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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
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- Sprache: Englisch
Some sites always appear at the top of a search result while others fail to even make it to the top ten. Wouldn't you want to see your site on the first page of any search result? This is not easily feasible if you are depending solely on the marketing guys whom you hire for SEO.
Joomla! SEO will help you to attract more visitors and improve the way you rank in search engines by giving you the techniques and knowledge to work your site into higher visitor numbers. It will help you to create and improve your site in an easy way. Joomla! is great, and you can make it perform even better by using the guidelines and ideas in this book.
Search Engine Optimization is becoming a must for every web site. As the competition on the Internet grows you need to make sure your site is among the top results on the major search engines. More and more people use search engines to find the information they are looking for, so you need to make sure you show up in those search result pages to get those visitors to your web site.
Joomla! SEO will provide you with a lot of information, ranging from keywords strategies through technical improvements and content creation. All this information and the tutorials provided are targeted to give you the best base for gaining higher rankings.
In the book, you will learn how to build a keyword strategy and create a better site structure for SEO. You will read about technical improvements that will give you better options for SEO. There is a separate chapter that helps you create search-engine friendly and keyword-rich URLs.
In the end, you will have a web site that is ready to outperform your competitors and a manual to refer to for improving every step you take.
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Table of Contents
Joomla! 1.5 SEO
Herbert-Jan van Dinther
Joomla! 1.5 SEO
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: October 2009
Production Reference: 1011009
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847198-16-7
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Ed Maclean (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Herbert-Jan van Dinther
Reviewers
Jose Argudo Blanco
Niko Kotiniemi
Acquisition Editor
David Barnes
Development Editor
Dhiraj Chandiramani
Technical Editors
Gaurav Datar
Dhwani Devater
Copy Editor
Sanchari Mukherjee
Indexers
Rekha Nair
Hemangini Bari
Editorial Team Leader
Gagandeep Singh
Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Project Coordinator
Rajashree Hamine
Proofreader
Lesley Harrison
Graphics
Nilesh R. Mohite
Production Coordinators
Dolly Dasilva
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Cover Work
Dolly Dasilva
About the Author
Herbert-Jan van Dinther was born in September 1959 in Heusden, the Netherlands. He first came in contact with computers during his study at the Fontys Hogeshool in Eindhoven. He is currently working as an ICT Manager and owns a small part-time company named Web site Builder and SEO Consultant that focuses on Joomla! and WordPress. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Economics.
His first web site was built with Microsoft FrontPage in 1999 and he introduced the "new" Google search engine to a lot of people at that time. Google now has a market share in search of up to 98 percent in the Netherlands. He wanted his and his customers' sites to rank well in the search engines and his quest and passion for SEO knowledge has not left him since that first site.
Later he came across the NetworkDNA methodology to structure computer network documentation , which was created by Don Krause. Don Krause introduced him to Mambo—the content management system that later became Joomla!. To promote the methodology in the Netherlands, a web site based on Joomla! is now ranking high in the Dutch search engines.
Joomla! is now one of his biggest passions and sharing his SEO knowledge about Joomla! has resulted in several web sites and blogs on that topic. He also published the Little Joomla SEO Book, a free PDF file about Joomla! 1.0 SEO. Currently, he is working on a new web site http://www.herbertjanvandinther.com to show how powerful and easy Joomla! is for building your own site.
I want to thank all the people at Packt who helped me to create this book and promote the Joomla! content management system and show people how they can improve their sites. They showed me how to improve my writing and gave some excellent advice and contributions to make this book a better read.
I also want to thank my wife and children for the patience and time they gave me to accomplish the large undertaking of writing this book.
About the Reviewers
Jose Argudo Blanco is a web developer from Valencia, Spain. After finishing his studies he started working for a software company, always working with PHP—a language he learned to love. Now, after six years, he is confident in his experience and has started to work as a freelancer in an attempt to give his personal vision to the projects he undertakes.
Working with Joomla!, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, JQuery and other known open source technologies and frameworks, he expects to build stable and reliable applications that reflect his desire of making better web experiences.
He has also worked as reviewer for the book Magento—Beginners Guide and hopes to continue working with Magento-related projects.
To my girlfriend Silvia, without her support I couldn't have reached this long.
Niko Kotiniemi is a web developer and web/mobile technology enthusiast living in Jyväskylä, in central Finland. He has worked on developing and maintaining web sites professionally as a freelancer for over three years. Lately he has also reviewed four Joomla! books for Packt Publishing:
Niko Kotiniemi is currently employed as a web designer at the Guidance and Counseling Services for Adults—National Coordination Project (www.opinovi.fi). Over the past few years he has been employed by the Federation of Special Service and Clerical employees, ERTO (www.erto.fi)—a labor union whose members, among others, include those that work in the IT-service industry in the private sector.
He continues his lifetime computer hobby by studying a Bachelor's degree in Software and Telecommunication Engineering at the Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences, JAMK. In his spare time he enjoys outdoor activities, developing his web site (www.aktiivi.com), spending time with his family and friends, or delving into that next ultimate solution or API that will allow applications and web sites to interlink and share information.
Preface
Many people are building web sites with Joomla! because it is an easy-to use-and understand content management system. The fact that it is free is also a factor that makes Joomla! one of the most popular systems that you can use to build your own web site.
It is only after your Joomla! site is built that you wonder why there are such less number of visitors and why you don't rank as highly in the search engines as you thought you would. At that moment you start investigating different sources and possibilities to improve your rankings and get more visitors. Joomla! SEO will help you attract those visitors and improve the way you rank in search engines by giving you the techniques and knowledge to help you achieve your goals.
What this book covers
Chapter 1 will give you an overview of what we will cover in this book, and get you started with the foundations of your SEO strategy by creating your keyword list. Besides that you will set up a baseline to monitor your progress, using some statistical tools.
Chapter 2 helps you understand and implement the best way to structure your content for better search engine results as well as giving your visitors a better experience. We also look at files such as sitemap.xml and robots.txt to guide Search Engine Robots. You will also improve on your menu structure so that it reflects your new web site structure.
Chapter 3 covers the installation and use of the Joomlatwork SEF patch, which essentially gives you even more power to optimize your Joomla! site by enhancing some core Joomla! items. You will see what improvements are made and how you can benefit the most from these changes. We also look at some of the basics of meta tags.
Chapter 4 covers content ideas, deciding which keywords to target, and the importance of structure in the content of your pages. You will also learn about keyword placement, how to enhance your titles, and the use of headers and paragraphs. You will read more about the meta tags description and keywords, along with the importance, and proper use of those fields.
Chapter 5 helps you set up a blog within Joomla! and shows you the external tools that you need to use to get the most out of your blogging efforts. You will read more about the importance of blogging and commenting systems, along with how to implement solutions that make Joomla! an even better blogging tool.
Chapter 6 covers the installation and configuration of sh404SEF—the best component for creating search engine friendly URLs in Joomla!. You will learn about the basic and advanced configuration settings of this component, and how you can use it to your advantage. We will also look at possible errors that may arise and how to fix them.
Chapter 7 covers Joomla! templates and their influence on your web site. You will learn what makes an SEO template a good one and how to find one that fits your needs. We also look at the choice between free and commercial templates, along with the need for code validation and source optimization.
Chapter 8 discusses all the possibilities for improving the speed of your web site. Speed is a necessity for users and Search Engine Robots. You will learn about the built-in cache system, and learn how to find possible delays and how to correct them. You will see the effects of image optimization and the best way to use images in your pages.
Chapter 9 covers the need for and use of statistics programs to track your visitors and progress. You will look at the data provided by such programs and learn how to interpret them. StatCounter and Google Analytics are described to give you an insight into the way you can use the data collected from your site, in order to gain even better rankings, and to improve the conversion rate of your site.
Chapter 10 covers several different ways to get more incoming links, from commenting on other sites to blogging on other platforms. Building incoming links is time consuming, but if you do it the right way it is a very good way to boost your web site's rankings.
Appendix A covers a complete case study of creating a web site in Joomla! and how it evolves. It takes you from choosing a domain name to structuring the site for best performance. You see what benefits and problems are involved in finding the right template, as well as the installation of components, and how to get into the search engines. We also touch on the use of Google webmaster tools.
Appendix B covers Joomla! robots.txt and .htaccess files. Especially the later can cause big problems for a Joomla! webmaster if it is configured the wrong way. There is an explanation of the different options within .htaccess and robots.txt. You get real life examples that can help you solve common issues to prevent error 500 pages on your site.
What you need for this book
This book describes how to improve a Joomla! 1.5 web site for search engine rankings. You need to have a Joomla! 1.5 web site installed and hosted on a publicly accessible server where internet users can have free access to it.
You need to know how to install Joomla! components and you need to have access to the administration panel on a super administrator level to make some changes in the configuration of your web site.
You also need to have access to the root of your Joomla! installation, preferably using FTP to install the SEF patch and to change your robots.txt and .htaccess files.
Who this book is for
This book is written for anyone using Joomla!—ranging from owners of business sites, to web site developers and personal web site owners. Any Joomla! web site owner who wants to sell products or services, or send out a message to the world will find that getting better rankings in the search engines will help them reach their goal.
Some prior knowledge of Joomla! is expected, but no prior knowledge of search engine optimization is needed for this book. The reader will get a deeper level of knowledge on how to make their web site rank better and attract more visitors to their site.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "If you don't use the second option you would have an extra /index.php/ in the URL."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "If you look at the configuration panel, there is a small section called SEO Settings".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. Developing your SEO and Keyword Strategy
Joomla! SEO is not as difficult as some people will try to tell you. Most of the things you will see and learn in this book, could have been accomplished just by using your common sense. However, there are some things that are a bit more technical and there are some topics that you should start with, before progressing to the geeky nerdy stuff.
Here are some challenges that lie ahead of you and that you will have tackled by the end of this book:
Each of the points we just discussed will improve the chances of your site getting noticed more often on search engines, thus bringing more visitors to your site. That is your goal and you can take action right now by setting up your SEO strategy.
At the end of this chapter you will have your very own SEO and keyword strategy ready to work for you, and you will be ready for the next step.
Setting up your SEO strategy
As I mentioned earlier you have to do some work on your Joomla! site to improve its ranking, but where do you start? Baby steps will not take you where you want to go. You really need some kind of a game plan to help you out.
First you need to make some basic improvements to your Joomla! web site to eliminate some of the basic flaws in SEO for Joomla 1.5. We will then dive into keyword research, which is an essential part of your SEO process. Without targeting the keywords that people are actually searching for, you cannot take the next step.
This is when you build your SEO strategy. You cannot do everything at once when you want to get your site up in the search engines. You have to choose where you are going to spend your time and optimization efforts. By the end, you should have done most of the things we will talk about in this book, and you might have chosen to leave certain aspects of the process out of your strategy.
Create a small list of what you intend to do first, second, and so on. Here is a list to give you some idea:
The technical requirements can be implemented very fast, and getting it to work will just take a few hours. The brainstorming and keyword research takes a lot more time and effort. However, you need to know which way to go with your web site, so keywords are essential.
For your site it could be that you already optimized a lot of things and you just have to move articles and categories around to improve the usability and theme of the site. You might feel that you have enough content and you can start building incoming links.
The order in which you do things is all up to you. My suggestion is to start with the technical improvements such as the SEF patch and an SEF component. This way you can make sure that your new URLs are working and picking up the rankings you already have. Once you have those elements in place, you can start the fun work—improving you titles, meta descriptions, content, and lots more.
At the end of this chapter you will have figured out a good game plan for your SEO. Also once you have finished reading this book, you will have covered the most important aspects of improving your web site—to have a better visibility in the search engines.
You can add some extra things to your SEO strategy such as the use of AdWords or affiliate promotion, but these topics are not covered in this book. They will cost you money and you might not want to do any advertisement. If you get this advertisement stuff wrong, it might cost you a lot of money, so I will leave that part to the specialists in this field. In this book, we will focus on getting the best organic search results possible for your Joomla! based web site.
Solving basic Joomla! 1.5 SEO problems
If you look at Joomla! 1.5, you will see that there are just a few settings in the administrator control panel under Global Configuration for SEO and meta tags. The right setup of these options is one of the tasks you have to do right at the beginning.
If you look at the configuration panel, there is a small section called SEO Settings as shown in the following screenshot:
URLs without activating the first option will show as http://www.cblandscapegardening.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6&Itemid=6.
But with the first option set to SEF URLs active it changes to http://www.cblandscapegardening.com/services.html.
