Web Site SEO Now

5 Best SEO Tips For Joomla Powered Sites

Joomla is not search engine friendly by default. You need to put some work into improving this. The main thing that you notice when you start your SEO work on Joomla website is the URL or each page. The page URLs produced by Joomla are not search engine friendly. They have always query parameters, which doesn’t give much information for search engines to properly index and rank those pages. When you do on-page search engine optimization, one of things you should pay a lot more attention is the URL of the page you want to optimize. It has to be informative and meaningful, well populated with keywords and preferably with “.html” extension.

1. Use Search engine friendly URL

To make your Joomla website’s URL search engine friendly, you have a lot of options. The first one is to use the default Joomla’s SEF plugin. By default this plugin is not activated, so you have to go to your global configuration page and activate that.
You can also use third party free or paid components that do the same thing with additional features. One of my favorite is sh404SEF.

2. Craft catch Page titles for all pages in your website

Most of the time, I see on Joomla websites with default title that say “Home”. This is the title of the home page. Mostly beginners don’t see that and the way you change that title also a little bit obscure at first. As you know, page title is one of the main on-site criteria considered by search engines when ranking web pages. So you should give your pages meaningful title with your main keyword included in it. To change this title, do the following:

a. Go to Menu Manager and click your main menu.
b. From the list of menu items, open the one that says “home”
c. Now on the right hand side of the screen there are a number of parameters you can change. Open “Parameters (System)” and change the field that say Page title to your desired homepage title and save.

3. Setup Meta data for every page in your website

Meta data may not have as much value in the eyes of search engines as used to have few years back but still you should do proper optimization work on them. When optimizing Meta data of a webpage. You should focus more on the description rather than keywords. You write good descriptions about your page, preferably 160 characters long. This description is the one you see on search engine result page under your title. So it has a lot of value to help your link in the search engine result page stand out. Of course if search engines cannot find relevant description in your Meta tag, they will try to extract some text from your article body on the page and use that as description on the search engine result page. However, you have the chance to decide what to put instead, so use this advantage to attract more visitor from search engines.

The major problem I see on lots of Joomla powered website is that they use one set of Meta description and keyword for all pages on the website. This is wrong! You should set up individual sets of description and keywords for every page on your website. You can still use the global configuration to set Meta data for the whole website, but you should add Meta data for every article you add from you’re your article manager page.

To add Meta data for an article you just wrote, look at the right section of Article [edit] page to find fields for entering Meta data.

4. Take advantage of 404 error page pages

Most often you see a Joomla website with the default 404 error page with small information about the error and a link to home page. You should setup a 404 page, either using some sort of plugin or setup one manually. Include valuable resource on this page to direct the user somewhere back to your website. Or include search form that can be used by the user to get back on track. Or use some of the phrases from users query on the previous page and produce a search result page yourself. The point here is to avoid users from being frustrated by the mean error page.

5. Insert H1 Tags In Joomla

It’s a good idea to make use of H1 tag as your article title decorator. It has some significance to wards convincing search engines that the page is actually about the keyword you have been mentioning starting from the page title. I know pages that do well without H1 tag, but who cares if you can get a little help on your SEO for little or no work. Go ahead and us H1 tags for your your articles’ Title.

About the Author

John Balthazar is an SEO expert. he currently lives in Johore Bahru and gives away SEO tips at his website.

Joomla CMS, an award winning software

Joomla – An Overview

Why CMS?

Content is the most crucial part of any website. It is the things of past where the websites were consisted of mostly static pages. Web portals and web communities have to update their content not just daily but a few times a day. All sorts of businesses need to provide up-to-date information about their products and services on their web sites. So managing and organizing this growth in content has become very critical nowadays.
Development and maintenance of website is a technical task, and if your website is dynamic then constant up-gradation is required. You need to recruit qualified technical people to keep track of your content and website up-gradation. This is a very tedious job and human is error prone, so to overcome this difficulty software called content management systems (CMS) is launched, of which Joomla, a free award winning software.

What is Joomla?

According to Wikipedia, Joomla is a content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available.

