SAMIEI SOLUTIONS

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 it’s 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, it’s 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

It’s 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.

* It’s 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 Joomla 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 doesn’t 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) don’t 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 don‘t 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 Joomla 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.
What’s not here?

You’ll see much of the dis­cus­sion about SEO revolv­ing around var­i­ous SEF com­po­nents. These com­po­nents allow for advanced manip­u­la­tion of URL’s 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.

Related posts:

1. Best 5 Joomla SEO Tips with Joomla SEO extensions
2. Joomla SEO, for a Search Engine Friendly Website
3. How Google Indexes Your Site
4. Joomla SEO tutorial
5. Earned Links Ver­sus Bought Links