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What Does This Tool Do?

It shows if your Joomla site has indexing problems in any of three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Instructions

Part 1: Add these two numbers:

• Administrator > Content > All Content Items > At the bottom of the page
• Administrator > Content > Static Content Manager > At the bottom of the page

Part 2: Add these two numbers:

• Administrator > Content > Section Manager > At the bottom of the page
• Administrator > Content > Category Manager > At the bottom of the page

Part 3: Add the pages on your site that are useful to visitors. Examples are:

• Forum Posts
• Documents available to download

Understanding the Results

• A good result will show green. This means the search engine has indexed between 70% and 130% of your pages.
• A bad result will show red.  This means the search engine has indexed too many or too few of your pages.

Improvements

What can you do to improve if I have too few pages?

• More incoming links. Often sites that have few indexed pages are new or have very few incoming links.
• More internal links. Try and link more between articles on your site. One easy way to do this is with the Simply Links component.
• Check your template. Do you have Javascript or Flash menus? Do you have a big splash page? Look for things that might prevent search engines from indexing your site.

What can you do to improve if I have too many pages?

• Go to the search engines where your results are bad and use this search … site:mydomain.com
• Look for pages that are of low quality. Examples include:
• PDF pages (duplicate content – the text is the same as the original article)
• User profile pages (repetitive and often little information)
• Calendar pages (often 1000s of empty days are indexed)
• Photo pages (little or no text)
• Use robots.txt to remove the low quality pages. A guide to using robots.txt is here.

Questions

If you are an SEO Club member and have any questions about the tool or its results, please post on the club forum.

Here at Alledia, we specialize in design and SEO work for Joomla and are available for custom work in those areas.

However, we often get requests from people who are searching for experts with other skills. This is a list of people we’ve worked with before and whose abilities we can strongly recommend:

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For onsite training, please also visit JoomlaYellowPages.com to find a company is close enough to your location to visit you.

We want to protect your privacy. In order to operate, Alledia.com may gather information about you. These terms explain how this may happen, what we will do with any potentially private data and how you can get in contact should you have any concerns.

Personally Identifiable Information Collected

Personal identifiable information is information that allows you to be identified as a particular person, such as your name, your address or phone number. We collect certain types of personal information when you register. The only information we collect for registration is:

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• Your name
• Your email address

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Other information can be supplied after registration but it is not needed to join the site and is also covered by this Privacy Policy. Information we collect will not be given or sold to any third parties.

Cookies & Web Beacons

Alledia.com, its advertisers or analytics partners may send a cookie to your computer or use web beacons to gather statistical information.

A cookie does not personally identify you. It is simply a way to know that a particular web browser was used to visit our sites.

A web beacon does not personally identify you. It is simply a way to automatically send information about pages and content used to an analysis tool.

Cookies and web beacons allows us to understand things such as whether a particular web browser is spending much time on our sites, visiting several times per month and other types of analysis.

If you never provide us with personally identifiable information, then your visits – despite us using cookies or web beacons – are anonymous. We don’t know the actual person linked with the cookie.

Browsers can be set to accept or reject cookies or notify you when a cookie is being sent. Privacy software can be used to override web beacons. Taking either of these actions shouldn’t cause a problem with our sites, should you so choose. If you do encounter a problem, please let us know.

Policy Changes, Questions & Comments

We’ll post changes to this policy on this page. Questions about this policy should be emailed to [email protected].

This disclaimer applies to all content on Alledia.com including the blog, SEO book and the forum.

Alledia provides information, advice and content based on our personal and professional experience. All of this is opinion. We do our best to limit false or misleading information but search engine optimization and search engine marketing are not exact sciences. All of the information on this site to paying members or non-paying visitors is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, no guarantees, and confers no rights.

Alledia does review all content that appears on the blog. However, we try to err on the side of posting “too much” rather than “too little” material, and thus, you may find content that is heavily opinionated or even dead wrong at times.

All code samples are provided “AS IS” without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

We do sometimes include affiliate links to other sites. We only do this for products and companies that we know and trust. However, we take no responsibility for the products we link to. Be careful, check the demos and read around to find out more about a company before purchasing.

