Sunday, September 6, 2009

Joomla And SEO

By David Bungay

We should first be clear that SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization and that SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from any search engines. In other words, the objective of the SEO is to give the web-page more visibility through ranking, and more depth through linking. SEO is also referred to as being SEF, or Search Engine Friendly. It should be noted that most of the search engines do have the facility to submit feeds which can be utilized to enhance the search capabilities of the engine. This feature is particularly of use to those web pages that require to be updated on the contents at regular intervals or frequency, while there are pages that are static but could do with some feed to boost their capability to enhance visibility. It is important at this juncture to know that each page is on a sitemap, which in turn is a collection of hyperlinks that clearly define the overall structure of a particular website. The sitemap facilitates not just the user, but also the search engine spider, to navigate and also index the website more efficiently. This in turn provides a very clear view of the contents of each website.

In defining the co-relation of Joomla and SEO, it is important to know that one of the major advantages of running the Joomla content management system is the fact that you can download and install a number of different sitemap components that will on configuration automatically display the contents of your web site in a site-map format to the visitors as well as the search engine spiders. It is heartening to note that in looking towards this as a requirement, Google has itself endorsed the need for the inclusion of a sitemap on the website and has accordingly created the option Google Sitemaps.

It is very imperative that prior to creating a sitemap, we ensure that the page titles, meta descriptions and the SEO clearly reflects the contents of your individual page. This will then assist the site visitors and search engine spiders to understand the contents of the web page, and be able to index as well as rank it accordingly.

Now, when writing the contents for the Joomla web-site, you must create it for the users and not the search engines. In other words, you will have to focus on creating the contents relevant to your web-site on a Joomla template site rather than focus on writing content for the Joomla templates itself. This is where most fail to create a demarcation. In Joomla, it is worthwhile making the targeted keywords in H1 and H2 for highlighting, which otherwise have no significance in SEO. Once you have defined your target audience, irrespective of the search engine being used, try and build up a list of sites with similar interests.

Lastly, if in Joomla you are not using sections and categories for the static page/s, then do create a generic section for these as a website content. In fact, create separate categories for each static page.

About the Author:

No comments: