Joomladay UK SEO presentation

Joomla! SEO part 1

Joomla!day United Kingdom

Maidstone, Kent

Wilco Jansen

13/14 March 2009

What are we going to do?

SEO Basic/Workshop part 1

What is SEO?

Why would i need it?

How does it work?

SEO Workshop part 2

How to apply SEO on joomla?

What is SEO?

It’s all about finding your site!

You are the SEO expert…

Why would I need it?

Unless your site is top secret…

You want to be listed when people are searching…

Why optimize for search?

More visits = more revenue

How does it work? Why optimize for search?

Is SEO like Voodoo?

Topics to cover

Become the Google bot …

What does the bot look for?

Page ranks

Content

Back link

Keywords

Meta tags

Dead links

RSS feeds

Nofollow

Sitemap

Permalinks

…

… by understanding how it works

What a visitor sees

What does Google see?

Imagine search engine spider's behavior as like someone reading through the pages of a document.

A well-structured, validated XHTML page should be laid out with logical, ordered headings and paragraphs that describes the content to the 'reader', and therefore helps it to understand the information.

Search engines love to crawl semantic mark-up

Things to look after

It’s all about the content!

Make a content plan; who, what, when, target audience etc.

When you blog, write like you are directly speaking with that person, visualize him/her

Use words, phrases that people search for

Like a librarian:

Books needs labeling correctly (correct title, category and meta tagging).

Duplicate content is annoying.

Put the right content in the right spot of you site.

Learn from your visitors: use Google Analytics and Webmaster console

Get links

Keep it simple

Structure and meaning first, presentation later

Know all HTML elements and attributes

Validate, validate, validate

Basic rules for valid XHTML

Each document should have a logical heading structure that starts at level 1 and doesn’t skip any levels

Anything that visually looks like a heading should be marked up as a real heading

The title of the document’s main content should be a level 1 heading

There should be only one level 1 heading in each document

Requirements for a good document structure

Title tag

<head><title>Site title</title></head>

Header tags (H1/2/3)

<h1>Content of biggest importance</h1>

<h2>Less important content</h2>

<h3>Least important content</h3>

Strong

<strong>Bold typeface</strong>

It’s all about the content

Images

<img src=“image.png” alt=“keyword” />

Hyperlinks

<a href=http://moovum.com title=“Title for this link”>Keyword in anchor text</a>

It’s all about the content

Proper markup makes

20%-30%

of your site optimization!

A big percentage also comes from off-site marketing

Title Tags (which should be document titles or title elements , since it’s the text between the opening and closing title tags that is important, not the actual tags)

Keyword Density

Site Structure

Internal Links

Links and PageRank

Page Reputation

Anchor Text

Link Popularity

Essential search engine marketing techniques

End if SEO Part 1

Links

Guidelines for creating better markup  http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200704/guidelines_for_creating_better_markup

Headings, heading hierarchy, and document outlines  http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200901/headings_heading_hierarchy_and_document_outlines

Official Google Webmaster blog  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Top-10 Joomla! SEO tips  http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-1.5/top-ten-joomla-seo-improvements/

Anthony Ferrera’s performance grader  http://www.joomlaperformance.com/component/option,com_performance/Itemid,52/

Links

Joomla! SEO part 2

Joomla!day United Kingdom

Maidstone, Kent

Wilco Jansen

13/14 March 2009

How to apply SEO to Joomla?

A simple guide

Basic setup

Semantic Template

Content optimization

Site optimization

Setup SEO within Joomla!

1. SEO settings configuration

2. Turn global keyword and global site description off, Google bot does not like double content

Basic Setup

Semantic template

Content

Article title

Article keywords

Article description

Article alias

Menu title

Menu alias

Menu page title

Potential problems

URLs

Metadata

To many pages

URLs

Preferable human readable

The bot searches the URL for keywords

Try to prevent multiple URLs for the same page (use http://www.jfoobar.org/tiny-123 to prevent multiple aliases)

Use the SEO option in Joomla

If Joomla URLs are not enough, consider extensions who do the job (examples: sh404SEF, ArtioSEF and SEF Advanced)

Never change URLs once published (redirect with a 301 if possible after change, see also http://www.jfoobar.org/tiny-186)

Meta data

Use them, they are there for a reason!

Page titles are crucial…and default this is missing: some SEF extensions solve that, there are also plugins available

To many pages

Readmore links get indexed, worse a calendar extension could very easy also to pages indexed till the year 4000 ;-)

Special attention

Calendars

Photo galeries

Ordered lists in extensions

Check your site using the site option of Google: site: jfoobar.org

Prevent indexing using robots.txt Disallow: /photogalery Disallow: /planner Disallow: /*.pdf$

Google webmaster tool Dashboard->Tools->Remove URL

Content optimization]

Speed is important, test it!

RSS feeds generate traffic, but also link back to your site

When using internal links, create a page per link

Use meaningfull 404 pages

Submit a sitemap to Google

Configure your extensions (be aware of the indexing problem with some)

Site optimization

End if SEO Part 2

Joomladay UK SEO presentation

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