I’m sure most of you have heard the trick question for webdesigners: “which browser do you use?”.
(The correct answer is “all of them”, because designers need to check their work in every major browser.)
SEO people will give you a different answer: “Firefox”.
It so many great plugins available that it really is the best browser to use. In honor of Firefox 3’s huge launch, here’s a rundown of the best plugins available for SEO work:
Internal links to your site are the links that reside on pages that belong to your domain. So links to subdomain and subfolders also count.
If you have a lot of content on your site it can be hard for search engines to work out which page is most relevant for a particular search term. You can help them by automatically linking from a keyphrase to a highly relevant page for that topic.
For example, whenever I type sh404SEF it automatically links to our review of that extension. The review is #5 on Google for the phrase “sh404SEF” even though we’ve written many articles about it.
There’s a great component called “Simply Links” which allows you to create internal links across your site.
Here are two newspaper sites, each with very different tactics when it comes to their links and their landing pages:
The good option.
Where is this bad?
The details option. This pages focuses on creating an authoritative list of all the actor’s movie appearances and co-stars. They do link to some articles about his work but only lower down the page.
The news option. All the latest news articles on the team. There’s little background information aside from a small box linking to some statistics and roster details.
You can find out how many pages on your site currently link to a particular page with a query like this:
link:http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-urls/review-of-sh404sef-url-extension/ site:alledia.com
This tells me that about 30 pages on alledia.com link to our review of sh404SEF.
You can also head over to Google Webmaster Tools. Go to Links >> Internal Links and you’ll see a list like this:
Sometimes you just want a short-cut. Sometimes the idea of slogging away for months to reach your goal just doesn’t seem worth the effort. Take the woman on the right. My wife just went to Japan and found this “Dancing Cowboy” machine. Designed for people who want to get fit without effort, you don’t have to do anything. Sit there, and the machine will shake like a horse and do the exercise for you.
I’m sure theres a lot of people out there who’d like some SEO shortcuts. From an e-mail I got this week:
“4 months to do SEO seems like a long time to do anything. I mean what takes 4 months?“
Wouldn’t it be nice if there you could jump ahead of much older and more established sites? Here are five ways to leverage Google’s own features to your advantage:
Read more: Click here to list your business in Google local search. There are several people on our forums who’ve founded their businesses within the last year and have used Google Local to jump ahead of people whose sites have been up since the 1990s.
Read more: Instructions for running video perfectly in Joomla. Your videos will need to be hosted on YouTube, which is good news because it also solves on hosting / bandwidth costs.
Read more😕 Make sure to remove Disallow: /images/ from your site’s robots.txt file. Click here to read more about image optimization.
Read more: How to get your Joomla site indexed in Google News.
Read more: Make sure your product is on all major sites in your niche. For books, that means Amazon.com, Overstock.com, BarnesandNoble.com. For golf equipment, thats OnlineSports.com, GolfLocker.com etc. Click here for tips on doing this with Virtuemart.
Google’s technical name for this move away from simple text results is called “Universal Search” and its been around for around one year now. Yahoo and MSN have their own versions of Universal Search. Ask.com took this further than anyone else with all kinds of search result delivered on one page.
I recently came across a cool SEO tool:
SEO-Browser.com displays a website the way search engines view your site. The site is displayed with all images and formatting removed, leaving just the links, headings, and text.
Viewing a website the way the search engines do reminds us of and enforces the key elements of SEO.
I have used this tool to show clients how their web site looks to the search engines. Seeing your site as simply text demonstrates how important relevant text is.
One of the hardest things for a new site owner to do is start generating links. However, because you’ve built your site in Joomla, you have the chance to get? a good number of valuable links.
Earlier this week we talked about using Siteground’s strategy of dominating the search results with extra sites. This is an alternate strategy that involves building positive links to bolster your online reputation. It helps you fill the search results with positive mentions of your business and provides protection against negative news. I’d love to have a dollar for everyone who’s said “we decided to do business with you after searching through your results on Google”.
Continue reading “Getting Started With Links to Your Joomla Site”
|
A few people have asked for examples of those techniques and I found a great one today. Siteground is a hosting company that targets the Open Source niche. They offer middle-of-the-road prices and like many other companies they manage servers at the ThePlanet.com. They do offer fast answers to support tickets, but generally they offer the same product as many other companies. So, how do they fill the search engine results with their company and drive more customers than their rivals? Siteground’s Hosting “Review” SitesOne of their main strategies is to build a large number of extra sites that appear to be a neutral hosting review site, but are in fact simply lead generators:
How You Can Tell They Belong to Siteground?
|
An entirely subjective list of five components that I’ve found to cause SEO problems on Joomla sites:
Continue reading “5 Joomla Components Harmful to Your SEO”
Joomlatwork.com have updated their metadata patch for Joomla 1.5 Release Candidate 4. The patch is free to download by clicking here.
People love short cuts. People particularly love short cuts that they think will reach 1000s of new customers. So, its easy to understand why people might love automatic translation tools.
However, this is a clear case where easy is not best.
Continue reading “Be Careful of Joomla Automatic Translation Tools”
Its a Friday close to Christmas now and I hope most of you are winding down a little as the weekend and holidays come closer. I thought today might be a great day to talk about three things that you really don’t need to worry about as much as you thought:
Continue reading “Three SEO Things People Worry About Too Much”
This is a guest post by Steven Johnson from InTownWebDesign, following up from our post earlier this week: Siteground.com and Their Search Results Domination. In this article, Steven explains how Siteground's multiple feeder sites area part of a larger strategy that you can utilise in your industry.
Continue reading “What You Can Learn From Sitegrounds SEO Domination”