This URL is also based on the other two options, which are active as shown in the previous screenshot. The option Use Apache mod_rewrite means that you are on a Linux or Unix based hosting platform and that you have the rights to access .htaccess file. If you don't use the second option, you would have an extra /index.php/ in the URL. You really shouldn't use that option if your Joomla! site is on a Windows server or on your local PC, as it will break the URL to your pages and will produce error 500 page as the server doesn't know what to do with the .htaccess file.
The third option just adds the .html extension to the URL, thus making it look like a static web site. Using the .html extension is beneficial as people and search engines know that they are directed to a real content page and not a directory.
If this is all so great, what problems could there possibly be? It is possible to have different URLs to the same article if you have more than one link to it through several menu items. If you create a menu item, the title of that item will become the URL pointing to the item. Joomla! uses the title-alias field to create the URL.
This becomes a problem if you link categories in one menu item to the section in which that category is in another menu item. This is because you create multiple links under different URLs to the same page. If you want to blog with Joomla!, this is something that is very likely to happen.
Also, look at the following URL: /landscaping/8-landscape-gardens/8-outdoor-patios.html. You can see that the /section/ name, categories with ID number, and the page title with the ID number are included. The ID number is used to make sure that you don't get URLs that are the same, and thus only one page can be reached. You don't want numbers in your URL for two reasons. First, it can confuse your visitors as they might expect an article about eight different outdoor patios. The second reason is that you want the URL to be as clear and as short as possible and numbers don't really work that well unless you really have an article about eight outdoor patios. Also, the creation of more menu links will lead to a duplicate content issue—something that most content management systems have, but it is better to avoid.
I will show you how to change your site setup to overcome and prevent these kind of problems. I will give you some information on the new rel="canonical" option to give the search engines your preferred URL when we look into the SEF components. I will also show you whether "nofollow" options are still valid if we look at the SEF patch and content creation. Both these options have a new or improved benefit for SEO.
Global configuration meta tag settings
If you use the Metadata Settings under Global Configuration fields, you are placing the same description and keywords on every menu item that is not pointing to a specific article.
So, with every menu item you create in your Joomla! web site, you create duplicate descriptions and keyword meta tags, something the search engines don't like. These duplicate descriptions appear in the result pages—something that you probably want to avoid. You want the right descriptions and keywords to be indexed.
Clear the fields in Global Configuration | Site. Do not use the Global Meta Tags at all! I will show you how to create a better meta tag description and set of meta keywords later on, but for now, please let Google and other search engines pick their own snippets to show in the search engine result pages.
PDF, Print, and E-mail icons
Although it is a nice idea to give your visitors the option to view and print your content in a PDF or print format, it provides extra food for the search engines. With Joomla! 1.0.x you would find a lot of PDF pages in the Google result pages.
With Joomla! 1.5 there are some simple options you can configure to prevent this from happening. Just select Content | Article Manager | Parameter and Joomla! will open an overlay screen. Here you can scroll down and disable Icons, PDF Icon, and Print Icon by selecting Hide then click on Save and you are done.
Meta generator tag
Joomla!, just like WordPress, inserts an HTML tag that says:
This is of course a nice way to show that you use Joomla!, to the people who view the source code. However, from an SEO point of view, this information has nothing to do with the content of your pages, and it adds an extra line to your page size. This can also be a nice indicator for hackers to know the version of Joomla! you are using.
The good thing is that all these issues can be solved with minimal effort by changing some settings and using some extra components and patches.
Why do you need to do keyword research?
Keyword research is essential for optimization, and if done the right way, you may even find some gold mines you can work with in your niche market.
First things first, I am going to tell you why you need to do it. It is actually quite simple—you need to know what your potential visitors/customers are looking for. You need to find the words and phrases that your potential customers use when they use a search engine. Of course there is more to it than that—you also want to know how much competition is there for those words, so you can estimate your chances of ranking well.
Let's start by simply looking at what you already know about your site topic. You already know a lot about your current customers, but do you know what people are looking for on the Internet that you could possibly sell to them? It is a bit like fishing—you first have to know what kind of fish you want to catch, and the bait you need to use in order to catch them. The tools with which you catch the fish aren't that important. At the end only the result counts—eating fish!
Keyword research is simply finding the right bait to draw your potential customers to your site. You already know some of the keywords people are searching for. You know your business and the terminology that comes with it and its importance.
