SEO and Joomla

If you want people to find you on the web then you need the search engines to find you first. This is how the majority of web sites get their traffic, and is worth thinking about in the initial stages of website development. Does the platform you are on influence the SEO of your site? Not really; and whether you are using Joomla or something else, it is more about what you are doing within a specific environment in order to please the search engines.

It is a good idea to work out how you are going to optomise your site for the search engines while you are in the development phase. There are some simple simple things you can do, and some simple things not to do that, each of which can make a world of difference.

Firstly, what to do. You need to create high quality content that is rich with your keywords, but not too rich. Basically, if you think about writing your web page for real readers and not for the search engines, then the search engines will be happy. Google and other search engines hate spammy content with an over use of the relevant keywords, anywhere from 3 - 6% of your content dedicated to relevant targeted keywords is normally recommended. Joomla can give you access to RSS feeds for relevant content, but there is really nothing better than coming up with totally unique content on your own. Joomla makes it easy to manage all of your articles in the correct categories and use tags appropriately.

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Secondly, linking is very important. Measuring linking as a search engine factor is actually the basis of what made Google so big originally. By focusing on page popularity and links from relevant web sites, Google favoured certain sites that were seen to have a level of authority. Every one knows about this now and you can use it to your advantage, without getting too black hat about it all. Find where your target readers hang out, and try to get some links from these pages. If you are part of an organic network of similar sites, the search engines will notice and give you their stamp of approval.

Article titles are also very important, probably one of the most important factors to take care of for ranking well. Name your articles with the keywords that you want to be found by, as it seems like the search engines place article titles above all else. All of these things are easy to do within Joomla as you have great flexibility to control everything that is going on with both the content and the design of your website.

Now you know a few of the things to do, what about what not to do. Some of the SEO tricks of the past are blatantly obvious to the search engines today and you should stay well away from these little tricks. Don't fill your page with hidden text containing every keyword under the sun. Some pages use text that is the same colour as the background so that readers can not see it in the hope that the search engines will rank you for all of these words. Well think again, it doesn't work. In a similar vein, do not load up your page with too many keywords, even if they are relevant, too many of them and your web page may be considered spammy and not rank well. If you pay attention to your titles and tags while also providing a constant source of new and unique content, your web page should get treated well by the search engines.