SEO Review of VA-Home-LoansOnline.com

Today is part 2 of our blog series called "Joomla SEO Site Review".

Every week we’re going to look at a new Joomla site and address several questions the site owner wants answering about their site’s SEO. We’ll discuss them on the blog and then open things up for other people to give their feedback as well.

Hopefully it will raise some topics that will be useful to lots of people, not just the site owner. If you’re interested in having your site featured, feel free to contact us with your site’s URL and 4/5 questions you’d like answered.

Site Review #2

Our sceond site is run by John Parker and the URL is http://www.va-home-loansonline.com.

Some brief facts about the site:

The site provides home loans to Texas veterans.
Almost completely brand new, it has no Page Rank currently and only 11 Yahoo links.
A simple site upgraded recently from a landing page.

SEO Questions

John has the following question about her site:

1) What are the best sites to get links from? The only ones that I know of are Yahoo Directory, DMOZ and Business.com

Those sites are good – to an extent. However, I’d recommend changing your focus and looking for links from sites in your niche. Search Google for texas home loans or veteran home loans. Those are the sites whose links will really help you. Instead of spending $299 annually on a link in the Yahoo Directory, you might be able to use that money to buy link on one of the pages that ranks in the top ten for your keyphrases. Check sites such as text-link-ads.com or contact the site owners directly.

That being said, with only 11 links so far, you do need to build that number considerably. Consider submitting your site to 400 directories (or getting someone else to do it for), in order to give your site an intial boost.

2) Should I use an RSS feed to reprint news articles on my site?

Perhaps, although RSS feeds are more suited to news and opinion sites. A quick check of your rival sites reveals that none of them have RSS feeds. Unless you are considering updating the site with regular, topical articles then as RSS feed isn’t a neccessity.

3) Our current traffic comes from PPC and it works well, what would you suggest to start getting traffic to the site from search engines?

You need to build up a profile of your site online. Some good places to start:

Build up your link base. The good news is that top ranking sites for phrases such as Texas Veteran Home Loans only have 500 / 600 links.
Create profiles, links and reviews for your sites on major sites.
Make sure you tag your content on sites such as Technorati and Del.icio.us.

4) We have been targeting 5 keyword phrases but also use Hittail which shows the exact search phrases, What should I do to use this information to generate traffic?

The best competitive advantage you have is your own private data. So if you have a Hittail report showing search phrases that people use to find your site, and those phrases don’t show up at inventory.overture.com, then you know you have useful information. You could consider building a page to target those keywords. As your site grows and you get more traffic, you’ll get more unique data that you can use to improve your site.

5) I have installed JomComment, do you feel that this will cause a duplicate content issue?

Yes, but only through the RSS feeds get indexed. Sites such as Feedburner now offer the option to remove your feeds from the search engines for exactly this reason. Either turn off the Jomcomment RSS feeds or consider hacking that template to add no-follow to the RSS links.

Over to you guys…. Do you agree with my advice? What other ideas would help John with SEO for his new site?