In the last few months I have been moving some websites from subdomains to new domains and sometimes changing there apperance.
Here is what happened on one of them…

The site was number One on Google for a long tail keywords phrase and it site was getting some nice traffic from this term.

After the move from its sub-domain life and going into its own domain I changed the template to a more suitable one and optimized the site to get more traffic.

One thing I did was the craft the Home page title so it would get even more traffic and it worked out nicely. The new theme was search engine optimized and I did not feel like I needed to do anything about it…

As I said, the site had a No. 1 position on Google, but after I wrote a new post on this site this happened to the traffic.

Once I noticed the drop in traffic I checked Google and saw the site was still No. 1 but not with the title of the homepage anymore.

The title shown by Google was the title of the last post and no longer this traffic attracting title of the Homepage!
This title was not really on topic of the search term so nobody clicked on it to check out the site!

I checked the theme and changed the header option to make sure I got the Homepage title back into place.

Bringing it Back on Track

So everything is technically set back to how it should be, and now it was time to get Google’s spider to re-index the site so the homepage title was back where it belonged.

Writing a new post that to update the site did the trick and the site was back in a few days.

All looked good, but a day later there was again this drop in traffic. Now I can explain the first drop, then the recovery but not the second drop.

The only thing I can think of was the short time upgrade followed by something Google might do like switching back for some time serving search engine cached indexes if they upgrade the primary index.
If you have another explanation, I would love to here it!

After this initial drop and kick back the site is now doing well, thank you for asking.
It is still growing in traffic.

Conclusion: Keep track of your site after you do a mayor upgrade like changing themes or even system upgrades.
The thing you need to watch closely is that the so carefully crafted title of you homepage is still the same so it will keep getting you the traffic. Especially it you have the No. 1 position on Google that you wanted to get.

Tags

SEO, WordPress

You are reading No. 1 on Google and No Clicks an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

As I mentioned on Twitter before, the next step in my 2010 cleanup was Hummerbie, the moving of the Blog that is, not the site Hummerbie.com.

If you are reading this post via your RSS Feed reader or your Feed Mail subscription the Joomla SEO Blog is now on HerbertvanDinther.com, yes on its own domain and no longer in a subdomain of a Joomla! based website.

It has served its purpose in getting traffic for its Big Brother, and now its time to set it free on its own to see if it can grow further into a mayor force on its own.

There was af course an other reason for giving this blog its new domain: Branding… I have been blogging on several sites and platforms under the name Hummerbie and now the Blog lives under Herbert van Dinther and the posts are also posted with the name Herbert-Jan van Dinther.

There is also a domain herbertjanvandinther.com and that is setup with Joomla as Content Management System, but that is my next project to get some content and articles on.

Joomla, WordPress and SEO

For those who have been reading this blog for a longer period of time know that the focus was on Joomla! and SEO, well there is going to be an extra topic on this site and that is going to be WordPress. The system this blog is build on.

I think they can work together to give you the best of both worlds and a feed of this site will be part of the Joomla! site.

One great thing I recently came aware off is that http://www.rockettheme.com/ now is offering Joomla and WordPress themes and if that is not enough, they have this fast Joomla! Theme called Afterburner and the same theme for WordPress Afterburner and they are both Free. So you can have your Joomla! site and WordPress Blog with the same look and feel.

Redevolution has been doing the same thing for a longer period of time now. They also have a great SEO Blog that is worth visiting.

So you see, Joomla and WordPress match up just fine and I have been promoting Joomla on several wordpress.com based blogs like seo4joomla.wordpress.com and joomlablogging.wordpress.com.

As I said before, I needed a new focus for 2010 to get more done and to blog more about the topics I love to write about and I think this move will give me new and fresh idea’s to write about. I do have some things in mind to share with you, so lets make this a great year for all of us.

P.s. If you find any problems on this site after its move, please contact me so I can fix it :-)

Tags

Blogging, Joomla, SEO, WordPress

You are reading Moving Hummerbie’s SEO Blog to its new home 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

Yes, that is right, they all fail at Search Engine Optimization…

I have been reading several new posts about how well WordPress is doing SEO compared to Joomla! and how good Drupal is in SEO compared to WordPress and….well, you get the general idea.

it seems that every time people are defending their choice to use a certian Content management system. Which is a good thing, you can show people the reasons why you love the system(s) that you use.

