I received a review copy of Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia from Packt Publishers and was expecting to read a lot that I already know 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 optimisation efforts as we all now that video, mp3, podcast en mobile web interfaces are becoming more important everyday.

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.

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia by Allan Walker

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 setup podcasts and the handling of mp3s 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.

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Joomla, Joomla Seo

You are reading Joomla 1.5 Multimedia by Allan Walker – A Book to Consider! an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

For those who have missed my writings, this is why you did not see much blogging going on here over the last 10 months…

As it is just released Packt is promoting the Book with a special discount that will expire on the 24th of Oct 2009.

So get your copy NOW with the special discount at http://www.packtpub.com/article/exclusive-discount-offer-joomla-seo before it expires.

And I promise I will start blogging about SEO again on a regular base :-)

Need more info on what you can find in my book, check out http://www.packtpub.com/joomla-1-5-search-engine-optimization-seo/book

I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

P.s. A big Thank YOU to all the people at Packt Publishing that have worked with my on the creation of this book!

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, SEO

You are reading It’s Done… The Joomla 1.5 SEO Book is out Now! an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you don’t have an RSS feed subscription on the Google Webmaster Central Blog yest, I strongly advice you te get one…

On there latest post they included an nice basic SEO Starters Guide from Google which you might want to forward to some of your customers.

What better way to educate them then sending them a document produced by the Guys that know Google the best.

Af course it is just a basic SEO Guide, but it shows some fine examples of things you need to get done for better rankings.
I personally like the explanation about why you need to have the best URL possible.

For Joomla webmasters this is still an issue, although Joomla 1.5.x “out of the box” is a lot better then Joomla 1.0.x but still not the way I want them.

P.s. don’t forget to update your Joomla 1.5.x to the new Joomla 1.5.8 version! ?(if you use the SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com you better wait for the update… looks like that could take some days.

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEO

You are reading Learn SEO from Google’s webmasters | Google SEO an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

A few weeks ago I didn’t know what to think of Nooku… I heard of it, read the Blog posts at Joomlatools.org but still saw it as a new Joomfish component.

But then I got to the eduvision Joomla conferentie were Johan Janssens and Mathias Verraes did a presentation on their new Joomla Content translation component Nooku.
Although Johan warned us about the fact that "Live demonstrations have a tendency to go wrong" theirs run without any noticeable problems.

For you who havent heard about Nooku yet a short introduction.
Nooku is a Joomla component that helps you to build a multi language Joomla websites and does that in a way that it is really simpel for translators to do their work.
You can even track how they do their work, see how far your translations are and how long they worked on their translations.
Well, You have to pay them, so you want to check that what they charge your for is what you are got…. with Nooku you can!

Hold on, I can here you think, what about the language specific URLs? Strange formed URLs, Not translated Titles, not translated Meta-tags like descriptions, keywords etc etc…

An Impressive Component

Now this is where Johan and Mathias really impressed me!
They showed in a live demo how Nooku not only showed the percentage of a page translation that was done on the standard language, but they showed allot more….

The title that was translated was indeed translated also in the HTML Title, but also the URL itself was automatically rewritten to that language title version.
You also get the possibility to translate your meta tag description and keywords into the translated version… so you really get a translated version of a content page in a SEO Friendly (might I say a real Search Engine Optimized way).

There is more.. look at these (real life) URLs
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/en/childrens-corner.html
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/nl/kinderhoek.html
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/es/el-rincon-de-los-ninos.html

Can you believe they did that for  Eight (8) different languages… with Nooku version 0.5… what do they have in store for use when they hit version 1.0?

Multi-language and Search Engine Optimization

Lets look at some other things Nooku does when it comes to SEO, the first thing you say was the URL rewrites.
That wasn’t done by a component like sh404SEF or any other component, that was done by Nooku…

Speed is also a concern when it comes to Multi language Joomla sites, they can be really slooowww. Nooku (according to the tests they ran) even speeded up the Joomla 1.5 website on which it run because Nooku brings in its own Caching system.

 Last but not least is the content translation handling (you do know SEO it all about content for your users, right?).
Once the standard page is written (you can choose your own language standard) you don’t have to go into some strange component cpanel, you just select the language you want to translate to from a small selection box in the right hand corner of your content menu and you can start your translation!
Thats right, you don’t even need to leave your content editor screen… now wouldn’t you want that for your multi language Joomla based website?

How to get it!

From an SEO point of view I even would like it for my single language Joomla website…it has a lot of my wishes right in one component…
So why don’t I have it… because it is not on the free market yet…sigh….

At this moment it is only available for partners of Joomlatools.org but that has its advantage in requesting features, getting support and more.
I ams just a singly person writing about Joomla, SEO and building just a few sites a year, so the partnership price is not an option for me.
If I was a full time Joomla website builder with some clients that needed Multi-languages websites, then I would be the next to sign-up! The partnership price is not that high that it is unaffordable, it is just for me not an option.

Like I said: If you run a Joomla website building company and have customers that need multi-language Joomla websites you owe it to yourself to get in contact with the Nooku team and partner-up…

And No, I don’t get paid for this post, and don’t have stocks in Nooku or Joomlatools and yes, I really, really like this component…

Here is video from there website that explains even more about Nooku and how it works.

P.s. Reminder to myself, send Mathias the example of the HTML Title feature we talked about that is one part of the Joomlatwork patch. 

Tags

Joomla Seo

You are reading Nooku? Nooku! The way to go for Multi-language Joomla sites an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

In the last few days, the Joomla SEO and Bloggers community have been writing a lot about two posts on the Official Webmaster Blog.
Two posts, one about Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty" and the other on Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs.

From a Joomla webmaster point of view, these items look as if they would turn the world of Joomla SEO upside down…
Yes, Joomla can produce multiple URLs that pint to just one content item and Yes, Joomla is a Content Management System and thus will produce Dynamic URLs.
So it seems only natural that Joomla webmasters and Joomla SEO Specialists will read and react on these posts.

Duplicate Content Issues

So lets see what people are writing, first is Arno Zijlstra on his Joomla Blog , he wrote a short post pointing to the first Google webmasters Blog and About how Google thinks about Joomla! and duplicate content which is followed by some fine comments by Steve from Alledia and I really like the comment of Johan Janssens "Finally ! Been fighting this fight for 3 years now …".

Which is really true and people think multiple URLs to one article is a bad thing from Joomla!, but also WordPress and Drupal will do the same.

But as Adam Lasnik already wrote in 2006 Deftly dealing with duplicate content Google does a good job on filtering the best link to an article itself. (That article has some tips on how to improve things from a search engine point of view)
Vanessa Fox did a kind of follow up on that post also on Duplicate Content also giving pointers to help your site to get better SERP results.

Duplicate content is not the same as having different URLs pointing to the same article, most certainly not if the links are on the same domain! Duplicate content is if you publish your articles on more domains, or use the same text on multiple pages on your site.
See the difference? Multiple pages, not multiple URLs.

Steve did a piece on Joomla and Duplicate Content also in 2007 and I did write some articles about it on my other Blog like Simple things to avoid duplicate content , but the best post was this one on The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth (That Title was close to the Google’s blog….back in 2007)
Quote "I’m here to tell you that there is no such thing as a search engine penalty for duplicate content. At least not the way many people believe there is. " … now where did I read something similar…?

Also Barrie North wrote a piece about this Joomla duplicate content issue, also pointing to different URLs and the problem about diluting pagerank between those URLs.
Which brings us back to the second posts from Google’s webmaster Blog.

Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs

Joomla in standard installation has URLs filled with parameters, Google is now saying that you can just leave them as it is…or not?
Well no, they are telling you that if you want to do rewrites of your URLs to do it the right way, which means make sure that you have one URL pointing to your article.
O, and just to point out one thing… did anyone notice that the Google webmaster Blog itself rewrites their URL to a Keyword rich one?
Or should I assume that they write there pages in a pure static HTML version?

Looking at this post and some of the examples given, it seems that there are some Cms systems out there that really stuff there URLs with a lot of parameters and adding parameters each time new content is added.
But that is not the case with Joomla, Joomla sites with the basic URLs can get good results in the SERPs but in my opinion and based on my experience that once that are using URLs rewrites are doing even better.

As confusing these two posts can be, they also have some great information on how Google robots and indexing is done.
And no, Google is not the only search engine robot out getting your links, Yahoo and Live can also bring in some traffic.
More importantly, people tend to click on better looking URLs more often because they recognize the topic keywords.

So what to do with your Joomla! site?

For me this is simple, if you already have good rankings, keep doing what you do the way you are doing it now.
Changing URLs now based on the Dynamic URLs vs Static URLs post will surely drop your results.

If you are setting up a new Joomla site make sure you use a SEF Component like sh404SEF that will point all duplicate URLs to just one URL and will send a proper 301 redirect from the standard Joomla URL to the SEF one.
One other point why you should use sh404SEF is that it will give Google a real 404 code on a 404 page and thus cleaning up duplicate URLs over time.

I addition to the sh404SEF component, make sure that you have a Google / Yahoo / Live, oké , oké a sitemap.org complaint sitemap.xml file (ore equivalent) that holds the URLs produced by the SEF component.
That way the search engines will know what URL you think is the best if they find duplicate URLs.
Don’t forget to set that path in your robots.txt.

