Steve’s Blog

Open Question: SEO Changes in Joomla 1.6

Joomla recently announced that they’re looking for white papers, proposing ways to make the next version even better than 1.5.

So, together with some of Joomla’s brightest SEO minds, we’ve taken up the challenge and are writing a paper with our suggestions for improving SEO in 1.6.

We’d love to hear ideas from the community to include in the proposal:

What SEO improvements would you like to see in Joomla 1.6?

Already on the list are ideas such as improving control over metadata. What else should we do to make Joomla the most search-engine friendly CMS available? 

Read MoreOpen Question: SEO Changes in Joomla 1.6

Joomla Indexing Tool

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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.

Read MoreJoomla Indexing Tool

Joomla Extension of the Month – February 08

Joomla Extension of the Month - February 08Our Extension of the Month for 2008 is a very worthy winner, because it overcomes several important limitations in Joomla’s core. Joomla’s default search component has several issues:

  • You can’t enter a query of more than 20 characters
  • You can’t search only in one part of the site (for example content, forum, comments)
  • Its hard to customize so that results appear in the order you desire

The new "Advanced Search" from anything-digital.net solves all those issues.
Continue reading “Joomla Extension of the Month – February 08”

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Review of the SEF Patch for Joomla 1.5

Joomla SEF PatchIf you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few days, you’ll know I strongly recommend two components to improve SEO on Joomla 1.0:

The good news is that one of those has just been updated for Joomla 1.5. This is our review of the new SEF Patch.

Continue reading “Review of the SEF Patch for Joomla 1.5”

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New Recommended Providers Page

Joomla ExpertsHere 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, particularly when it comes to PHP / MySQL coding and server / security work. To make referrals easier, we’ve added a "Recommended Providers" page.

The list is currently small, but it will grow with time and these are people we’ve worked with before whose high-quality work we can vouch for.

Read MoreNew Recommended Providers Page

Recommended Providers

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.

Read MoreRecommended Providers