We all do, we all like the system of our choice, whether it is WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Modx, Typo3, etc,etc. They are all great open source content management systems.

The Big Three, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

I have written before how Search Engine Friendly WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal can be, but they don’t do SEO…, YOU do SEO…

That is right, they don’t do anything else then giving you the tools to get your website ready for higher rankings and better performance in the search engines!

You are the deciding factor in how well search engine optimization is done. You and the webmaster and content writers of your website.

None of the content management systems will come up to you and say, here is a great keyword rich title for your post. None of them will provide you with the keyword rich quality content that attracts visitors and back-links.

That is all up to you.

None of these content management systems will give you the right structure and internal linking ideas for the content of your site based on relevant keywords and none of them will do that keyword research for you.

They are just what they say the are, content management systems. You can use them for building websites, for building blogs, for building community’s, but they still remain content management systems.

They are the engines that drive your website and/or Blog, but you have to work with them to get a really search engine optimized website.

The deciding factor for great search engine optimization

It is up to you to get the most out of the system of your choice and you will see that you can do it!

Either with WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, or any other system, you have the knowledge and the ideas to get better rankings for you site.

You know your system of choice and you are the engineer that knows how to fire up that engine to drive it up to the best possible spot in the search engine results pages!

So don’t blame or praise a website building engine for getting search engine optimization done right, praise yourself for doing a job well done.

Tags

Drupal, Joomla, SEO, WordPress

You are reading Why Joomla, WordPress and Drupal all Fail at Search Engine Optimization an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Above is a little picture I wanted to show you.

For those among you who are used to looking at website traffic graphics you see that something strange has happened here…

You see, the picture above is from one of my websites and shows clearly what the impact was of the following story.

I made a mistake, a simple one but with large consequences as you can see.
Because of this mistake traffic for this site almost went done to zero.
But if it had gone down to zero it would have been clear what happed right from the start, but it did not, I “just” lost traffic from the mayor three search engines.

What happened?

In simple terms: the site was hacked via  a remote inclusion attack from several forum like websites, one of them was successful.
There was just one file affected but one of the most important ones, the .htaccess file.
There were four lines of code injected at the bottom to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]three - code used

The code in line three redirects those search engine robots too the site in line four (which I changed, the real site got enough traffic from me).

How was this possible? Simple, because I forgot to reset the security on .htaccess after doing some previous test.
The file was still set to 707 = also public write access, and yes its security is set back to the right access now.

How to find out your site is hacked

As I said before if the traffic had gone to zero you most probably would have checked your site and see a defacing of the site itself of some kind. The site would not work the way you would expect it to.

In this case the only problem I could see was that the traffic dropped hard in the statistics.
Upon looking further into the details I checked the ranking of previous Google search terms the site was ranking for.

I found that all the top 10 ranking pages ware gone! All my efforts to rank for those keywords were lost.

So I logged into Google webmaster to check if there was something horribly wrong with the site and the site had received some kind of penalty.

And yes there were errors with the URLs in the sitemap.xml, errors about unreachable URLs.
So I checked the files on the site that where modified just before the drop, and there was the .htaccess file with the above mentioned code.

Getting back into Google

After cleaning up the mess and setting the security right I realized the impact of these few lines.

All three search engine robots had gotten notice that the pages where permanently moved to another domain! which is not true, but they don’t know that.

Checks on site: reference in Google, Yahoo and MSN showed that the domain was still in Yahoo and MSN Indexes, but had no entry in the Google Index anymore.

So it was time to send a reconsideration request to Google telling them what happened, what had been done to resolve the problem and what steps where taken too prevent it from happening again.

After that, you can only wait and wait…, don’t expect an email form Google, just an automatically generated message in your Webmaster control center that they will look into the matter.

After a few days traffic started to build again from Google and Yahoo as well as MSN (Live.com) so you can conclude that Google really looks and acts upon your requests.