Conclusion 

Read the Google webmaster posts and read them carefully, also read some of the comments.
They indeed can be very confusing and send you in the wrong direction as some other Google information looks like it is contradicting to what is written.
Maybe they should follow a short course from Brain Clark on how to write clearly on a technical subject.

Am I changing my advice on SEO on Joomla and WordPress? No! I have seen sites go from page 150 to page 1 on their targeted keywords just by rewriting their URLs.
But if you want to give it a try, just shut down your SEF options, wait for a few weeks and see what happens.
Then please come back here and put your experience in the comments, I would love to read about them then I always look forward to reading about a nice experiment.

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEF, SEO

You are reading Joomla Duplicate Content and Dynamic URLs – Google’s view an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Joost de Valk has written a great article on his new website about WordPress and SEO, Calling it "The Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog"  and I must say, he does a splendid Job in working through all the aspects of SEO for WordPress.

And indeed the Blogging world is raving about this article as well:

Here are few links:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-seo/7096/
http://www.searchengineguide.com/sage-lewis/yoast-should-boast-its-wordpress-seo-gui.php
http://www.jaankanellis.com/wordpress-seo-in-a-nutshell-by-joost/
http://sphinn.com/story/52017

And Yoast (that’s right -> Joost ) also does a great Job in monitoring all those incoming links and as a true blogger reacting on every one of them :-) 

You will know by now that I use WordPress,Drupal, Typo3 and Joomla for a number of websites, so I can related to the technical aspects of his WordPress Guide as well as the real Search Engine Optimization stuff.

And this were you can learn as an Search Engine Optimization fanatic, looking at several aspects of this guide and pick the right stuff for improving any website.
That also means Your Joomla based website.

Some of the point you can look at are:
Basic SEO

Permalinks = Search Engine Friendly URL’s

Titles
Descriptions
More text
Image optimization

Than there is more advanced stuff and some great advice on coding and more, you can really do well if you follow his advice on:

Point 5 – Conversion Optimization
Point 6 – Comment Optimization
Point 7 – Off site site Blog SEO, like using Twitter SEO 

I am looking forward to implementing some of his advice here on this Blog and on my other Joomla SEO Blog

Both are build with WordPress to Promote my Joomla sites about Joomla SEO and Open Source CMS SEO

And I must say, that Joost already has inspired me to write a similar post about Joomla and SEO, that is if you as a reader would like to see that as well, covering several technical aspect on how to do this advanced and basic SEO for Joomla.

An Other great article to read is Meet Yoast in which Joost writes about the redesign and the new domain name… also read the comments like "How does it feel to commit Technorati suicide" since your Technorati rankings won’t follow you to the new domain like your FeedBurner readers will.

Thank you Yoast for a great post a great new site and insight into the basic off really well done SEO!

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEO Articles

You are reading WordPress SEO Post and Joomla Lessons an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

So you think I have made a wrong update on this Blog, do you?
Well, guess again… it was not my update!

First let me tell you I am a big fan of Netvibes and Feedburner as well, because they both supply great free services for keeping tabs on the Internet moving around.
I even wrote an article on how to Run your Joomla feed through Feedburner

Now for the issue mentioned in the article title, here are some Graphical illustrations of the drop:

Details of the Day Before…

And the Day after the Great Update…

See the difference? I do! There are no more Netvibes subscribers…

Feedburner or Netvibes?

So who is to blame? Feedburner for not picking up the right stats from Netvibes? or Netvibes for not sending the right statistics to Feedburner?

Or are there mayor problems at Netvibes?

It did not take long to find out where the problem resides since Netvibes did indeed do a mayor upgrade on the 23 of April as they said the would.

So now everybody is on Ginger and there are going to be big improvements on the new Netvibes, and yes they did offer their apologies for the Downtime because they run into some unforeseeable technical problems.

But I did not see any remarks in the comments that stated that the feed subscribers count is going the be restored.
In the mean time people are calling on Google, as the new owner of Feedburner about why they do not report the right feed count.

You can read more on the problem at the issues already started in Januari.

Why does it matter that the feed-count is down from an SEO Point of view?
Because Google also looks at the Feed-count to see if there are a lot of followers so they can see if your site is an authority site or note.
And they do own Feedburner… and the Feed count is one item of the Webmaster tools..

Besides that, if you already show a larger count of subscriber numbers, people are more willing to subscribe as well.
Finally I am just hoping they will solve this problem as soon as possible!