This is where most web site owners, just like you, are making an incorrect assumption. The terminology used by you is most likely not what people are searching for. For example, you might think that "harden off" is what people are looking for, but in fact it is "how to get my indoor plants into my garden". You know you have to "harden off" those plants before taking them outside, but you can also see that "harden off" is not included in the search.
People are looking for an answer to a problem they have. It is up to you to provide the answer to their questions. If you do, they will love you for it and hopefully do business with you.
But wait, there is more!
By carrying out keyword research you will not only find the most profitable terms you want for a rank, but also the way your site should be structured/restructured. Another reason is that picking the right targeted keywords and optimizing those terms will improve your revenues. Whether you are selling digital products, information, or services such as landscape gardening.
An old study from Cornell University shows that the first result on the Google search's result page will get more than 50 percent of the clicks. Second gets about 15 percent, and the third gets around 10 percent, the rest goes in smaller portions of max five percent and down to the other competitors.
This is why you want to make sure you are ranking higher than your competitors. It can also give you a traffic boost if you start ranking—number one for more specific searches instead of focusing on more generic terms. Ranking on generic terms such as "cars" is a lot more difficult to do than ranking for a more specific term such as "hybrid performance cars".
Wouldn't it be nice to have your site in the top three? Having your pages further down from the initial search results will give you a lot less traffic, and hence fewer potential customers. If you start ranking better in the search results, you also need to try and draw people to click on your site link. Once we get into the meta tags issue and how to write for better results, I will give you some pointers on how to do this. Keep those results in mind and think about your web site as we go into the hard labor of researching keywords for a landscape gardening site and of course, for your web site.
How to do basic keyword research
Keyword research is not that difficult to do, it is just a matter of using the right tools and using your common sense. You must keep in mind that during this research you will come across loads and loads of keywords and phrases you might want to use.
Create a list of all the keywords that are used in your web site's topic area. Write them down. You are going to work with these later on in this chapter. Put them in a spreadsheet, a word document, or a text file. It doesn't matter how you write them, but just do it!
Personally, I prefer Microsoft Excel as I can easily structure and restructure some content afterwards, and it can import .csv files produced by some of the keyword tools that we will use. But if you can work better with another program, maybe even a Mindscape map, please use that. It is all about getting the job done.
There are a few other things you need, well actually two things:
You will need to use these for structuring your web site based on the main keywords you will find. Once the basic list is ready, you will start building a new one, based on your findings from the keyword tools we will use. One word of caution though—restrain yourself from putting too many keywords and key phrases in the second list. We will draw topics to create articles that will be put into the site structure that is based on the first list.
You have to make sure that at the end of this process you have a list that you can really work with. Remind yourself that only you can decide whether or not you are able to write good articles and content for those words. This last advice is essential for building a site that attracts lots of visitors in the long run.
Even with a massive list of keywords, you have to provide quality content on the subject of your site. Having a good list of keywords and phrases just helps you to attract search engines and get good rankings for your pages, but at the end of the day it is the visitor who decides if your site is good enough.
If he/she thinks it is not, in the end the search engines will leave, as the bounce rate of your site will be too high. We will get deeper into the signs of problems like a high bounce rate in the Analytics part of the book.
The tools of the trade
There are mainly two types of tools—free and commercial. We will first discuss the free tools.
Free tools
Let's start out simple, by going to Google's AdWords tool.
Google's Adwords
This tool is available at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. It is a great tool to use—just check if your results are for the right language and country, and then fill in your keywords. You can find those options and alter them by using the screen just above the input table. Then type the characters shown to you and hit Get keyword ideas and look how Google gives you information about:
After you run the tool, take a closer look at the screen, click on the small drop-down button, and select Show All.
You now have more information than in the default screen. One thing that stands out for the targeted terms are the trends. You can clearly see that April and May have the largest search volume, which is not surprising considering that these are the months when people want to start working on their garden. What is also nice to see is that landscape gardening has a lot more searches than garden landscaping.
For your site topic you can now start adding terms to your list. Don't forget the keywords that will bring you local results. In case of landscape gardening, "Los Banos" should be included in the terms to target. Using your village location in the keywords and phrases, you are going to target direct traffic that will convert better than just the general keywords.
If you are going to use the location item, make sure to include the surrounding villages and try to get traffic from those places as well. There are some easy ways to do this, which I will show you once we get to the writing section.
As you can see in the picture, selecting the Approx Avg Search Volume