Features of Joomla:

• Flexible and easy to use: Many web designers wish for a CMS that provides a lot of flexibility while designing a website. Joomla gives them more scope while working on a website. Functions like editing, deleting, adding, updating texts, photos, images, and pages on their website should not be very complicated. Joomla CMS is the answer to all their needs.
   
• User friendly: Basically a CMS enables you to manage and control the presentation of the contents of the website. The contents of a website may include texts, images, music or documents. To manage these contents in a professional manner, the website needs to be designed with a competent CMS. Joomla is a fantastic CMS which is very user-friendly. You needn’t to be an HTML expert or some kind of technical nerd to design any website using Joomla.
   
• Absolutely free: Joomla is absolutely free. It is a free open source CMS, so you do not have to pay a single penny to use this system.
   
• Easy to Install: Many web hosting packages now include the Joomla software and it is very easy to install. Initial customization of Joomla may require some help from a technical person and includes setting up the basic template. The template includes the web site design and navigation system. This template contains a few editable areas but the overall look and flow of the site remains consistent throughout the site. All you need to start using Joomla and become familiar with its features which are similar to any word processing software.

• Easy to maintain and update: A website designed using Joomla is also very easy to maintain and update. You do not have to depend on any professional to maintain or update your website. You can do it yourself by learning from the Joomla video courses that are available online.
   
• Automated templates: Joomla uses a simple browser-based user interface for managing various aspects of the site. Through easy-to-use web based forms, you can update image or text content, set it up to take sales orders, create new content sections or pages, manage your employee listings as well as contact information, or even regularly update your product catalog. When you want to change the appearance of the entire site, all you need to do is make changes in one template file to have it reflected throughout the site.
   
• Add-on’s and plug-ins to facilitate the use of even more features: Joomla has the ability to provide your clients with ample of free plugins, modules and components for their sites. These things all extend the basic functionality of Joomla, allowing you to create anything from a small business website to a fully functioning corporate website with an integrated backend. Most of them can be downloaded for free, offering your clients feature rich and interactive tools for their site bound to keep their customers engaged and coming back for more. Some of them do have a fee but are more reliable as well as more feature rich than other CMS plug-ins.
   
• SEO and joomla: SEO(Search engine optimization) is the key of success of any website, so if you are creating a website that is not accessible to search engines, then you exist nowhere. Since 90% of the traffic comes through search engines only, that’s why web developers were constantly forced to weigh the ease and organization of a Content Management System with the priority of search engine presence. Joomla provides many features which makes your website familiar with search engines like search engine friendly urls that end with .html or .htm and don’t have a ‘?’ or other special characters, using Joomla each page can be easily customized for Title and Meta tags that prevent duplication, which is a negative seo-factor. With Joomla, you can customize 404 error page and also keep track of the broken links people are using to surf your site. Since blogs offer a unique personalized tone to your approach towards your target traffic. Joomla offers user-friendly tools to post your blogs online without much effort. Submission of sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and other popular Search Engines will help to index your site quickly, with Joomla, a sitemap(component or extension)of your website, html or xml based can be automatically generated. Newsletter forms a vital ingredient of a successful commercial website. You can remain in touch with your customers and prospects with this feature, which can be integrated through a customized newsletter extension in your Joomla.
   
• Simple to add new features: Joomla also makes it very simple to add new powerful features to your web site with just a click of a button. You can choose from any of the hundreds of extensions available – document management which allows you to index the kinds of documents on your web site, track the changes in them and make them easily searchable; image and multimedia galleries; forums and chat software; blogging software; mailing list management; shopping cart and complete e-commerce software; Web standards upgrades; Workflow management and many more.
   

 Summary: In all, Joomla is a very powerful software that allows users to develop and maintain dynamic web sites. If you’re building a new web site or renovating your existing site, you can take the help of Joomla CMS software. While non-technical users can use Joomla to manage various aspects of the site including the content very easily, more technical users can use add-ons to make the site more powerful and actually build large-scale online applications. Joomla is being used to power all kinds of web sites – simple, personal or family sites; small business web sites as well as more complex corporate intranets and extranets; community portals; magazines and newspapers; government applications and so on.

About the Author

Shilpa Singh, Director Himshilp- Internet Marketing Consultants handling SEO, SEM, website designing and website promotional stratagises.

http://www.himshilp.com