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Joomla Seo

You are reading How to Loose 623 Feed subscribers with one Update an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

This is really a post about Joomla and SEO I would rather not have written…. but it is a great case studie, so here we go…

About 3 weeks back I did some work on my major dutch website, replacing a SEF component, replacing the template and also updating the site to Joomla 1.0.13 which I should have done some time ago.. (no not to Joomla 1.0.14 yet, but you will see in the end why not).

The SEF Components

I wanted to replace the OpenSEF component with sh404SEF, mainly because of the way the later works by sending real 404 headers.
This site had more pages in Google than there were actual pages… I must admit I did some heavy testing with different SEF components in the early days , thus creating more URLs pointing to the same content.
But they al said to the search engines:
He I am OK look Ma, code 200! So all pages stayed in the index.

So cleaning that up was one of the aspect to choose for sh404SEF, the other reason was that OpenSEF is no longer under real development.

Oke, back to the site in question. All things with previous site conversions went without any problems, but with this site I also wanted do a little change in the URLs.
I covered that by redirecting the old URLs to the new ones with 301 redirect in the .htaccess file, so that was covered.

The new template and site upgrade

This was not a great undertaking, as Joomla works great with templates and this one is really clean and fast, even more then the old one.

Upgrading a Joomla website within the 1.0.x range isn’t hard to do as well.

Both items were ready in about 30 minutes with some tweaking here and there.

The Google results

After a few day however I found that my visitors number were dropping dramaticly…

Is this new SEF component the cause of this problem? That was the mayor change on the site?

But I did redirect all those pages, so this could not have caused such a dramatic drop!

Now one thing I always do if I have to look at a site in trouble is run the command site:www.example.com in Google.
And there it was! The problem I was having with the site was the basic one with any not optimized Joomla website!

Standard Joomla gives out the HTML Titles composed of [sitename] – [pagetitle] and this site ad a long title.
So there were a lot of hits showing… my site title and not my carefully crafted pages titles.

Then it hit me, I had upgrade the site to 1.0.13, but had forgotten to install the Joomla SEF Patch by Joomlatwork.com after that.

The Solution to the problem

For those of you that don’t now the SEF Patch yet (shame on you), one of the things that is done by the patch is that it changes the way the title of the pages are shown.
Basically it just shows the page title as the HTML title tag, you know, the number one SEO Ranking factor?

Installing the free Patch is just uploading the Page via FTP, or if you have the paid version, which is installed as a component, but thus giving you even more controle over the HTML title (costs 8,33 Euro, which is really a bargain)

I Installed the SEF Patch, and run a new sitemap.xml creation to see if all page titles were back the way they should.
Then off to the Google webmaster tool, removing the old sitemap and telling Google there was a new one.

The results of this action you can see in th graphics above, the site is doing oke again and is now back to where it was before and slightly growing further.

Conclusion:  if you upgrade a Joomla site, even if it is your own, you should always make sure you have the SEF Patch in place!

P.s. Why no upgrade to 1.0.14? There is no patch for this version yet :-) (to my knowledge that is, maybe Richard can shed some light on this) 

Update: The Joomla SEF Patch for 1.0.14 is now ready for download at http://www.joomlatwork.com/downloads/

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Joomla Seo

You are reading A Joomla SEO Post I didn’t want to write… an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you want to know how fast you can get into the Google index…

My best time is 38 Minutes :-)

No really!, I wrote the post about Joomla 1.5 RC 4 and the SEF patch just about 40 minutes ago….

I do have a Google alert on “Joomla SEO” which should inform me if anything with Joomla SEO is posted or written on The Internet.
And I got an email with the alert that my Post was “discovered”, so I did a search on simply “Joomla sef rc4″, about 11.800 results showed up, and the post was ranked at a Nr 5  position.

Just above a Feed scraper website that reposts an excerpt of my post via Technorati I guess.

Yes, that is the drawback of RSS Feeds…

So here are some screen shots to prove it (no, no photo-shopping is done)

Getting into Google fast:

A fast scraper….

(No, no link here!)

Tags

Joomla Seo

You are reading One of the fastest ways to get into Google… Blog and RSS Feeds an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

The new release candidate of Joomla 1.5 is released as a new step forward to the new stable version of Joomla!

So I have downloaded the file and via http://www.alledia.com/ I found the new SEF patch for this new version as well.

To be honest… I would have rather have these patch functions implemented in the core files of version 1.5, but reading through the documentation at Joomlatwork, I now know it not going to happen before at least version 1.6.

And this brings in so many nice features:

• Optimize your HTML title tag for SEO (Next to normal Title and Alias function)
• Meta description (also for menu items, not only articles)
• Meta keywords (also for menu items, not only articles)
• Robots Meta tag
• Lots more for the basic needs of Search Engine Optimization for Joomla!

