Joomla SEO 101 Workshop

(Part 1)

Iman Biock Aghayiman@successroad.cawww.successroad.ca

Vancouver Joomla User Group

www.VanJoomla.net

Agenda: 90% Fundamentals – 10% Technical

• How Search Engines Work

• Keyword research

• Title

• URL

• Questions and answers

How Search Engines Work

• Data gathering1. Web-crawlers (Bot, Slurp, spider, …)2. Index

• Algorithm 1. Rank for SERPs2. Page Rank VS. SERP Placement/Rank

• The most sustainable strategy:

Working on 5 elements of web pages

Search Engines Fundamentals

How to find out

Google changed its strategy over

____ Times

Last year!

Google changed its strategy over

____ Times

Last year!

500

1- Title (3%)

2- URL (3%)

3- Content (10%)

4- Meta tags (3%)

5- Links (25%)

The first 50% is

“Keyword Research”

The Other 6% includes tons of other stuff such as:

Sitemap no-follow URLs

Webpage speed Tagcloud

Age of your site

File propertise/summary Template

URL Descriptions Image alt text

404 302 robots.txt

*Index-caffeine image source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/** All figures are presenter’s personal opinion and is not considered as a professional advise, you have to work with your own SEO knowledge to get any result

Keyword Research

• Listing root brands and product/service names (Realtor, Chiropractors,…)

• Brainstorming variations of product and brand related keywords (e.g. Real estate company names, chiropractic centers,… )

• Talking to clients to determine what terms they use in search

• Studying competitors’ sites • Adding geographic variations (e.g. Vancouver realtor,

Richmond Chiropractor) • Adding descriptive variations (e.g. Cash flow property

real estates listings, Low back pain treatments) • Taking all the variations and entering them into the

Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which will suggest numerous other variations

Keyword research should be the first action in any online business

Best Keywords (To start)

Niche Market Keywords• Long tail keywords (Combination of 2-4 words)• Less competitors for exact keyword (Ideally under

20,000)• More than 10,000 searches per months• Watch out for your competitor anyhow• Check if there is any Adwords for that keyword

Is it a hard keyword or not?

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/

High conversion, less competition

Title

Create your first workbook

Use the words economically

Do not over use your keywords

The best title has 80 characters

Use the title for PEOPLE not for Google

Use Variations to cover more keywords:

• Singular vs. plural • Synonyms and acronyms

• Alternate word order • Keyword modifiers

Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

Website VS. Webpage

www.example.com example.com

Acronyms are better than long URLs

The more understandable the better

Watch out for domain age

Search Engine Friendly URL (SEF URL)

http://www.joomlaseocompany.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&i

d=1&Itemid=3

VS.

http://www.joomlaseocompany.com/joomla-seo-tips.html

If you can’t understand this URL, how Google wants to understand

Contest:

How to have SEF URLs in Joomla?

• Change global configurations

• Choose Alias based on keyword research and avoid acronyms:

• Choose Alias for all Sections and Categories

Create your first workbook

Avoid creating duplicate content

URLs can cause duplicate content, avoid using URLs like:

example.com

example.com/index.html

example.com/index.php

www.example.com

www.example.com/index.html

www.example.com/index.php

Create your first workbook

Q & AIman Biock Aghayiman@successroad.cawww.tavanayan.com

Vancouver Joomla User Group

www.VanJoomla.net