Posted by: twmeier
on Jul 8, 2009
There are a few quick and easy ways to improve your website's search engine rankings using a few simple search engine optimizations. By following the simple steps below, you should see an increase in your rankings with the top search engines.
1). Never register your domain for only one year at a time. Search engines will pick up on this and will assume your website may not be around for the long haul. There is not a specific number of years you should register your domain, but the more the better.
2). Pick your page titles wisely. Search engines seem to weigh heavily on page titles. Especially Yahoo. Pick page titles that match the keywords you would like focus on. I would recommend using Google's keyword tool to find the keywords that people are searching for the most that are relevant to your website:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
3). Content is everything. Search engines now focus on content more then ever before. You need to start writing. All those English classes you took over the years will finally pay off. Again, you need to pick keywords you would like to focus on, and write your articles with using these keywords in the title, meta tags and the articles themselves.
If you do not have the time to write articles (or just hate to do so), you can easy find companies online that will do it for you. Most one page articles will cost you around $12 to $15. All you do is specify the subject and what keywords you would like them to include. For a small fee, these same companies will also post messages on your forum in order to get things moving.
4). Pick to use www or not to use www. I recently checked the page rank of the homepage of one of my own personal website, first with 'www' in the url, and then without 'www'. I was surprised to find that the page ranks were different. Google was seeing the homepage as two unique pages, one with 'www' and one without. This is a problem since Google penalizes pages with duplicate content. To fix this problem you can place the following code in a file named ".htaccess" in your site's root directory:
Example 1 - Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Example 2 - Redirect www.domain.com to domain.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
5). Avoid the cheats. A few months back, I actually heard these world: "I am going to throw some hidden text in my site for SEO." I almost died laughing. This may have worked 10 years ago, but not anymore. You will actually be punished for doing this. Just remember, if it seems to easy to work, it is. It will take a lot of work getting to the top of search engines. Just be patient.
Posted by: twmeier
on May 11, 2009
Modifying the page title, keywords and description for a page created by a component in Joomla is very simple.
Inside your component, add the following:
<?php
global $mainframe;
$mainframe->SetPageTitle("Some Page Title");
$mainframe->appendMetaTag( "description", "Some Description.");
$mainframe->appendMetaTag( "keywords", "keyword1, keyword2");
?>
It is that simple.
Posted by: twmeier
on Dec 31, 2008
In order to use Joomla's built in SEF Urls feature, you must first enable it. To do so, go to the backend of the site (/administrator) and go to the "Site" tab and select "Global Configuration."
On that page you will see the following:
Set the "Search Engine Friendly URLs" to Yes and the "Use Apache mod_rewrite" to Yes.
You will next need to rename the htaccess.txt file in your root directory to .htaccess as seen below:
That is all there is too it. Joomla will now automatically change all your standard dynamic URLs in your content items to more friendly URLs.
Posted by: twmeier
on Dec 16, 2008
As mentioned in my last blog, Joomla uses dynamic URLs. These URLs contain characters for passing information to the current web page. These URLs can be long and complicated and may not be indexed by many of the major search engines. The following URL is an example of a dynamic URL:
http://www.lab11.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=32