What I like most of the guys at Joomlatwork is their commitment to improve Joomla when it comes to SEO.

“Therefore we will support this patch within the coming releases of Joomla 1.5 and higher until it’s included in the main code line.”

And I agree with them, this should be in Joomla! core if it is going to be the best CMS for SEO.

You can read more about this patch and download it at Joomla SEO Patch for Joomla 1.5

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Joomla Seo

You are reading Joomla 1.5 RC4 Released and The SEF Patch for it… an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you read the post about Matt Cutss and Meta Description Tags�and looked at the video, you now that Google does use these terms for their Index.

Wel, they just made that more clear than ever…. giving you a big help on improving your site for their results pages!

Just login to Webmaster central en check your website diagnostics, and then “content analysis”

You will see a new screen that give you a lot of information about any problems that your site may encounter that way Google looks at the website:

So you might find out about:

Title problems

• Missing title tags
• Duplicate title tags
• Long title tags
• Short title tags
• Non Informative title tags (Are you using the standard “contact” page of Joomla, you will see just “contact”…

Meta description problems

• Duplicate meta descriptions (real Joomla problem that easily be�fixed by NOT filling the Global Metatag function and filling every page tags�!)
• Long meta descriptions
• Short meta descriptions

Non-indexable content�

• Flash ?

To find out what pages have problems click through the on the issue line:

The next screen will show if you click on the indicated link:

For every issue reported, you can check the pages that should be corrected and work on a better ranking website.

And of course there are some helpful pages at Google about this tool:

What is the Content analysis page

After you have corrected all the errors and problems, this is what you would like to see…

Tags

Joomla Seo

You are reading Google helps you to correct your description Metatags an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

You might have read my post on Working Images in Search Engine Optimization were you can find the basic of using your Images for Rankings.

Recently I was working on a Redesign of a Website and Weblog, as I realized that there was one design elements that is the most Fun for me to work on, but did not mention it to you… yet.

So here is a pointer, look at the header or preferably headers on your website, what do they tell you?
If you mouse over them, do they tell you what the page is about?
Do you name you headers just header-1.png or top-image.jpg?

Just start using your headers the same way you (should) do you images!
Name you headers so the will fit your page keywords, for example this image:

Knowing Your Template

If you want to work with your Headers this way, you most likely have to change some setting in your template.

Look for Coding like headers, or top modules, learn to read the HTML, php and CSS coding to find the right spot to work on.
Don’t forget to use the ALT and Title attributes for the images, as they are the key elements together with the image name…

But most importantly, make sure the images fit the layout and color scheme of the website, and that they are appealing to your visitors.

For Joomla you can use the Simple Image Rotator form http://www.joomlaworks.gr (P.s Don’t forget to set the Link Title Option :-))
If you run  a WordPress Blog, check your header.php file of your Template…

And while you are at it, have fun creating the headers!

Tags

Joomla Seo

You are reading Having Fun with SEO Image Headers an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Last time you could read about finding related keywords to incorporate in your website, know there is a nice tool to find the websites to link to…

Why Links out? Because it shows the search engines where to position your website in the large scheme of topics on the Internet.
As Matt Cutts stated several times, also on the paid-links discussions, Links should be as relevant as possible and should be off benefit to your visitors.

Learning from Problogger

Reading the post from Problogger about “Graphing your Blog Connections” is tried the Tool myself.
You have to read the Getting started on the website off http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html to get it to work, but it was a pretty straight forward experience.. works great!

But as I tried some queries to see how is linking to my sites, it suddenly hit me…. this is great!
If you out in the keyword your are planning your niche in, you instantly get the mayor players in that field!

For instance I tried “Joomla SEO” (go figure..) and this is what came up.

Notice the Big Rounds, those are the Mayor players in this field!

Linking out to those site right in the middel of the biggest cirkels shows Google that your website is related to that topic.

On the site off TouchGraph your can read the following: “The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites.”

And I guess this Blog is doing oke on the Topic its setup for..

Now go and try it yourself for your Keywords and find out who to link to !!
And look at there site to learn…

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading Finding Your Niche Competitors and Authority Sites an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I got back from a short Holiday a few days ago.

You might have the same problem I had to get started again with work and business, and getting through ton’s of E-Mail.
Not even all off them where spam.. but there where some nice ones that made it OK.

One of the Things I did on my vacation was to read a book.. yes I do sometimes, especially if you have NO Internet connection on you holiday address.

But was it relaxing, yes and no, the reading first was somewhat hard to get into the subject, but once the basics were done, the good stuff showed up.
And now I have to work on the subjects and insights I gained… so should you!

It was an eye opener and pleasing to read as well, this book will definitely by my site if I am going to evaluate my sites and that of my customers.

