Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 SEO

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 SEO

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5 SEO
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
9
Tracking and Tracing to Improve Your Web Site

Appendix A. A Joomla! Case Study in SEO

In this appendix we will be looking into the complete process of building a demo web site through a case study. In this case study I will show you the steps I took to get a web site up and running with all the SEO options in place.

Is it a real live web site? Well, the answer is yes. But it is not for a real company, which limits to local search options using Google maps. Does it rank? Yes, but it needs to grow in content (once I finish writing this book!).

So, here are the steps we need to take, listed in chronological order:

  • Pick the niche to build the site in

    • Brainstorm for ideas and choose a domain name

    • Buy the domain and arrange some hosting

  • Set up the Joomla! 1.5 base installation

    • Install the SEF patch and sh404SEF component

    • Install a good Joomla! SEO template

  • Name the sections and categories

  • Build the menus

  • Install and configure the sitemap

  • Write the content

  • Use Google webmaster tools

    • Analyze your results, rinse, and repeat

Choosing the niche

This involves finding a good niche to place and optimize the web site. This is not always easy to do.

Ideas such as digital photography and credit cards are just too saturated to even think about getting a new web site to rank well, especially in the time plan I wanted to use; you can try to rank for those words, but you will have to work long and hard to get there.

So, I came up with "landscape gardening" in the "Los Banos" CA area. I took a trip to Los Banos in 2001 to visit a family. I also needed a company name to go with the site and there the Beez theme came in and the idea was complete—"The Crazy Beez Landscape Gardening Company" was born.

Picking a domain name

With the niche, name, and location chosen, it was time to find a fitting URL in which it would be nice to have the main keywords. You can imagine that these names were already taken:

Then I included the name of the company into the ideas, but that was getting too long.

Also, there was some concern about people typing "crazybees" instead of "crazybeez". So, at the end, the domain www.cblandscapegardening.com was registered and put in place as a second domain on a hosting package that I already owned.

In retrospect I think it would have been better to host it with a USA-based hosting provider instead of a Dutch web hosting company. For the target audience this would have been a better choice as it would get an IP address in the USA and with that it would rank better based on Google's geotargeted search results.