Hard Lessons learned

Now for the fun part of this episode, the lessons learned
First lesson: make sure to secure your cms installation and critical files.

Some tips:
- change passwords on a regular basis (use keepass if you have a lot off passwords to remember)
- secure your admin directory or files with .htaccess passwords, most of the hosting companies have this option in their cpanel
- update your system as soon as a new version comes out.

Check your stats once a day, or a least every few days for strange things happening, since this could have taken me a long time to get back if it wasn’t for those early warning signs.

As a personal note: I need to get more incoming links from non-search engines to diversify my traffic sources :-)

What I realized after my traffic was back to its old level was that Google is really fast in acting on 301 redirects and changes in their index.
They update their index with a higher frequency than Yahoo and Live, and they really act fast on those re-inclusion request as well.

A hack like this before your start your SEO work for organic ranking would also mean that all your efforts will have no effect… so if a cusomers is really having trouble to get his or.her site into the search engines, check the .htaccess file!

If you have your own horror stories like this one, please share them in the comments and let us learn from those stories as well.

Tags

Optimization, SEO, Search Engines

You are reading Lost and Regained Traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN the Easy Way an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you keep an eye on things that are happening on Google, you will find some interesting things going on at this moment.

Ranking and Google Changes

First I want to point you to two video’s from webpronews.com, the first one is an interview with Bruce Clay about this presentation Ranking is Dead where is looks at how Universal search is going to effect your Search Engine Page results.

The other one is at the same site, but now an interview with Matt Cutts on some of the Changes at Google were he talks about some of the things that Bruce Clay pointed out.

From both interviews you can see that Universal Search is going to target your search result pages based on previous searches and Local Search results based on IP address.
The latter is af course already in place where Google will use IP country ranges to lead you to other Data Centers and gives local and country language specific results.

Universal search is mostly referred to as showing results based on your previous searches , but this time even if you are not logged into your Google mail account!
That might scare some privacy concerned people… take into account that Google, Live and Yahoo already have a lot of information on your search history, be it via cookies, or via your DSL Provider that gives you a nice IP address.
That IP address wil stay the same for a loooong time,which is great! For Search Engines that is…

Actually listening to Bruce Clay I find a lot of things he is predicting for 2009 are already in place, it is just the flick of a switch for Google to turn them on.

Searchwiki

One other new thing you might have seen if you are logged into your Google account and you do searches is the new Searchwiki function.

Next to each Title in the result-page there are two little icons, one for UP and one for Delete, well the last one is to actually remove that result form your own search page.
So now you can get those old or not relevant results out of your own search results, but how will this effect the total results in the long run?

I can imagine Google using those results of up and delete actions to improve results in general.
If you look at large enough numbers of people "voting" on search results you could clean up the total results and make them even more relevant and up-to-date as they are now.

Afraid of your competition "voting" your site out of the results? Don’t worry, as you heard before ranking is dead anyway.
But in fact I guess Google will have some algorithm in place that will show that people are trying to play the system.

The effects on SEO

Both Bruce and Matt mentioned it in their interview, as smart SEO is looking no longer at Search Page results rankings but at Conversion and is deep into analyzing his server logs.

A smart SEO is already working on Blogs, News, Images and Video to keep up with the new upcoming personalized search results and to provide your visitors with the quality content they are looking for.

But one thing I am really looking forward too is that importance of links to your site is going to be downgraded and real quality content is getting a more prominent place in the results pages.
This time driven by your own visitors that don’t have spam sites but are really liking your content. 

Tags

SEO, Search Engine

You are reading Ranking on Google is going to change in 2009 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

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

My Google Alert on Joomla SEO just brought me this link to an Google Insights Article that also discussed the use of this new tool in conjunction with the previous mentioned report in Open Source CMS Market shares.

What interested me even more was how these figures where on a regional level, so I did some comparisons between Worldwide, USA, UK and the Netherlands.

The outcome did somehow surprise me…

Below the graphics for the Worldwide search, showing clearly the search for Joomla as the biggest one…

Now for the Dutch searchers, Joomla is also looking great with extreem high search levels.

When it comes to the UK, you see that Joomla and WordPress are almost level, with WordPress here as the rising star.

But here is the really BIG surprise, Joomla is loosing big time to WordPress when it comes to the United States.

So where does this big difference come from? Are there more Bloggers in the US?
Is WordPress so much more popular in the US for use as a CMS as well?
Is the installed base of WordPress bigger in the US, and are there more questions on using WordPress?

But that is just one way to look at this tool….

Most interesting are the screens just below the Worldwide search, that will show you the regions that are the biggest searchers on that specific keyword.
Which is great information if you need to target a certain region for your SEO Customer.

Also the results below that field, which gives you related searches, but also Rising searches… which means that this is a tool to use in the future to see what keywords are hot and what you should be writing about!

I like the tool! How about you? can you work with this information or are you skeptical about the numbers shown?

Tags

SEO, Search Engine

You are reading Google Insights use for analysis and upcoming trends an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I have been following the Stompernet guys for some weeks now, as they are moving into the next Stompernet teachings.
Just have a look at Stompernet Going Natural 3 but you have to leave your name and email address to get to the real goodies.

Inside you will find some great videos from guys who really know there business.
Here are some of the video titles:

• ClickFu & the LOST video
• AdWords Triangulation Method
• Keyword Research
• Stomper Site Seer Introduction
• Stomper Site Seer How To
• Member Case studies
• en some more…

But make sure you got some time on your hands, because most of the video’s are about 30 Minutes and bring some great tips.
My Favorite is the one from Keyword research.

The Site Seer Tool
Looking at the tool that they provide, you can get even better keywords targeted to your website.
Using the tool is simpel, just fill in your website URL and two times your email address and the link to the full report is mailed to you.e report shows in one of the fields " How Google sees your site"  and that will bring some great information.

It shows you the main keywords that Google thinks what your website is about, but you can click on these words to get even more related keywords.In my case it showed me that one site was not on the keywords I wanted to target, but another one was spot on.

Further looking at the first site I found what was wrong so I can improve it.Please be aware that you can only get 5 reports within 24 hours, so take your main sites first.
There is other software like IBP SEO that can do a website analysis like the Site Seer tool, but they compare your site to the top ten websites for you keyword.
And I must say it is a great tool that I frequently use.
But the above mentioned Site Seer report part shows you if your Website theme is setup right.  

Stompernet
Now the new Stompernet is open, but still out of my reach with a Membership price of  " Just"  $797,00 per month, but it seems that it is well worth the money.

For now, I just have to settle for the free video´s and the tool, but that is really great offer to start with.
One more thing you have to look at once you have access to the free video´s is the way they have set this up over a short period of time, using the the AIDA formula to get people to want to sign up before the deal was on-line.
They get your Attention with the first video, build Interest with the full range of following video’s, got you to Desire for more with the tool, and set you up for the Action to sign up for the full package… 

The video’s are really master pieces of soft selling the deal, something to keep in mind for your next product launch.

Tags

SEO

You are reading Free Search Engine Optimization Video’s and Website Analyses Tool an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

First off, search engine friendly is not the same as search engine optimized!
This is something Joost de Valk already wrote about in his post Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

Search engine optimization does go a lot further then making a search engine friendly website, and building a Content Management system for websites that is search engine optimized…, that is just not possible…

What is possible is to look at the search engine friendliness of three popular Open Source CM systems.
Basics for this comparison are the options necessary that are in the system itself and not those things that can by done with Content, Images, Layout or other aspects.
So no info about H1 or H2, no alt or title tags for images and more.
No, you can read here about:

• The possibility to influence the HTML title separate from the content title
• The possibility to use the Metatags like Description and Keywords on individual content items
• Create search engine friendly URLs, preferably with keywords in it, or other wise with as little possible use of parameters like id_?=12 or similar.