But there where also some chapters that luckily confirmed my ideas and give not only insight in how to make a site more usable for the visitors, but also for search engine spiders!.

What book? Well of course the book that does make you think!

Tags

Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, Search Engine, Webdesign

You are reading Holiday Thinking and Optimization an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Oke, you know what SEO means, and what Joomla is.. but this LSI?

Well, if you really are into Search Engine Optimization, you have come across this term “Latent Semantic Indexing” or in short LSI.

So, is this going to be such a long an technical post about algorithms and how they are build… no, its not..

But what you should know about LSI is simpel, it is all about related keywords!
Yes the ones you are so desperately seeking to improve your visitors numbers, but it goes beyond what you normally do.

To explain the term in a more down to earth manner, you should know that you are using it the whole day through en you didn’t even realize it.
Say for example you are thinking of Joomla, what comes to mind? Components, Templates, Modules, Plugins, Content etc, all of these terms are related to the Content Management System Joomla.

Another example, you walk into an unknown supermarkt and want to buy a bottle of Coca-Cola, what do you do?
You look for a sign in the hallways marked “Soft Drinks” because you know it is related to your search.
But you don’t have to think about it, you just know.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Google and other search engines use an algorithm that does something similar, it looks at the structure and words used on a website to determine the basic topic, on main subject of a website.

But is uses this related terms also in their personalized search results!
Lets look at the results a musician will get, someone who searches for Music, MP3, Records and sheet music and song lyrics in Google.
If he/she would now uses the search term “mambo”, the results will point him to websites about the Dance “Mambo”.

If I would use the same term “mambo” the results are highly focused on the Content Management System “Mambo” and there will be results about Joomla sites as well..
But that is because the main part of my searches are all about Internet and Content Management Systems.
You see these are all highly related results for both persons.

How does Joomla Help with LSI

 One thing that the search engines look for to identify the subject and relevance of your website for your Keywords is the way your website is build , or structured around the topic.

Now this is where Joomla has its strength, although some may hate it, and that is its structure for content.
You can have one, or more sections, but each section is build with categories that holds the content pages.

And to name and sort these categories, you look for, and use the structure that you see fit for your topic!
So for a Joomla Information website, you have categories about Components, Templates, Modules, Plugins and sometimes extend into Joomla SEO :-)
You see that the categorie structure forces you to think about your subject and use the most related and relevant words?

So in this case the so called weakness of Joomla becomes one of its strengths.
And yes I know, WordPress is great for Search Engine Optimization, but the use of Categories only becomes useful if your tightly restrict the use to just some categories.

Drupal is also great for Websites and Blogs, but you still have to come to grips with this Taxonomy thing..
And If you don’t get it, how are you going to explain it to your customers?

Joomla is a great Content Management System, that has its pros and cons, but I really think it is one of the best for a Small or Medium Business website to start out with and has te potential to grow with the Company.
And because of the rigid structure it will help you to keep your content and structure in focus, and thus relevant for Search Engines as well as your websites visitors!

If you liked the content of this article, please subscribe to the feed to keep up-to-date.
One word of warning though… I am off to a two weeks vacation, so you won’t see any update for that time.

But after that, I hope you will read some nice Search Optimization things I have thought up during that time, happy holidays!

P.s. One way to find these words, is to go to the Google Keyword Tool and use the Site-Related keywords tab and fill in the nr One website in your Niche.. you will find some great related terms you did not think off before.

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, SEO Articles, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading How Joomla helps with LSI and SEO an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Last time I wrote about the Title use in Joomla, pointing you to the Joomla Page Title, and the use of the Alias for schort URLs.

I all so pointed you to the Paid SEF Patch that has the HTML Title rewrite in it, and more options then just that.

Now there is a new Plugin, the JooFox Content Title Plugin  which gives you a great way to use the Title Alias to improve your HTML Titles…

How does it work?
Just install the Plugin, go to a Joomla content page, and change the alias to get a better title.

You can read more about the way it works and some extra things to think about before using this Plugin on my blog post at getting-the-number-one-seo-factor-improved-in-joomla 

You can greatly improve your Joomla SEO with the combination of the Free SEF Patch from Joomlatwork and this new Joomla Content Page Title Plugin!

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading Joomla Title Plugin for Search Engine Optimization Improvement an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you run a Joomla or WordPress Based website, you are of course constantly creating quality content for your users.
Writing the best Titles like www.copyblogger.com told you how to do.

But there are several options in Joomla, and with the right Plugin you get something similar in WordPress.

If you create new content in Joomla, you find yourself with two Title options:

The Title and the Title Alias.

