Joomla 1.6 is stable and very good to start a new website on, but for Search Engine Optimization you have to set some basic parameters for optimal results.

So here is a short overview of basic Joomla 1.6 Do’and Don’t for Search Engine Optimization. Let’s start with the Do’s…

Global Configuration SEO Settings

Like the SEO Setting that you can reach via -> Global Configuration -> SEO Settings.

Joomla 1.6 SEO Settings

For Search Engene Friendly URLs should always be active to convert your article title to a clean URL.
The big difference with previous versions is that this will work even without .htaccess by adding /index.php/ into the URL!

If you don’t want that you should activate the second option Use  URL Rewriting and follow the advice given in the Exclamation mark! That means you have to change some settings on server level or start using .htaccess on an Apache Based hosting program (Most of the hosting providers use Apache)

Adds Suffix to URL means that the extension .html is added to the URL. So instead of http://www.example.org/using-joomla you get http://www.example.org/using-joomla.html

This is a small change but it gives you the benefit that people will see that this is a content page and not a category directory, so it creates a real clear endpoint.

Metadata Settings

In the Global Configuration you can also set some basic Metadescription and Keywords, but I never use that option. But keep the last two options active!

Joomla 1.6 Metadata Settings

As I mentioned you have to keep the last two options active because you want to see the following options in you articles writing panel.

Joomla 1.6 Article Metadata Settings

Use the Metadescription on every page for the best results, just write a short excerpt of the page with the keywords you want to target and make it like a small advertisment for you page. Google and other search engines can use these text just under the Title of your page and it can give you a better click through rate from the search page.

Keywords is debated because Google and Yahoo won’t use them. I do put in some main keywords, but never more than five, you don’t want to stuff that field! Stuffing will get you worse rankings…

Joomla 1.6. SEO Don’ts

With Joomla 1.6 you don’t have the previous unclear function’s like Section’s and Categories in those sections. Instead you can now have nested categories.

Joomla 1.6 Category Nesting

And although it is a good thing to have a better user experience and people can create content a lot easier, there is also a drawback.

You can now have a category in a category in a category in a category… and that can make the URL for you article very, very long as every category name will be in that URL.

For example http://demo16.cloudaccess.net/index.php/using-joomla/extensions/components/content-component

Don’t go overboard with this feature! Just do like you did before, make a small number of main categories with only one level deep extra categories so your URLs stay short! Also keep the naming off this categories short..

Keep these thing in mind and your basic is set for SEO, all that is left now is for you to create Quality Content that Google and your visitors will like :-)

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

I received a review copy of Joomla 1.5 Multimedia from Packt Publishers and was expecting to read a lot that I already knew about Images and the image manager in Joomla!.

But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your visitors.

This book is a great addition to your search engine optimization efforts as we all now that video, mp3, podcast en mobile web interfaces are becoming more important everyday.

Joomla Multimedia

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia will have some information for you that you can skip through if you are building Joomla! websites for a longer period of time, but the main part of the book will help you to further improve your and your customers websites.

I am not going the repeat the complete list of chapters of this book, you can follow the link above to get a better content listing than I can do… what I will tell you which chapters captured my special interest:

• Chapter 3: Text, Characters and Fonts: This shows you some good information on how to improve accessibility and still play with fonts in your design.
• Chapter 5: Using Audio: How to set up podcasts and the handling of mp3 files which is very good in combination with normal blogging.
• Chapter 6: Using video: Of course information about Video including a few extensions that will aid you in your efforts to use video in Joomla!
• Chapter 7: Collaboration with external resources: You don’t need to produce all the videos yourself, you can also pull from other resources and this chapter shows some very neat information about how to do that the right way.

Chapter 8 about templates is also good, but for me personally not that interesting, Chapter 9 gives you a complete step-by-step overview of the building of a Multi Media Joomla! based website and can be a great help if you start out to implement the other ideas that come from this well written book.

Don’t take my word on it, check out this sample Chapter 4 from the book: Adding and Managing Image Content.

For my, this book will stay on my desk for a longer period of time as I am going to use a lot of information from it :-), thank you Allen Walker and Packt Publishing for this great new book.

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

There is a great announcement from the Joomla Core Team today….

Joomla 1.5 Stable is released!

Congrats to all who worked on this great new Release!

Here is the official release of Joomla 1.5 Stable announcement you can down it from Joomla 1.5 Files

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

If you have read several topics on Search Engine Optimization, you will find that the term “Keywords” is used to indicate several different items of SEO.