If you have concerns, comments or problems with any of the material you find on the blog or the site, please feel free to email [email protected].

The Complete Introduction to Joomla SEO

At the suggestion of a few people in the Joomla community I decided to site down and write a beginner’s guide to optimizing a Joomla site for SEO.

The bad news: the default version of Joomla isn’t well optimized.

The good news: its such a popular CMS that people have come up with fixes for just about every SEO obstacle in Joomla. I’m going to talk about those solutions.

Quick Preamble

In this introduction, I …

• … will describe the "how" rather than the "what" or "why" of on-site SEO for Joomla. If you want to learn more about the basics, head over to the Beginner’s Guide.
• … will assume you’re familiar with some basic Joomla terms such as components, modules and plugins. If you need help here, head over to Joomla.org’s help site.
• … will only talk about Joomla 1.0. Version 1.5 is too new to have a full range of SEO extensions.
• … won’t compare Joomla’s SEO capabilities with WordPress, Drupal or other alternatives. That would need a book, not an article.
• … will be too lazy to add the ! after Joomla every time. It gets awkward to read after too long.
• … will recommend only solutions that cost zero dollars and zero cents.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

First, the problem. Joomla is a dynamic website software and it produces dynamic URLs. By default they look like this:

index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=36&id=257.

In the default installation of Joomla you could rewrite this to something shorter:

content/view/36/257

However, you and I both need better URLs than that, so we’ll require a plugin. 

There are six components available that can turn Joomla’s dynamic URLs into search-engine friendly URL (to make it easy, we’ll call them SEF URLs). I’m going to strongly recommend one of these and explain why I prefer it.

• Artio SEF. Unfortunately the authors try to conceal advertising in this component, either inside the <head> tags or as an extra site footer. Removing those links costs €49 but unfortunately it also suffers from some serious technical bugs such as creating multiple URLs for one page and becoming very slow on large sites.
• JPromoter. This $25 component works in a completely different way from the other solutions, but not entirely successfully. You need to run a scan every time you update the site. The scan often times out and makes editing the site difficult.
• Open SEF. Back in 2006 this was the best available extension for Joomla, but unfortunately its developers no longer support it and it lives in zombie-fashion as NuSEF.
• Remosef. Only a very basic solution, this also is no longer supported.
• SEF Advance. This was the very first URL extension for Joomla but unfortunately it hasn’t kept pace with its rivals. Its encoded, costs €40 per site and lacks many of the features offered by its rivals.
• sh404SEF. My recommendation. On this surface sh404SEF produces short, keyword-rich URLs for Joomla, but its impact and options go much, much further. Let me summarize why I love it:
  • Its free to download and works with almost every Joomla component.
  • It works even if your server isn’t ideally configured, or even if you’re on a Windows box.
  • It does a great job of stripping out unusual characters to produce very clean URLs.
  • Its fast. Although the URLs are stored in the database, enough caching is done to make even large sites load quickly.
  • It offers every feature found in the other five components, plus a range of security, SEO and accessibilty options.

Headline Tags

Metadata

Without code changes, Joomla doesn’t allow you to add unique HTML titles to each page. Almost all of the SEF URL extensions mentioned above provide some extra control over metadata, however, this is our preferred solution:

• Empty both metadata fields in Site >> Global Configuration >> Metadata.
• Download and install the SEF Patch. This allows unique titles, descriptions and keywords to be applied to every page on the site. Doing this does require patching some core files and causes a bit more work when updating your Joomla installation, but its worth the effort.

Preventing Duplicate Content

This is a list of all the Joomla developers who run affiliate programs. If you have a Joomla site, this list will compare ways that you can make money from your site.

Some programs are much rewarding than others. Use this list to help you find the best-paying programs.

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Below is a list of the best Joomla extension providers. Some sell individual extensions and some offer them to people who subscribe for several months.

Extension Club	Logo	Extensions	Price
Joomlart		PHPList Bridge JA Iconmenu  JA Module Collapse   JA News JA Showcase	6 Months – $50 12 Months – $70
Ninjoomla		25 Current Extensions 23 Community Builder Templates	3 Months – $30 12 Months – $60 12 Months Developer – $100
Rocketwerx		Coming Soon	Coming soon