The first option is what is going to be the title of you page and is show as a content header.
The second option is not shown anywhere on the page.. so what’s the use of this option?

Most SEF Components have the possibility to use this alias as the base for there URL rewrite.
So you can have an Title that says:
“The best Content Management System, Joomla or WordPress”
but the alias is written ”Joomla or WordPress CMS”
With the use of the alias, you URL is going to be http://www.example.com/joomla-or-wordpress-cms.html
instead of the longer title based version

http://www.example.com/The-best-Content-Management-System-Joomla-or-WordPress

But with the paid version of Joomla SEF Patch by www.joomlatwork.com you get a second title option:

The HTML Title

Now this title is the one that gets indexed by Google and other Search Engines… this is (after good content) the number one Search Engine Optimization tool.

With a standard Joomla installation, you content title is also the HTML title.
But you might want to keep the content titles short, and the HTML titles extended with some extra keywords…!!

This functionality is also integrated in the latest version of JoomSEF, in the edit URL section.

The Title Options in WordPress

You may not be aware of it yet, but there are similar functions in WordPress.
Just start writing you post, and you are editing your Post Title, which (if you have permalinks enabled) becomes the content of your URL as well.

But there is this nice option in WordPress that is called “Post Slug”

Here is where you can change the URL that is used for you Post, especially useful if you have a long post title..
Just shorten you Post slug and the URL will be much shorter and easier to pickup.

And with the right Plugin you also have the possibility to change your HTML Title, or as some call it, you SEO Title.
There are two Plugins that can do that for you:
The SEO Title Tag Plugin which is great for rewriting titles in bulk, and for page titles rewrites, and the best part is, you can use it in combination with the next Plugin.

This Plugin not only gives you the HTML title rewrite option, but also the best way to insert Metatags like keywords, and with the use of the “Optional Excerpt” to fill the MetaTag description.
This Plugin is really the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress and this one is a must have for Search Engine Optimization.

It does even more than just the Title rewrite as you can see.
It can even fill your Metatag Description automatically with the first words from your post…

If you want to use it with the SEO Title Tag Plugin, just untick the Rewrite Titles and the Titles from your other Plugin are used.
So if you are starting a WordPress Blog, go for this Plugin form the start and you will do allright.

Title use Conclusion

The HTML Title tag is very important for your Search Engine Optimization.
Not only should it be written to draw people to your website, it also should contain your targeted keywords.

With the options I mentioned above, you have now the possibilities to extend the power of the HTML Title tag beyond your post title and keeping your URL short as well.

Make good use of it, and don’t forget to write some keywords, but even more important, write very good excerpts of you post and content in you description tags.
Because in essence they are small adverts for you page that show up in the SERP Pages of the mayor Search Engines.
So work extra hard to create those descriptions.

Tags

Blogging, Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEF, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, WordPress

You are reading What Title to Use in Joomla or WordPress an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Just a few day’s ago you could have read about Google and Placement Performance..

Now is time to expand the Google network with the Pay-Per-Action on a Global scale.

So I just wanted to show you some of the links to the Information Google is giving out on this “new” advertising model.

Here is the basic most important line from the Pay-Per-Action FAQ:

How much does pay-per-action advertising cost?
“Only you can decide how much you want to pay for your pay-per-action advertising. You determine how much you’re willing to offer for each specific action to be completed on your site, whether it’s $5 for a purchase or $1 for a newsletter sign-up. You can also control your spending by setting a daily budget.”

For mor Information on the subject you can check out:

Google AdWords Pay-Per-Actions ads
Pay-Per-Action FAQs
Google Announced Beta Test
Google Going Global with PPA

The advertisers that might be part of the Beta will receive an Alert in the AdWords account.

Adsense Publishers and SEO

But how about the Publishers I wonder? has anyone seen something of the Publishers site of this action?
I guess this will be by invitation only..

Looking at the factors that are off importance for the AdWords Advertisers:
“Starting today, advertisers who use AdWords conversion tracking and receive more than 500 conversions from their cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) campaigns in the most recent 30-day period will be invited to join this beta test, on a rolling basis.”

You can imagine that there will be only Adsense Publishers invited to check out the PPA programs offers that give good quality content on their website that makes it possible to get those high performance conversions..

So if you want to get into this game and earn some more money with  Adsense and PPA, you have to make sure your website is in Tip-Top shape with high quality content and of course you need to work on your Search Engine Optimization, otherwise you lose…
So does Google indeed want you to be part of this? I guess So with their recent Policy Update

Tags

Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading Google goes Global with Pay-Per-Action in AdWords an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Typo3, all Open Source Content Management Systems.
But which ones are Search Engine Friendly? Or are they Search Engine Optimized?

