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.

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.

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.

Today I found out that the best Free editor for Joomla, that is in my opinion is now available for Joomla 1.5 as wel.

it is also good to see that this Editor now has it’s own website JoomlaFCK.

I am working on some posts and articles about the new Joomla 1.5 Stable release and how to use and improve SEO for it.

And I couldn’t use my favorite editor… which is JoomlaFCK :-)

Why should you try this editor for your Joomla based website? Either for 1.0.x or 1.5 version…

Because it is the only one, free one that is, that doesn’t mess with your HTML code if you want to get something hand-coded in your content.

Further more you don’t have to install a lot of Plugins, it works for most of the content editing right out of the box.

Images handling

You might have noticed that I try to use a lot of images and screen shots to explain things.
JoomlaFCK give you the tools to upload your images without closing your page and does something pretty great for SEO as wel…

It takes the width and height values from the image and puts them in the code, you can also fill the Alt tag and on the Advanced tab also the Title of the images.
Then its up to you to make sure your images have the read name before uploading.

I could go on and on about this great editor, bu you just should try it yourself.

Download the right version, install it as a Plugin and activate it.

If you want to read more about this editor , go to the Homepage of JoomlaFCK editor or have a look at the impressive JoomlaFCK features map

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today I received an RSS Feed from Barrie North, one of the best educators on Joomla that I know off.

He brought you earlier the Joomla Template Tutorial and he is a moderator for the Joomla SEO Forum

And now he is Selling his Joomla Admin Manual to you with a discount!
He even tells you why you should buy his book or just use the Joomla Manual for 1.0.11

But let me tell you already, this book is more then just Joomla, it gives you more information on how to work with the system, optimizing it for Search Engines and shows you how to create a better website.

I may not agree or like some off the things he writes about, but he sure knows his Joomla Stuff and how to design Great SEO Templates.
And if you are serious about Building the best website you can for yourself or your customers, then this Joomla Admin Manual is really worth the little money he is asking for it. 

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

If you want to do a really good job at doing the right stuff for your website, then don’t use Metatag generators or even worse On the fly Plugins or Mambots  that create Metatags stuff for you.

They might seem a good idea and if you really don’t have the time, or the knowledge to do proper Search Engine Optimization, then use a Metatags generator.

You can find several good once at the Joomla extensions site.
You can also find some “on the fly� Metatags generators, who change everything for you, if you change a few of the first lines of your page.

Here is why I don’t link to use them:
- They are not as good as you in creating good titles
- They are not as good as you in giving a good an well thought through Description of the content of the page
- They are just stuffing some keywords in the keyword tag, and you still have to change them for maximum results.

Joomla Metatag generator components

With Metatag Generators components, you database is filled in the right places, and you can mostly edit the tags, either on the page meta-info tab itself, or in the generator pages.
OpenSef comes with such an Metatag Generator included in the SEO Assistant tab.
Also the Metatags generator of iJoomla works well.

For both generators I suggest you set the options in the configuration fields to NOT overwrite the already filled in Metatag fields.

If you have a large website with multiple editors that don’t know how to write Metatags information, it will be a valuable extensions.
But if you run your own site, don’t use them, think for yourself. You are the expert on your sites topic.

On the Fly SEO ?

There are several Plugins that create “on the fly Metatags�.
What they do is basically read the first positions from the text area of your page and take that as the title, and mostly some more lines to create a description Metatag.
With the words included in the text the keywords are extracted.

For some people it will work great, less effort, and instant results…..

What I don’t like about it is that you don’t have control over the more important parts, it overwrites all you previous work.

But should you call this Search Engine Optimization for you Joomla Site?
Or are you just fooling yourself and taking the easy road?

Search Engine Optimization is more than just letting a program work some stuff into some fields for you.

You have to do research on Keywords, Optimize you text, site structure and more, and that is hard work!
Just running a Plugin or component might look nice to you now, but will it last in the long run and will it provide the right Search Engine Results you are after?

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

Here is a Little tool I use to keep up with al the news that comes out on Joomla!, Joomla Components and Blogs…

I hope you already use it, if not, then this post is for you.

It is called Netvibes and it saves me a lot of time… so could you.
You can create an account for free with Netvibes and just try it, it won’t cost you a thing, just time (very precious) but in the end it will save you time.

There are lots of things you can do with Netvibes, like organizing your feeds like the Joomla Blogs onto one Tab.

But you can also work with your own favorites, Flickr Foto’s, Alexa rankings, Gmail,Yahoo mail, yes even POP3 mail accounts, all on one website, organized with tabs, or however you like it, just drag and drop the content you want in the place you want!!.

Isn’t that great, so Web2.0.. and from a Search Engine or Traffic building tool point of view….
Build a tab with all your favorite Joomla Blogs and Websites (including yours) and publish it on the Netvibes EcoSystem to share it with other Netvibes users.

It is one of the best tools I use to keep Informed on-line, and you can access your page from any Internet connected PC, just login!

You could also try the “Personalized Home” pages of Google , or the one from Yahoo or Flake pages, but Netvibes is for me by far the best! Just go ahead and try it out….

P.s. If you want to use Personalize Google pages, Gmail is now free for All !! Just go to www.Gmail.com and sign up.
Even if you don’t want to use it for mail, you still need it for the Google Webmaster Tools which are now out of Beta http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

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

There is no “C” in Joomla?, of course there is, You know there is a C !
Joomla is a “C”ontent Management System.
And that is where the majority of your SEO is done!

Content is what they want.

No, You should not look for what you can do to play the the Search Engines, devote your time to focus on your visitors.
Most of the mayor search engines like Google, Yahoo en Live now want you to build quality content for you visitors.

And Building a quality site is just what makes Joomla a great tool to work with.

Looking at Joomla, you have a Content Management System that lets you Build large sites, with the possibility to give you site the right structure.

A structure that you can make out of Sections, which you then divide into categories.
And in those categories you put your content, your pages.

Once you defined you structure, start building, a few pages per week, will get you a site in one year that holds more than a hundred pages!

And building a page is easy in Joomla, push “new” in you content overview and start writing…

Use all the features that you can, from Title to Metatags Information, its all there.

Writing to Boost your ranking

You saw the way you can build and structure your site.
Try and do your writing the same way:

Your Writing is Your Best SEO

Make sure you write your headlines with passion, and make your paragraphs easy to identify.

Use short sentences where possible and look at the overall page impression.
Can you “scan” the page? Can you find your keywords in the bolded paragraph headings.

Use H2 and if necessary H3 HTML headers, But use the H1 not more then One or two times on a page.

But the most important thing you can do, is to write information that your visitors are looking for.
Whether your write about product, services or Information or a special subject, always but out the best you can.

Look at yourself, what do you want to read about if you are looking on information on you sites topic.
And then write about it!!

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