For all three system’s the comparison is with the following technical hosting specification:

• Linux (UNIX) based hosting
• PHP 4 or PHP 5
• Apache webserver with Mod_Rewrite active

WordPress, Drupal en Joomla

WordPress

• URL Rewrite is easy to realize with the ”Permalink” option, WordPress can set the right .htaccess options in the file if the file is writable. My own mostly used option is to use the custom option /%postname%/ with which the post title is also the URL. You can change the URL by changing the text in the “Post Slug” option.
• Title is naturally  the standard title of your post, but you want more control on the option for search engine, that is why your could use the  SEO Title tag plugin with just a minor change in your template.
• Metatags in a basic WordPress installation there is no possibility to change the ”Description” and ”Keywords” per post or page. With the All-in-one-SEO-Pack plugin you will have all these options. You can also change the Title with this plugin, but I like the overview and options that SEO Title tag will give you.
  You can use both plugins at the same time if you disable the title rewrite option in All-in-one-SEO-Pack

Tip: Use the optional excerpt function to generate the Meta description, that will also give you better archive pages, since most of the templates use that data for the archive page creation.

Drupal

• URL rewrite in Drupal you need to use the site configuration option “Clean URLs” that also can change your .htaccess file if it is writable. But that just changes your URL to /node/1/ instead off q=1. And you need more…. That is why you need to install the ”pathauto” module and you activate the modules “path” and “pathauto”.
• Title this is just as with the other just the title of your content item, but with the Page Title module you just have a little more control about the title tag, but not a lot.
• Metatags in the standard installation of Drupal this option is also not available, but with the Meta Tags Nodeword module you will get that possibility.

Tip: Set in the Pathauto module in the general settings the option at “Update action” to “Do Nothing” with this option you will later have the possibility to change the title without changing the URL.

Joomla 1.0

• URL rewrite in version 1.0.x of Joomla there is an SEO option in the main configuration screen, a standard htaccess.txt file is included in the package en needs to be renamed to .htaccess. With this option enabled URLs are made on the base of ID numbers like Domain-name/12/25/3/, but here you also want more… that is why you should install a SEF Component like sh404SEF that will give you much better URLs. And it will give you a good 404 error page that will also uses a proper 404 header. (Joomla standard will give an 200 OK and redirects you to the Homepage…)
• Title with the same SEF component you will get the opportunity to use the title alias function for you URL so you can use your normal article title for you optimization. For an optimal use of titles, and also for your menu items, you can use the SEF Patch of Joomlatwork , there is also a paid version that will give you a separate HTML Title option for more control like the WordPress SEO Title plugin.
• Metatags the description and keyword options are already in a standard Joomla incorporated for each article, but not for menu items, you will have to get the above mentioned SEF Patch to use that.

Tip: Choose with any SEF component you use alway the option /category/title and not /section/category/title to get a little shorter URLs. /title/ alone is also a possibility but not as good, because you can run into trouble like things like /Drupal/installation manual.HTML and /WordPress/installation manual.HTML (Drupal en WordPress are here been used as categories)

Joomla 1.5

• URL Rewrite is in Joomla 1.5 done with the SEO settings in your Global configuration, but you have now three options, unfortunately in each of those options, there is always an item ID number in the URL.
  • SEF on, will give you directly URLs with the title in it, but with index.php in the URL. (can also be used on windows hosting)
  • SEF with the use of .htaccess, this will also give you the URL with title, but than without the index.php
  • Use suffix, this options sets a .HTML at the end of your URL
  • Attention! Joomla 1.5 uses the title alias, but you have to set the ”-” between the words in your URL options, otherwise you will get a %20% in your URL if you leave it blank.
• Title here Joomla will use the standard article title, if your want more control, than you can use the new Joomla 1.5 SEF patch from Joomlatwork.com (Dutchies ;-)) and I have to add here that Richard of Joomlatwork already has stated that the SEF patch will be update with each release until it is in the Joomla core!
  If you use the SEF patch you get an extra SEO tab in your configuration screen, don’t forget to set the minimal [TITLE] option, otherwise your title will show your URL as title.
• Metatags are also like the “old” Joomla version built-in for articles and site wide via your Global configuration. But like with the old version, here is the same advice to get more control use the SEF patch of Joomlatwork.com .