To be honest, Joomla in the latest version 1.0.12 is not Search Engine Friendly, the new Beta 1.5 version is much more Friendly from a Search Engine Point of view.
For the current version you have a lot of work to do before its Friendly enough.
Drupal and Typo3 are already more SEF, and WordPress is the easiest to work with if it comes to creating and using a Search Engine Friendly system.

So Joomla is the worst at the moment, but I love it because its so easy to work with from a content creation point of view.
Besides that, there are a lot of free components, modules and Plugins that can help you in making it SEF.

Search Engine Friendly and Search Engine Optimized 

Did you notice, I never said any of them being Search Engine Optimized…
That is because I totally agree with Joost van der Valk in his post on Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

Also the post that inspired him by Joe Dolson is a great read on the topic of SEO versus SEF, which in turn was written as a reply to a post by Stony de Gruyter.

Then Gary of Phoenixrealm wrote a Post on Content Management Systems and SEF and SEO to point to the make sure that your CMS of choice should be Search Engine Friendly.

But just a Search Engine Friendly Content Management System doesn´t mean its Optimized!
Some Buro´s think just making your site SEF is enough to make it Optimized… no way..
As Joost pointed out, Optimization takes a lot more effort then just making a website completely search engine friendly.
Optimization is in the details, in the little things and learning from tracking and evaluating your changes and there effects.

Search Engine Optimization is delicate work and you need a lot of knowledge to get the job done.
Its also not a static one-time effort, it takes a lot more than just that to get good ranking and stay on top with your results.
So why waste the SEO´s time to make a site Friendly?

Educate the designers and Site builders

Just make sure that your site builders and designers have a basic knowledge about Search Engine Optimization to get the best results if your have to hire an Professional Search Engine Optimizer!

The basics are not that difficult to learn, like the comment op the post of Joost by Ruben Timmerman mentioning that a web developer should know that the title tag of each page should be into the H1 tag.
It should be basic knownledge of your designer on how to work these things into there designs.

There are companies out on the web promoting there SEO Services who don’t have a clue what SEO really is.
I have seen some websites from “Search Engine Optimization” firms that are so NOT optimized that I would never give them that part of business..

But the main thing is, looking at those content management systems that they all use templates.
Templates designed by Professional designers, who have no clue about Search Engine Optimization.

So its not just the developer that needs to be educated, please focus on the designers as well!
They are the ones that can make the efforts of your Optimizer much easier, by already creating Templates that need little to no work the make the site Search Engine Friendly.

Not only for Joomla, Drupal and Typo3 websites, but also for WordPress, as there are some Themes that need to be worked at to make them Search Engine Optimized…
And as Joost pointed out, those are just the simple mistakes that need to be corrected to make you website Optimized for Search Engines.

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, SEF, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, Webdesign, WordPress

You are reading Is your website Search Engine Friendly or already Search Engine Optimized? an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Just last Monday Statcounter announced that the 100 page view limit for the Free accounts is raised to 500 for Free

Now for some of you, that will be off no intrest, but for the Small and Medium sized Business that run their own websites this is really great news.

Hold it, but Google Analytics does a lot more and is also free…

True, but just place yourself in the the mind of a small business entrepreneur that wants to see how he is doing with his website.. which screen showing you the results would you prefer?

The Statcounter overview

Or the Google Analytics overview?

Or even the old Graphics?

Now you must admit that Google has now a better interface then before, but for me…
I like the Statcounter view better because it gives me a lot of information right there in that one screen.

But I also have to admit that I use both an every site I build for myself, but just the Statcounter for my customers.

Why the Statcounter for Customers?

If your work with in the SMB sector like I do, you cannot expect from your customers to learn how Google Analytics works.
They just want to see how they are doing, visitor wise…and how people get to their website and as cheap as possible.

But you, you want more out off you statistics, you need to get more data to be able to optimize the site for you clients.
Well in that case you combine the two.

Here is another fun part of Statcounter for you as a developer / optimizer.. you can have all your customer statistics on your own login and give your customers their own login name and password, and limit them to their own domain!

Just giving them a free service from your part.. and freeing up your time to do more productive work than writing the reports for your customers.

I think its a smart move from Statcounter to upgrade the free accounts.
The create a Buzz in the Internet about it, and are (hopefully) able to hold their customers that would otherwise run for the Google Analytics Hills.. 

Of course the Google Analytics tool is more focused on Conversions and Data for the AdWords user, that is why there are so many conversion statistics incorporated into the overviews.
But it makes it hard to work with for the average Jane and Joe of a Small Business.

So, which Statistic counter would you present to your SMB Clients?

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine

You are reading Google Analytics versus Statcounter an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther