Improve the search engine friendliness of your web site

• Improve the rankings of your Joomla! site in the search engine result pages such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing
• Improve your web site SEO performance by gaining and producing incoming links to your web site
• Market and measure the success of your blog by applying SEO
• Integrate analytics and paid advertising into your Joomla! blog

Some sites always appear at the top of a search result while others fail to even make it to the top ten. Wouldn’t you want to see your site on the first page of any search result? This is not easily feasible if you are depending solely on the marketing guys whom you hire for SEO.

Joomla! SEO will help you to attract more visitors and improve the way you rank in search engines by giving you the techniques and knowledge to work your site into higher visitor numbers. It will help you to create and improve your site in an easy way. Joomla! is great, and you can make it perform even better by using the guidelines and ideas in this book.

Search Engine Optimization is becoming a must for every web site. As the competition on the Internet grows you need to make sure your site is among the top results on the major search engines. More and more people use search engines to find the information they are looking for, so you need to make sure you show up in those search result pages to get those visitors to your web site.

Joomla! SEO will provide you with a lot of information, ranging from keywords strategies through technical improvements and content creation. All this information and the tutorials provided are targeted to give you the best base for gaining higher rankings.

In the book, you will learn how to build a keyword strategy and create a better site structure for SEO. You will read about technical improvements that will give you better options for SEO. There is a separate chapter that helps you create search-engine friendly and keyword-rich URLs.
In the end, you will have a web site that is ready to outperform your competitors and a manual to refer to for improving every step you take.

What you will learn from this book?

• Set up your SEO and Keyword strategy
• Develop and implement a plan to improve the ranking of your web site
• Organize your content in a search engine-friendly and user-friendly way
• Get more SEO improvement possibilities with an SEF patch
• Impress the search engines and your visitors by writing titles and articles
• Set up a Joomla! blog and run its RSS feed using Google’s FeedBurner service
• Install and use sh404SEF, an SEF component to improve your URLs
• Pick a good SEO template for speed and SEO techniques
• Speed up your site with better images and cache settings
• Monitor visitors and keep a track of the visits to your site using Statcounter stats and Google Analytics

Approach

This is a practical, hands-on book that will lead you through the process of search engine optimization of your Joomla!-based web site. It provides clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do at each step in the SEO process.
Once you have finished reading the book and gone through the detailed plans from each chapter, you will have the knowledge to improve the rankings and visitor numbers of almost any Joomla!-based web site.

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for anyone using Joomla! ranging from owners of business sites to web site developers and personal web site owners. Any Joomla! web site owner who wants to sell products or services, or send out a message to the world will find that getting better rankings in the search engines will help them reach their goal.

Some prior knowledge of Joomla! is expected but no prior knowledge of search engine optimization is needed for this book. The reader will get a deeper level of knowledge on how to make their web site rank better and attract more visitors to their site.

Joomla! 1.5 SEO

Fernando C from Spain asks: “We are a pretty big site. We are changing our hosting company in the next few weeks (same country). Should we be scared from an SEO perspective?”

Search engine optimization (SEO) in an Internet marketing strategy that is designed to maximize the number of site visitors and therefore boost sales and profits.  SEO takes into account what people are looking for and how search engines function to get higher rankings in the results pages for the marketer’s targeted keywords and phrases.  SEO is a complicated set of procedures to take into account the wide variety of factors that search engines have included into their algorithms for estimating the relevance of a site for certain words and phrases.

Despite the many factors that are included in the equation, it all boils down to good content because the role of search engines is to provide relevant and quality information for the searcher.  Content should be the primary consideration even if knowledgeable and experienced SEO consultants are capable of tweaking off-site and on-site factors in such a way that the position of the site in the results pages is maximized.

The keywords and phrases that a web surfer is likely to type into the tool bar of the search engine when he is conducting research on a topic that is connected to the Internet marketer’s services or products, are some of the on-site factors.  These keywords are placed in the titles, in the articles, and in the various tags.  The background, layout, graphics, images, and color, are additional on-site factors for SEO.  To know the best layout and theme for your site, you will have to be familiar with your target market’s preferences and choices.  Still another on-site factor is the loading time of the landing page.|  The search engine is likely to bring down the rank of of website in which the searcher becomes impatient with a web page that takes too long to load and thus hits the back button.

Meanwhile, some of the off-site factors for SEO are the anchor text and the number of back links.  The anchor text contains the words that are chosen to encourage the reader of an article or a visitor of another site to click on the back link that leads to your site.  SEO also has to take into account the quality and quantity of the back links because these are included in the calculations of the search engines in determining the site’s rank in the results pages.  

It should be noted that some strategies used for SEO are discouraged by search engines such as Google because they are only designed to get the best possible rank and are not concerned with providing quality information.  Black hat SEO may provide the marketer with surprising results at the start but this is not likely to continue for long because search engines penalize such websites, that is why SEO with article marketing porivided by companies such as http://ArticlesOnTap.com is preffered.