After a long time of inactivity on this Blog, I just got started again.
Coming back to you while setting up a new Joomla 1.5 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 easily to remember.

Using Keywords in Your Joomla Domain Name

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

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 your and start asking you to give that domain name to theme 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 which is short, sounds good an is through its website content 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 Live.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 is ranking nr one in Live.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 (its a Drupal site and I am still learning SEO for Drupal 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 “Waybackmachine” 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 link to you with the keyword you target.
Mostly they will use the title of you 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 oké too).

if you want to go into the deep end and want tons of websites or if your customers asks you to help them, you could buy this book Killer Domains from Daily Blog Tips.

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 an other 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.

Want to read more? Check out Joomla & SEO Blog.

Doing Keyword research and Using the right tools to get the keyword information you need is essential if you want to build a successful website.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the most essential part of website creation, especially if you want your website to out perform your competitors.
And Since you are here reading this Blog, you must be looking for a way to do that and improve your Search Engine Rankings and user experience on your website.

Improving your website to get beter performance is in the first place a matter off creating a good website structure and for that, you need to understand two things:

• Your website topic
• What terms are used in search engines related to your topic

For the first part, you probably already know more than you think, so first thing to do is to get a piece of paper (or open a text editor) and start writing down all terms you can think of about and related to you website topic.

Example for the Topic Games: “Online Games, Download Games, Free Games, Video games, Adventure Games, Joystick, Game Computer, WII, Nintendo DS, Games Console”
Just to get you thinking and do some brainstorming before getting to do online research for the best search terms.

Now, before you take the next step, go to Google or Yahoo and do a search for the Keyword you are most likely to know a lot and want to focus on that term.
For “Games” you get 1,430,000,000 results on Google and 5,450,000,000 results on Yahoo.
For “Online Games” you get 111,000,000 results on Google and 2,690,000,000 results on Yahoo.
You can see that these are still very competitive keywords to target…
So lets take it one Little step further in Google and try two extra keywords “Free online kids game” and now you are down to 11,300,000 results.

So what do these numbers tell you? Well, first place, that there are a lot of Games sites :-)
But looking at it form an SEO Point of view, it will be a lot easier to rank for “Free Online kids game” than it will be for just “Games”.
It is time to Introduce the term Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) and this is a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.
Now the competition factor we have seen above, the popularity factor, that you will read about later on.

Back to getting into the heavy hitters.. there is an the hidden secret in doing your keyword research and building your keyword list the right way:

This secret is called “Keyword Clustering” and is very well explained by the Image from SEO Infographics I used before in Optimize Your Joomla site with Keywords.

As you can see in the Image, building a website with the right keywords targeted, will lift you into the higher competition field, just by focusing on the related words rather then going for the “Games” right away.

How to find keyword clusters

Finding the terms related to your topic, as seen above, you already have some clue about keywords and search terms to use.
You just have to arrange them into “packages”.
But to get you into the right state of mind to do this, you have some great tools on the Internet to help you out and put you on the right track to find out what people are really looking for:

You Free Clustering Keyword tools

There are several great free tools on the Internet that can help you track down what people are looking for, but also what Search Engines find related terms…
Lets start out simple by looking at some of the most your used tools, and how you can use them in a simple way.

Google Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

With this tool you have to check first, if your results are targeted for the right country and language, that is the first bloc you see in the page.
Just select the filters you want with the drop-down list next to the boxes.

After that, fill in your search term, and provide Google with the anti-spam term (Only once per session).
If you get the result page, select the “Avg Search Volume” column to sort the info to get an indication of the volume of searches (the results are from the previous month, so it a good idea to do this several months in a row)

Now you can go through the list and click on “Add” for the terms you think would do well for your new website.
Once you are done, download the results in the format of you liking, txt file or csv so you can work with these later on.

SEO Book Tools
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

This tool from Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com is really a great interface for the WordTracker database, combined with some Yahoo and Google information.

Most people will have problems with this tool the first time the use it, I even forget about the important click myself sometime…
If you do a term research, don’t use Enter !! You really, really have to use the Submit button !!

After that, you will get an extensive result page, and the nice part with the current version is that you can export the results into a .csv file like Google give you.
Download the file for later analysis in for instance MS Excel.
Keyword Discovery
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Trellian Keyword Discovery, just like WordTracker are basically keyword tools that you use extensively if you get a subscription.
For basic research they both have a free tool that you can use, but is limited in the results and the information offered.
Both will show you the results of the first 100 related searches for free.

