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.

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.

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.