not be as descriptive as it might be. But entering a title enables a far more relevant title to be specified. SEO is about lots of little enhancements that when used appropriately can have disproportionate benefits for site traffic, searcher and visitor alike. |
barrienorth
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... @Rob Lastly, but not least, is the Title option for menu links (under Parameters (system)). When not entered the menu link is displayed which may not be as descriptive as it might be. But entering a title enables a far more relevant title to be specified. Are you sure? I don't think this puts a title attribute on the link (title=""), it puts a meta title on the page to be navigated |
Rob Willox
said:
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... Hi Barrie Apologies didn't make that as clear as it could have been! You're right it doesn't add a title="" to the menu link. What I meant was that in cases where the title from the article is not sufficient, using the menu title option (with Show Page Title set to No) will substitute the article title with the menu title but not add to displayed page. I find it quite useful, particularly when displaying sections or categories in blog layout to be able to show an alternate browser page title to the one entered on section or category page which would otherwise show. Having the option to show it as page title only or on-page as well, provides some additional flexibility with the inclusion of keywords in both browser page title and on-page, is a bonus. |
Greg Eales
said:
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... Hi Barrie In a recent newsletter I cam across another SEO component which i think is relatively new. You can take a look at http://www.ijoomla.com/ijoomla...o/overview It seems to cover most SEO basis and comes endorsed by Steve Burge of Alledia in the newsletter so is probably wortth checking out. I would appreciate your review and comment on this new component compared perhaps to some others out there such as SH404. I look forward to your feedback Regards Greg |
barrienorth
said:
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... @Greg I think the only SEO gizmo/extension I would use would be something like SimplyLinks. I haven't had a chance to check out the ijoomla one, but from the screenshots it looks more like a meta management tool.... |
Joomla SEO Experts
said:
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... Hi, I use 404SEF component for making my joomla sites SEO friendly. Its really cool component. By default the article title in joomla is not , using 404SEF you can make the article title . Its important you put tag across article title as it is the most important text on that page. Thanks Joomla SEO Expert |
free keno online game
said:
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... You have sharpened my seo skills.I am a newbie in the field of seo and and now i am very much inspired and have a clear vision for my future in this arena known as SEO. I think the most important thing to make it big here is "patience", if you have that you are a winner here. |
mesol
said:
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... there are lots of joomla sef component / modules out there, so which one is the best? |
Copper Wire
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... Hi, I used 404SEF component for making my joomla site SEO friendly, component shown that it is now operational, I also tried Default SEF, but still unable to understand why not getting any impact on URL can any one point out what exactly wrong I am doing as I am new bee and in an enthusiastic learning process of joomla.. Thanks |
sandy4710
said:
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... I am new and had less idea how to increase page ranking and use meta tag. but after reading this article now i can place may site to top 20 in the ranking in 2 month time. thanks for this useful article  |
Jane Smith
said:
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... Nice article, thanks. Just started with Joomla. Trying to add a blog section with MyBlog but still having difficulties. BTW how what component do you use for your latest posts? |
max9
said:
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... I think the best way to understand the 3 parts that are important for a website to promote itself these days is SEO, SEF and SEM..in that order of development and attack. |
Website Design in Waukesha
said:
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... Regarding meta tags... I place a high importance on the description meta tag. i have seen many instances of visitors who click on a lower-ranked link just because its description tag has been optimized and gives a punchier sales pitch. Many times, I have found myself doing the exact same thing. Description optimization is something that far too many web designers ignore. Thanks for the very informative post. The principals mentioned apply to all sites, even those that do not use Joomla. |
Jane's Hoodia Reviews
said:
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... Barrie, your recommendation on just using the core SEF feature and no 3rd party extension is interesting. A lot of joomla users recommend the use of components such as sh404sef to improve joomla seo. Can you please shed some light on this subject? Thanks |
chronis
said:
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... Thanks for the great guide from joomla point of view. Well maximum of the points are similar than the general SEO strategy that we use for all the websites. All SEO points are fine yes error page are crucial from traffic point of view and HRF links do sometimes play and important game as if we use keyword would help in ranking I am new to joomla want to clear few queries 1) Does it so that joomla based websites took more time in gaining Page rank (PR) as compared to normal websites 2) Does a default blog and RSS feed is been provided when we create a joomla based website 3) Many directories doesn't allow submission for these joomla based websites is there any solution for them. |
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