Trellian shows also how the search market is divided for the search terms, but these kind of details are into their extended Keyword Research Tool

WordTracker
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

If you are looking for Keyword information, WordTracker is also among the first you will find and that also brings great information on keywords.
You will find a lot of similarities with the SEO Book suggestion, since they both use the same database.

It is whoever a nice tool to double check the keywords found before.
But more than only a Keyword research tool, they also have a great Free Keyword Expert Newsletter that you can subscribe to for Free, highly recommended!

Putting Your Keyword List Together

Looking at and following the steps and tools above you will find yourself with an enormous amount of search terms that are actually used on the Internet for find information about the topic of your website.

Now here is where you will have to do the hard labour… but it will pay off!!
Yo have to go through the terms and pick the ones that will suite you best, that means that you can relate and write about those subtopics you just found for you site.

You see the emphasis on write about? that is because you are building the site and you should provide good quality content to your readers.

I like to import the data into an Excel worksheet (Open new spreadsheet, choose the data menu item, import external data, import data and select the csv file as source and don’t forget to select the csv value in the import option field).

In this Keyword list (yes you build one already :-0) you can select, sort and move the search terms around to get “clusters”.

Search Engines to the Rescue

This “clustering” can be a bit overwhelming if you start doing this for the first time, so lets bring in some free professional help.

Ask.com

This search engine has some great features to help you find your basic clusters, just go over to www.ask.com and start typing in you keyword.
There will be a small drop-down box showing you some related keywords.

The results page will also show you the relater terms in a simple sidebar.

Yahoo.com

Yahoo also has a similar way of presenting you this kind of information, they call it search assist

Google.com

And yes, even at www.google.com there are some related terms to be found, although not on every searched keyword, but if there are, you can find them at the bottom of the first results page.

If you are done selection the search terms you want to target and clustered them into topics, you are ready for the next step… your domain name selection… stay tuned.

Want to read more? Check out Joomla & SEO Blog.

I am currently in the process of building a new website for my own pleasure, and I thought I would tell you about to process involved in setting up a search engine optimized website with Joomla 1.5.x

You might thinks, well that should not take long… just grab a copy of the new Joomla version, install it en you are ready to got, that easy.

But that would be just a tiny little to simple… there is just more to do BEFORE you install Joomla (or any other CMS for that matter)

In the next weeks or so you can read here about how to get started once you have gotten an Idea to create a website about.
You will be reading about:

• Domain name selection
• Keyword research
• Getting into the mind of your visitors
• Setting Up a website structure that is easy to use, good for your visitors and search engines
• Choosing a hosting company
• Choosing your template and layout
• Installing and fine-tuning Joomla SEO Components
• Writing Content and what to write Search Engine Optimized content
• Tracking visitors
• Promoting your website

As you can see there is a lot to cover and at the end I (and maybe you to) should have a website that is doing well in the Search Engines and is also great for your visitors.

What I am nog going to tell you, is what the sites URL is, just to keep things clean in the process.
Some of the things I am going to tell you will see at the end of the serie, but by then it should not have a large effect on the visitors number.

Warning! Don’t expect a high frequency of posts about this project, since some thing really taken time, however once a week I guess there should be an update on the project.

P.s. most of the things will also be applicable to a Joomla 1.0.x website.

Want to read more? Check out Joomla & SEO Blog.

You now I do like Blogs… I write a few my self, and read a lot of others as well.

On new Blog that definitely goes into my Netvibes Joomla tab is this one from the Joomla developers, Developer Team Blog 

They will Blog about writing, seeking advice, coding and lots more, so as they say, it is a great way to stay in touch with the Joomla 1.6 development action.

And as Barry North already pointed out in one of his recent posts, the Blogs are now on Joomla 1.5 native with a social bookmarking footer instead of the old JD_WP WordPress based component.
Which brings back to mind that you really can use Joomla for Blogging but there are still some things that need to be ported to Joomla 1.5 native before it really would be a great Blogging platform.

But for the Joomla Developers Blog, content is the key! And it will be easy to keep up since they do offer an RSS Feed (No, not just yet via Feedburner, but maybe in time…)

For now, keeping my RSS feed open to new blogpost and looking forward to new improvements in the SEO Field.

Want to read more? Check out Joomla & SEO Blog.