Tip: For both versions of Joomla versions an advice, do not use the Global Metatag settings! With version 1.0.x you will get the text of the Globals on top of the page Metatags which will leave you with pretty much the same Metatags in the search engines as snippets, version 1.5 does this a lot better, and will not fill it with the standard if you use the page description.However is does set this if the page description is empty…

Conclusion: None of the three is out-of-the-box ready as search engine friendly Content Management system. With all three there needs to be done some extra work to realize the desired options.

For me they all have there own usage:

• WordPress works great for smaller websites and even bigger Blogs
• Joomla is fine for SMB websites and, with some extra extensions can be used for bigger sites as well.
  Especially the easy and user friendliness is great for less “technical” webmasters.
• Drupal can do almost everything, but for me is somewhat staying behind the others because of the lack of user friendliness for those who have the maintain and edit the page content.

But the most important factor in the choice of system is still what your customer wants and the ease of use for him/her… if the site has to become a success, then it must by their website, and to achieve that they have to be able to easily maintain the site themselves!
For search engine optimization…, well, that is why there are specialists, those who will look at the details… and each of them will have there own preferences for a certain system.

O yes, tips and  other options… the comments are open :-)

Tags

Drupal, Joomla, SEF, SEO, WordPress

You are reading Search Engine Friendly? A WordPress, Joomla and Drupal Comparison. an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

The next thing we want to look at are the Images options in the search engines, and although I explained this some time ago in  Working with Images for SEO�there are still some things to look at.

Because with most content management systems the image directory is blocked by the robots.txt file to prevent the search engines to crawl and index those files….

Open it up, remove that block! It will give you more traffic and especially if you have a website that is heavily loaded with pictures you will see that the visitors start looking for more on your site.

One thing�that even the largest websites seem to forget that Images can help you get relevant visitors.
Naming your images and using alt / title tags is not “advanced” is Matt Cutts will explain in the video below, it should be your standard!

You can look even at big websites�and find them using very well named product images link 12456789.jpg … and sometimes even without a proper alt tag.

But one point of warning here, don’t go overboard with the tags, just give a short description of the picture in that alt tag, no more, no less!

�

Looking for a Mercedes C Class Car? for example!

Tags

SEO

You are reading How Images get into the Search Engines an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

As an extra to my latest post, and the one I wrote earlier about how to use Description Metatags you can view this video of Matt Cutts explaining how the results below your Title tag is build.

One of the nice things here is that he also tells you to experiment with these tags, like using just .. or … at the end of the description…

Guess there is some rewriting to do on your descriptions tags… you did use them right?

Anyway, here is Matt’s explanation:

Tags

SEO

You are reading Matt Cutts on Snippets and Meta Description tags an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

I wrote my last post some weeks ago here, and know its time to get back to speed with the articles about Search Engines and future and current search options through all engines.

Search Engine Ranking factors

Here is a short recap of the things that you should have in place for your current Search Engine Optimization, it really is just a recap of the Search Engine factors by SEOmoz (if you haven’t read that one? GO There! now? Please…?)

1. Keyword use in Title Tag
2. Anchor text of inbound links
3. Global link popularity of the site
4. Age of site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical relevance of inbound links
7. Links popularity of site in Topical community
8. Keyword use in body text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

There are some more factors to consider, which you can read from the link above.

My most recent website building project however showed my that the “Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)”

was one of the most valid actions done to get very good rankings for the keywords targeted….

One page was already in a top position with an 8.5 million competition on Google after just two Weeks, point here was that the page did not have any content yet…..
It was in the right place and had a good Title tag and Metadescription…thats was it…
The site however was build with Joomla and I build it with the How Joomla helps with LSI in mind.

Which however shows very clearly that you should build a website with Search Engine Optimization and a relevant site Structure for helping your visitors in place.
That means that you really should have your keywords research done before even thinking about starting to build the new site!

Tags

SEO

You are reading Web and Search – How to Optimize your pages an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you are building a blog or a website, you need to focus on the topic of your online adventures.

Why? because search engines love websites and blogs that have only one or two topics, if there are more than two, they need to be related to the main subject.
The relevance of the site that is focused on just one topic is much easier to classify for them.
If you have pages or blog entries and categories that are “all over the place” you will have a hard time trying to get into top search results.