Like:

• Metatag keywords
• Search keywords
• Targeted keywords

And the latter is what I am going to give you some extra inside information on, and it will show you how easy it is if you really want to boost your sites ranking for your mayor keyword that you are targetting.

Optimizing your site structure

First things first… do your keyword research and find the topics related to your website main topic.

Then reorganize your site structure to reflect that relations.

So if you would create a website about, well lets say eheh… Joomla! then you know it will be very difficult to rank for the search term Joomla! itself.
But there are a lot of keywords related to Joomla, like Templates, Components, Modules, Plugins, Mambots.
See how these terms kan create a cluster of keywords?

Here is an image of elliance infographics that shows it all:

And the best part is… Joomla will actually force you in to structure it the right way, if you do you keywords research!

You see, where may people think of the rigid structure of Joomla for placing content is a bad thing, it is actually a great thing for SEO.
In Joomla you have to set up a structure in Section, Categories and Items which is pretty simple as you can read on Understanding the Joomla structure

But clustering you keywords in categories within the a section is the best keyword cluster you can create!

In a more diffecult term this is called LSI, Latent Semantical Indexing which is covered in Joomla and LSI for SEO

So if you really want your site to rock in the search engines, get your keywords together, create categories for them and start writing your content items accordingly…

Oh, one more thing… if you are going to restructure you Joomla site, make sure you 301 redirect your old URLs to the new ones!

Placing your Keywords in Joomla!

To get your keywords into your Joomla! articles you need to open the Metatags section on the left of you article writing screen:

You will most likely see a screen with lesser options, as this screen is taken from a website that allready has the Joomlatwork.com SEF Patch installed, which I highly recommend.

You will have a field called Meta Tag Keywords and that is where you place your keywords. Make sure those keywords are also in the text of the article and keep them limited to a maximum of 10.
Also be aware the Google doesn’t use these Meta keywords to index your pages but other search engines still use them.

There is a place for Keywords in your Global configuration screen, my advice… don’t use that option…

Joomla! will use that data on every article where you don’t use the Meta Data fields in your articles and thus giving the search engines the same values over and over again.

You can check if this happens with your website by searching Google with the term “site:www.example.com” ( without the ” ” and replace example.com with your own domain name)

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

If you liked the tool mentioned in my previous post about Joomla and SEO, you might also want to read this article on my other Blog.

This one is about the new Content analysis page in Google webmaster central:

Google helps with Meta description and title errors

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

It has been a while since my latest post, but I really have been busy working on new website building projects.

So my time is already limited, because I do all this stuff on the Internet after my normal daytime job.

Why? because I like to share knowledge, get in touch with new idea’s and try them to see what happens, and of course communicate with others about Joomla and SEO.(See the Blog-roll for my favorites!)

But today I found a little website that will gives you an impression on how well your are doing with your SEO efforts.

You do have some idea from your visitor counts I hope! But here is the URL to get a really nice overview of SEO Information like:

• PageRank
• Backlinks
• Indexed Pages
• Rankings
• Social Bookmarking
• RSS Feed counts and more

So go and check your own domain at http://www.xinureturns.com/

Below you can find a sample image of one of my websites.

O, and yes, I will try to post more with the coming weeks and months to come… most will be on Joomla 1.5 I think!

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

I just read a great page that gives you lots of website links with high quality information about Joomla.

Altough the Title of 30+ Joomla Tools and Resources doesn’t really give you tools like modules or components, a lot of the sites featured in this post do have some fine extensions for your Joomla website.

I know I have to look over some new sites and see what they have in store!

The one I already visit a lot to get great add-ons is http://www.joomla-addons.org/ please check that one for sure!

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

Joomla! Best PHP Open Source Content Management System…

Don’t take my word on it, this is the what the Packt Publishing Award judges say:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/joomla-wins-best-php-open-source-content-management-system

Joomla Wins Best PHP Cms

But it is nice to see ”Once again, judges commented on the size and responsiveness of the community, which translates to potential problems being dealt with quickly.”

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

Just recently I wrote about how to improve you Joomla Feed and select different categories to create different Feeds.

No just last week www.joomlafun.com released version V1.1.o , a stable release with a few new features.
One of the things I like the most is that you no can select a Section! Instead of putting all categories separately into the Feed you create, you now can select a Section, and you are done…

But you can also give people a feed of every update of your website… and not just the Frontpage.

Upgrading to this version is also easy, just download the new DS Syndicate version.

Uninstall you previous version via the Component Installer (Please do not use the uninstall function of the component !! you will loose every feed you configured.)

Now install the new version via the Component installer, you receive a message that everything is upgrade correctly.
If you check the feeds you already created, you will see everything is still there.

But you might want to check the new section functions, you might want to use this function if you want to further improve your feeds for you Joomla site visitors.
And if you did run your Joomla feeds through Feedburner, it is automatically done for your feed subscribers :-)

Here is the Full feed of Hummerbie.com as an example.

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

In my previous post I mentioned the fact that the Read More option of Joomla was not editable anymore.
Before that I wrote about how-to-solve-the-joomla-read-more-problem in version 1.0.x

But I found an item in RC3 in the Advanced Parameters of the article section that makes in possible to do an “Click here to read” text per article..

It is all the way done and marked as “Alternative Read More text:”

If you put you own text in there you can have something like:

If you use this option, you will loose the replacement of article title that since RC3 is attached to the Read More.. yes I missed that great new SEO Feature at first glance :-(

These two combinations are a great asset for Search Engine Optimization and for the visitors of your Joomla 1.5 RC3 based website…

For a production site, I still want to wait for the Stable Release, lets wait and see what else for great little improvements the Joomla Developers have in store for us!
I must admit that the more I find in RC3 the more excited I get about this new 1.5 release.

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

Looking at the latest Release Candidate of Joomla, version 1.5 RC3 you will find some Differences as it comes to the SEO functions.

First off, the difference in Options in RC2

The SEO Settings in Joomla RC3

So what are the results of this settings:

With the Suffix Active

As you might notice, the last new option attach’s a .html to the URL

The URL itself is build on the basis of the menu type used:

• section-blog
• section-table
• categoryblog
• category-table

After that you will find the /section-name/ID-Number-Categorie/ID-Number-Article-Title

There is no option to reduce the length of the URL to (my favorite) /category-name/article-title.html

So there will still be a need to have an SEF Component like sh404SEF for 1.5

The Feed Option 

An Other thing that changed is the Feed option, which was placed below the SEO Options in the Global Configuration screen.
Is is know part of the Site settings.

But although there is a small text below the Syndication module, the Feed is still only the Frontpage but the Layout is better now, not just the Text without HTML.

One thing that has radically changed in Joomla 1.5 is the place where you set your standard Content Options…
It is now in the Article Management control panel under preferences.
Here you can also set if you want to publish Full text feeds, or only intros.

But what I find most troublesome, is that I can’t seem to edit the Language File anymore from within Joomla itself.
There is no edit option… so I cannot change some of the standard text that have been translated.

As for the Read More option, which is now a Plugin, there is no parameter to change the way is might read differently.

Guess we have to wait until the Stable release will be ready for download, or will there be an RC4 before that…

I still would like to have more options and parameters for SEO, but that might just be me :-)

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

If you have read this Blog for a Longer period of time (or have gone through the Sitemap..:-)) you might have read about the DS Syndication Component in my post Overcoming the Joomla RSS Feed Problem Well, there is a new version of this component since August of this year and I must say it is better then before! Putting in multiple categories in to one Feed. Not limited to the Frontpage any more.. choose to show HTML, Images or not in your Feed, using your special images. You can create multiple feeds with different categories and different images for the feeds. There is also a module that can show each of these feed images to subscribe to or just the ones you selected Running your Feeds through Feedburner I always like to run my Feeds via Feedburner, because they have some great options! So for my new website a used the DS Syndication component to get two separate Feeds And I have written a Tutorial for you on how to use the DS Syndication Component and where to find it! You can find it on Improve you Joomla RSS Feed and if you don’t know why you should have Feeds? Read Why Every website should have a Feed

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

So, your are working hard on your Titles and improving them with relevant keywords and making them attractive for users… but do you have the Internal linking also down? 

One of the lesser used options on the Joomla SEO Configuration is the option to use Dynamic Page Titles.
But using this option can also increase your Search Engine Positions, because of the fact that your link to your pages with a link filled with Keywords, that is your article title!

If your use the read more option and show your articles on the Frontpage, you should use this option, it is a simple option to activate.
Just got to your Global Configuration (make sure your configuration.php is writable at this time and set it to unwritable afterwords) and go to the SEO Tab, there your find the two Options.

The Drawbacks of using Dynamic Page Titles

When you activate this option, you might be in for a suprise… and not always a pleasant one..
Your website, and especially the front page looks very different than before!

So how did this happen? and how can you fix it?

Well, it is a difficult one to give you a simple solution, but it is easy to explain.
If you activate the option the way the page titles are used is different because it call another class from your Template CSS file, so you have to check your Template CSS and probable find a class like a.contentpagetitle that is the one to look for if you want to change the way your Titles look of they are active.

If your don’t see any change, you could have a Template that already has corrected this to match the “normal” title or your template does not use a CSS class for the Title presentation.

So for strange behavior check your template and template CSS files first!

Change the options so it matches your site, or gives you nice layout for the titles and see over a few weeks if it works out for your search engine positions, if you see no results and don’t like the layout, just uncheck the option.
Although I recommend leaving them on for a longer period, since it take a while for Google and other Search Engines to reindex your site based on your alterations.

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

If you are like me, you like to have your Metatags like description and keywords filled with relevant content..

You could have Metatag generators for you website, or overviews of the content with a component like OpenSEF.
But what if you don’t use OpenSEF but sh404SEF?
In that case you could register and download the Joomla Metatag component form iJoomla.

But if you just want to see what pages still are in need of content for these Metatags.
In that case there is now a very simple but effective and easy to use modules, with two versions, one for the Joomla 1.0.x versions and for Joomla 1.5…

It is written by Dan Rahmel who also wrote two Books about Joomla!
and

And it is easy to install.

The module is installed as a normal module, but it is only for the administrator.
That is why it is listed under the Administrator part of the Modules and has to be published and positioned on the cPanel, which means that it will be visible on you administrator homepage (the first one after you login)

After publication you find the items without the Description and Keywords listed on a separate Tab on the Administrators page.

You can download the version you want from JoomlaJumpStart.com where you can even find more information on Joomla and the insights of Dan Rahmel.

There are people who will tell you that Metatags like the Description and Keywords are useless these days.. for Search Engine Optimization that is.

But try to work on writing good solid page descriptions and use just up to a maximum of 10 keywords in the keyword field.
Use the keywords you have used in the page, and in the Title and wait for the next index round of Google.

The Descriptions field mostly show up under you page title and should be written as a small advertisement to bring you the visitors you want.

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

I have been running a test-site installation of the new Joomla 1.5 RC 1 to see what improvements there have been made for SEF and SEO.

There is a difference between SEF and SEO, you can read more about that on  Search Engine Friendly or already Search Engine Optimized but I will not go into that much more here, as the point of the exercise was the see what changed / improved.

First thing you notice is that the Basic URL without the SEO Option set is still the same as before.

Next  you go into your Global configuration and look up the Seo Settings…
That has changed a little, and has a new option, which is really great!

Did you see it? There is an option that says “Use mod_rewrite” ! and the best part is that is works!
So now if you don’t know how to, or can not use a .htaccess file because of provider restrictions, you can still have SEF URLs like this one..

You see there is now an index.php between your domain name and the SEF URL.

Full SEO Options

You can set both settings and use an .htaccess file to get ride of the index.php so that the full (SEF) URL looks like:

Hmm.. maybe they should call it SEF Settings? But it is a great improvement that you can use the SEF URLs without a special component.

Does that mean that we don’t have to use a SEF Component anymore?
No, they are still very valuable for several functions like URL rewrites… yes those still apply, because you want more control over the how the URL is formed.

The SEF function of RC 1 uses the Title Alias for the URL, so you can play a little with that, but that takes away a possible use of the alias for HTML Title rewrites…

Also you want to control the 404 Sef function and landing page, with Joomla 1.5 RC 1 there is good basic 404 page with the right headers, so old URLs will be removed form the search engines.

Also SEF component is able to prevent Rewriting URLs if a Components doesn’t support them and breaks with te standard URLs.

The Duplicate Metatag problem 

What you would see with the “Old” Joomla was that the Global Metadata was inserted into the HTML code together with the Article Metatags like description and keywords.

The problem seems now to be resolved, so if you now fill an article with The Metatags Description and Keywords (and you know you should) than ONLY those tags are in the source code!

From a Search Engine Optimization view, this is a very good thing… problem is that you still get the Global description on every page you don’t fill the parameters, so pleas leave the Globals empty and let the search Engines pick there own excerpts. 

You see, there is still a need for a nice Metatag generator if you have lots off pages or multiple editors.

Overall SEO conclusion for Joomla 1.5 RC 1

You have a better Content Management System than before from a Search Engine Friendly and Optimization point of view.
The basics are in Place to get any new website based on this Joomla 1.5 version to get better results, just by activating the SEO Settings on a bare minimum of SEF URLs.

Its a very big improvement that it can work without the .htaccess files that so many people are struggling with, so that every website can have nice URLs to work with, so set that configuration option to ON.

As I will do some more testing, expect more post on these and other items, but please be patient, as I want to Inform you based on experiences, and time is limited..

So if you want to be up-to-date, and you liked the post, use the RSS Feed to keep up..

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