If however you are building a site that is highly focused on just one topic, it becomes a lot easier…

If you read How search engine help finding keywords then you have noticed that the keywords suggested are allmost always “on topic”.

How to Build a Theme based site

A theme based website means that you can have several “silos” where you can put the content.

Lets take the example of the Music site again.
If you are trying to build a website that is about music in general, you will find your self in a challenging competition with a large number of websites:
From Ask.com  Showing 1 -10 of 548,040,000
From Google.com Results 1 – 10 of about 1,110,000,000 for music
From Yahoo 1-10 of 2,660,000,000 formusic

So get realistic and focus on a more specifick group to target (find your “niche”) and bring them relevant information.
A website with just information about Anastacia is not going to do it as well, as Anastacia herself can do that a lot better and most probaly a Big fan will have something similar.

But if you want to build a site about female  singer-songwriters, now that could be a lot easier.
Doing the search on google for the term “female singer-songwriters” give you about 503.000 results.

But how many people will be searching on that term? I guess its not going to bring you masses of visitors to your site…

So how can this term help you?
It’s not that difficult, you just have to use your imagination.
Check the results that came up like the one from Amazon “best female singer-songwriters”

On that page you will find a nice selection of artists like:

And looking at other related singers on the term Anastacia like Pink, Gloria Estafan, Beyonce, Shakira, Joss Stone and Natasha Bedingsfield.

So if you would build a website with information on those realted artists, you are more likely to score on the individual keywords from those female singers.
Because they are all related and the search engines will look for information that has a relation to the topic of your site.

So you could build a site with silos like Biographys, Lyrics, Music CD’s and Music Videos.

A more simple example

Lets say you want to build a website about Joomla, what might be the related keywords?

• Joomla CMS
• Joomla Templates
• Joomla Components
• Joomla Modules
• Joomla Plugins
• Joomla Books… the list goes on…

Next is to find the search volume for each item so you would know where to focus first if your start building the site.
But you already know how to do that…

Does building a themebased website work? Yes!
How do I now?
I just recently started building a Dutch website and I had only the Theme based structure setup, so there was no content yet on the pages…
But the site is already ranking in the first 10 results of about 1.860.000 hits with a two word search term I was targetting. 
And again, there was no content on the pages, just the Themebased menu structure!

Tags

SEO

You are reading Focus for Search Engine Results an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

You now how to find keywords for your website, right? You know about Google external ad tool, WordTracker, trillian and seobook.

But there are more easily and very targeted keyword suggestions to be found.
The Search Engines themselves will show you what they think are the most relevant keywords…
It is like looking into their database and finding what they think is relevant for you visitors.

You just have to now how and where to look.
I did some research for a new page of a new site to check out the Singer Anastacia

Google Suggests

First Google, as this is one of the biggest engines, their you can use Google Suggests to find extra keywords.
You just type in you target keyword and you instantly get a drop-down box that shows you related search suggestions.

Yahoo homepage

You have to use the search box on the Homepage of Yahoo to get the next items to show.

here it works the same way as with Google Suggests, just type in you search word and you get a related items drop-down box.

Live.com Search

Microsoft’s Search engine Live.com also has suggestions for your keywords, but the just show up after you did the search.

In the results page you will find a nice listing on the right hand sidebar.
And they throw in some songs suggestions to take into you list..

Ask.com Suggestions

Yes, you can find the best suggestions on Ask…
They give you a complete left sidebar with all kind off suggestions, even other related items…
You can find extra words to target in the “narrow your search” items.
Find other artists to include in extra pages to build somewhat of a themed site with “Related Names”
Find extra keywords in the “Expand your Search” items.

Af course you will have your own favorite, but for my the Ask results pages was on of the best to use…
You could try the more.. link as well….

Naturally you have to combine the results from all the resources you can get to come to what you think are the best keywords to target, but that’s what makes it so nice to do Search Engine Optimization.. finding new ways to get relevant visitors to your websites!

Tags

Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engines

You are reading How Search Engines Help finding Keywords 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