Joomla & SEO Blog by PathosSeoBlog.com» Keeping Up to date on Joomla 1.6 – Joomla & SEO Blog by PathosSeoBlog.com

Keeping Up to date on Joomla 1.6

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:12:47 +0000

You now I do like Blogs… I write a few my self, and read a lot of others as well.

On new Blog that definitely goes into my Netvibes Joomla tab is this one from the Joomla developers, Developer Team Blog

They will Blog about writing, seeking advice, coding and lots more, so as they say, it is a great way to stay in touch with the Joomla 1.6 development action.

And as Barry North already pointed out in one of his recent posts, the Blogs are now on Joomla 1.5 native with a social bookmarking footer instead of the old JD_WP WordPress based component.
Which brings back to mind that you really can use Joomla for Blogging but there are still some things that need to be ported to Joomla 1.5 native before it really would be a great Blogging platform.

But for the Joomla Developers Blog, content is the key! And it will be easy to keep up since they do offer an RSS Feed (No, not just yet via Feedburner, but maybe in time…)

For now, keeping my RSS feed open to new blogpost and looking forward to new improvements in the SEO Field.

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Keeping Up to date on Joomla 1.6

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Joomla 1.5 Stable is Here!

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:37:09 +0000

There is a great announcement from the Joomla Core Team today….

Joomla 1.5 Stable is released!

Congrats to all who worked on this great new Release!

Here is the official release of Joomla 1.5 Stable announcement you can down it from Joomla 1.5 Files

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Joomla 1.5 Stable is Here!

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Joomla Tools and Resources from Mashable

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:53:07 +0000

I just read a great page that gives you lots of website links with high quality information about Joomla.

Altough the Title of 30+ Joomla Tools and Resources doesn’t really give you tools like modules or components, a lot of the sites featured in this post do have some fine extensions for your Joomla website.

I know I have to look over some new sites and see what they have in store!

The one I already visit a lot to get great add-ons is http://www.joomla-addons.org/ please check that one for sure!

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Joomla Tools and Resources from Mashable

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Joomla! Best PHP Open Source Content Management System

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:32:02 +0000

Joomla! Best PHP Open Source Content Management System…

Don’t take my word on it, this is the what the Packt Publishing Award judges say:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/joomla-wins-best-php-open-source-content-management-system

Joomla Wins Best PHP Cms

But it is nice to see ”Once again, judges commented on the size and responsiveness of the community, which translates to potential problems being dealt with quickly.”

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Joomla! Best PHP Open Source Content Management System

Joomla and Missing Metatags

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:13:10 +0000

If you are like me, you like to have your Metatags like description and keywords filled with relevant content..

You could have Metatag generators for you website, or overviews of the content with a component like OpenSEF.
But what if you don’t use OpenSEF but sh404SEF?
In that case you could register and download the Joomla Metatag component form iJoomla.

But if you just want to see what pages still are in need of content for these Metatags.
In that case there is now a very simple but effective and easy to use modules, with two versions, one for the Joomla 1.0.x versions and for Joomla 1.5…

It is written by Dan Rahmel who also wrote two Books about Joomla!
and

And it is easy to install.

The module is installed as a normal module, but it is only for the administrator.
That is why is is listed under the Administrator part of the Modules and has to be published and positioned on the cPanel, which means that it will be visible on you administrator homepage (the first one after you login)

After publication you find the items without the Description and Keywords listed on a separate Tab on the Administrators page.

You can download the version you want from JoomlaJumpStart.com where you can even find more information on Joomla and the insights of Dan Rahmel.

There are people who will tell you that Metatags like the Description and Keywords are useless these days.. for Search Engine Optimization that is.

But try and work on writing good solid page descriptions and use just up to a maximum of 10 keywords in the keyword field.
Use the keywords you have used in the page, and in the Title and wait for the next index round of Google.

The Descriptions field mostly show up under you page title and should be written as a small advertisement to bring you the visitors you want.

You are reading a post from: Joomla SEO Blog by PathosSeoBlog.com

Joomla and Missing Metatags

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Is Joomla 1.5 RC 1 Ready for Search Engine Optimization?

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:05:34 +0000

I have been running a test-site installation of the new Joomla 1.5 RC 1 to see what improvements there have been made for SEF and SEO.

There is a difference between SEF and SEO, you can read more about that on Search Engine Friendly or already Search Engine Optimized but I will not go into that much more here, as the point of the exercise was the see what changed / improved.

First thing you notice is that the Basic URL without the SEO Option set is still the same as before.

Next you go into your Global configuration and look up the Seo Settings…
That has changed a little, and has a new option, which is really great!

Did you see it? There is an option that says “Use mod_rewrite” ! and the best part is that is works!
So now if you don’t know how to, or can not use a .htaccess file because of provider restrictions, you can still have SEF URLs like this one..

You see there is now an index.php between your domain name and the SEF URL.

Full SEO Options

You can set both settings and use an .htaccess file to get ride of the index.php so that the full (SEF) URL looks like:

Hmm.. maybe they should call it SEF Settings? But it is a great improvement that you can use the SEF URLs without a special component.

Does that mean that we don’t have to use a SEF Component anymore?
No, they are still very valuable for several functions like URL rewrites… yes those still apply, because you want more control over the how the URL is formed.

The SEF function of RC 1 uses the Title Alias for the URL, so you can play a little with that, but that takes away a possible use of the alias for HTML Title rewrites…

Also you want to control the 404 Sef function and landing page, with Joomla 1.5 RC 1 there is good basic 404 page with the right headers, so old URLs will be removed form the search engines.

Also SEF component is able to prevent Rewriting URLs if a Components doesn’t support them and breaks with te standard URLs.

The Duplicate Metatag problem

What you would see with the “Old” Joomla was that the Global Metadata was inserted into the HTML code together with the Article Metatags like description and keywords.

The problem seems now to be resolved, so if you now fill an article with The Metatags Description and Keywords (and you know you should) than ONLY those tags are in the source code!

From a Search Engine Optimization view, this is a very good thing… problem is that you still get the Global description on every page you don’t fill the parameters, so pleas leave the Globals empty and let the search Engines pick there own excerpts.

You see, there is still a need for a nice Metatag generator if you have lots off pages or multiple editors.

Overall SEO conclusion for Joomla 1.5 RC 1

You have a better Content Management System than before from a Search Engine Friendly and Optimization point of view.
The basics are in Place to get any new website based on this Joomla 1.5 version to get better results, just by activating the SEO Settings on a bare minimum of SEF URLs.

Its a very big improvement that it can work without the .htaccess files that so many people are struggling with, so that every website can have nice URLs to work with, so set that configuration option to ON.

As I will do some more testing, expect more post on these and other items, but please be patient, as I want to Inform you based on experiences, and time is limited..

So if you want to be up-to-date, and you liked the post, use the RSS Feed to keep up..

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Is Joomla 1.5 RC 1 Ready for Search Engine Optimization?

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Getting the Number One SEO Factor Improved In Joomla

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:00:16 +0000

As you might know, the number one factor for Search Engine Optimization is the Title Tag of you page.

But you want your page title to be short and strong, building it with one or two keywords to provide a good reference to the content of the page.
The Joomla Page title is show as the first part of your page.

The HTML Title Tag is something different, it is the text shown in your Browser Title bar and is indexed by Google and shown in the Search Results Pages.
It is contained within the titletag < title > Title description < /title > in the source code.

For Joomla this was standard the page title you provided… was… because now you have the opportunity to change just the HTML Title !!
This functionality as already a feature of the paid SEF patch from Joomlatwork.

And now, there is a Plugin for Joomla that provides you with the following opportunity:

Change the Alias of the Title in your Joomla page and have it shown as the HTML Title…
Thus you can bring in more keywords or better crafted Titles to improve your rankings..

Here is an example Basic Optimization is the Joomla page title, but with the Plugin the Title now says “Basic Optimization for Joomla websites”.

I think you can find some pages on your website that can profit from this new Plugin JooFox Content Title

One word of caution, if you are using a SEF Component and have configured it to use the Title alias for URL rewrites, you better not use this one… because rewriting your Titles in that case changes your URL as well.
And that would be worse..

Also if you use the Paid SEF Patch (which has a great installer..) you don’t need this Plugin, as you already have that possibility.

For all Joomla websites, this should be a great opportunity to get more and better Titles for your pages, without have to change the content and URLs of you Joomla Page titles!

So here it is again, the JooFox Content Title Plugin from http://www.antoniodeluca.info/ go get it and start optimizing you Page titles…

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Getting the Number One SEO Factor Improved In Joomla

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A Joomla Frontpage changing Module

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:17:19 +0000

I found a module today bij http://www.joomlaworks.gr/ called “Ultimate Content Display” which is working great.

What is does? It can display content from sections or categories in a simple to place module position.
But the best part is, it can change the articles it shows by setting some parameters!

So why is this so exciting? Because you can now have ”fresh” content on for example your Frontpage simple by adding this module.
Think about it… you can show returning visitors articles they otherwise may have never seen.
But also you have fresh content on you homepage every time the Googlebot, Yahoo or Live robots visits…

You can have the content in a list form, or a slide / fader with time settings and many options more.
I will write an extended how-to use and copy the module on www.pathos-seo.com later next week.

You can see the module in action on the Frontpage (on the bottom of the page) of www.pathos-seo.com where it says Random content.

The Module you can download from www.joomlaworks.gr

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A Joomla Frontpage changing Module

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Where to Go with Joomla SEF and SEO Questions

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:51:06 +0000

If you have questions about Joomla with regards to Making Joomla Search Engine Friendly, and the next step, making it Search Engine Optimized, where can you go?

Well, you found this Blog and the website www.pathos-seo.com I hope…

But that is where you can rad all about it, with How-To’s and hopefully some great insights in improving your own website.

For getting answers to questions you might have with specific situations this is of course not a great solution.|
You want to post a question and get an answer as quick as possible…

Now you have several options to do that, main source of Joomla information is the forum at forum.joomla.org
If you have a more specific question related to SEF and SEO with Joomla your have recently got two extra specific forums to post your question:

The Joomla SEO Forum at Alledia
The Joomla SEO Forum at Joomlashack

Both Forums are great resources of getting more information in how to solve problems with your Search Engine Optimization for your Joomla website.

And yes, before you ask, I try to visit and answer Joomla SEO and SEF question on these Forums.

P.s. For the Dutch readers, you can go to SEO-SEF Google Forum on www.dutchjoomla.org

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Where to Go with Joomla SEF and SEO Questions

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Do you know if your site is Down?

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 19:11:33 +0000

If you run a site, you will at some point in time encounter a site outage.
That is not only with a Joomla site, it can also happen with WordPress or Drupal or any other Content Management System.

I am now talking about the fact that a complete server is down or that the Internet Connection of you Hosting Provider makes it impossible to reach your website.

No, the error I am talking about is that the connection to your database is lost…

In Joomla there is a special page that is presented to you visitors telling them there is something wrong, asking them to contact the administrator.

Now that is nice.. or isn’t it?
…ehhh how do I contact the System Administrator?

Change the Standard

Well in a standard installation you get these lines in your Global Configuration.
And most of use leave it as it is… of you take the site offline for maintenance it works just fine, so why change anything?

The second field in you Global Configuration is where you should make a little change.
Just ad a line with your email code in it like Hummerbie ( at ) Gmail (dot) com

Its even possible to change your entire offline page if you want to, but thats an whole other issue.

For now its really important that you know of your site outage before Google takes you out of the Index… and that can happen withing 48 hours if you have a really busy website.

Besides the contact information that you can easily edit into the Global configuration there is also an external service that can monitor your website for you.

Site24×7 gives you the opportunity to check you site one per hour and in case off a failed check you can get an email,sms or RSS alert.

Its free for up to 2 domains, but the paid service comes at a small price starting from $0,50 USD per month per domain..

Here is my configuration:

This is a check for the keywords in the error page.

And yes, there are reports with graphics and data to see the response times of the site.
Definitely worth a try , but just one warning… you might find out your have to talk to, or even change your hosting provider if you don’t like what you see…

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Do you know if your site is Down?

Joomla Basics 60 percent of Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 12:11:36 +0000

I was looking at search-ranking-factors at SEOmoz.org and they not only have made a very good list to look for Search Engine Optimization factors.
They also have a list of negative factors and there is a top five of negative factors.

Here is the short list:

Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

Looking at these factors its easy to see where thing go wrong in a standard installation of Joomla (before version 1.5)

Duplicate Content

First one is the Content similar to Duplicate or Existing in the Index:
This is because in a standard installation there are version in the standard HTML, PDF versions and print versions of each page of your website.

To prevent this, you should disable this functions in your Global Configuration under Content, disable the PDF and Print buttons.

Duplicate Title and or Meta Tags on Many Pages

All tough the Duplicate Title will not that easily happen, the Meta Tags can be a problem.

If you use the standard Metadata fields in the Global configuration you could really have a problem with this.
These value’s are given to each page in your website…
Even if you use the separate Fields of each page to give a separate description and keywords!

You can simple check this if your site is indexed by Google, just do a search in Google like site:www.example.com and see what is in the description fields.. it might surprise you.

The best way to prevent this is to leave your Metadata fields empty and fill your page Descriptions and Keywords.
Even if you don’t wont to use that, leave all fields blank and let the search engines take the excerpts from your pages.

Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

I wrote a post about this problem a while ago Joomla and Keyword stuffing and its of course related to the same problem as the one above.

The simple solution is to leave the Global Metadata fields blank.
Because Joomla will ADD the meta keywords to the list of keywords in your Global configuration.

You could install the free SEF patch from Joomlatwork.com to overcome some of these problems.

With the solutions used to prevent the above you can overcome some of the Negative Ranking Factors.
All it takes are some simple configuration changes and empty the Global Metadata fields, so make sure you don’t let your website fall into the Top 5 factors…

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Joomla Basics 60 percent of Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors

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The Little Joomla SEO Book now also in Russian

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:10:30 +0000

I just received an email telling me that “The Little Joomla SEO Book” just has been translated into Russian…

Now that is what I like about the Internet and sharing Knowledge, so that people can help each other, even in other languages.

If you are Russian, you can go to Russian version of this book available here (translated by Dead Krolik)

At the same time I saw the Images for the SEO Book by Steven from Alledia.
I had the pleasure of proof reading his Joomla SEO Book, and I can highly recommend it if you are ready to make your Joomla site better found in the Search engine’s.

So now you have three alternatives:

my Little Joomla SEO Book
Alledia Joomla SEO Book $ 37 with Lifetime upgrade and 100% satisfaction guarantee.
Compassdesign Joomla SEO Book (registration required)

And of course a big thank you to to Dead Krolik for his translation for the Russian Joomla Community.

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The Little Joomla SEO Book now also in Russian

Using your Search Engine Results to Improve your site

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Mon, 21 May 2007 12:00:46 +0000

You are always looking at your statistics, to see how people are coming to your website, right? You know you should…

But here is another way of looking at your website and what people are looking for on your site.
You have of course the Global Configuration statistics for Text Search set to on.

And you sometimes look at these searches to improve you website to give your visitors the information they are looking for.

Recently there was a new Joomla module listed on the extension site, its probably one of those extensions that slips through your mind as, well.. just another SEO Plugin..
But it is not, its not even made for SEO, although there could be a slight advantage for Search Engine Optimization.
I will tell you more later on in this post.

This Module uses the Search Keywords that people have used to find your website, and places each of those search words in a special search Block.
I changed some basic parameters in the Module Configuration and see what happens if people use the string “Joomla seo” and hopefully find www.pathos-seo.com :-)

The results in the Module..

Now your visitor can just click on a search word they used to do a further search in your website.

These searches are then stored in your search statistics.

The Search Engine Optimization Benefits

To be honest, I did not see any benefits at first, just an improvement to your user experience.
But that is also a great, if not even a greater asset the just SEO, for your website.

If you also run the Cache Component you have read about before, you will see that the results stay cached on the site.
Although this seemed a bit strange at first, form a cache point of view it makes sense.
I just reduced the cache time to improve on this special module.

Why is this good for SEO than.. because people are more likely to do a simpel search if tis ready for them, just one click away!
And that may result in more page views, a longer stay on your Joomla website! all good things.
A better user experience might bring them back again and again..

You are now even more able to look at what people are searching for on your site and you can provide the content they want.

The module is simply called Search Engine Keywords on you site and installation is simpel, try it on your website!

P.s. the Cache is also helping to keep your keywords on the page, which is also good for other visitors then the initial searcher that provided the keywords.

O, if you don’t see any keywords, you just got into the no-keywords cached page….
Try this search ”design cars” and look for www.design-cars.com ,it has the same module installed.

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Using your Search Engine Results to Improve your site

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Optimize your Joomla website from the Back-end

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Sun, 13 May 2007 10:05:27 +0000

If you want your Joomla website to run as smooth as you can, you have to optimize your MySQL tables at some point.

If you work with your PHP Admin software, you now how time consuming this can be, although you can have some scripts made up to do this maintenance task more easily.
But it would be great if you could do this just from withing your Joomla admin panel, instead of login into you hosting admin panel and then into the PHP Admin?

Well, it’s possible… with the SM2 DB Health Check Component from http://www.sm2joomla.com/.

Joomla! Database Health Check Component

Its a simple component to install, and for most part you don’t even have to set the configuration parameters like the Name of the Database Table, User name, server of password.

Please make a back-up of your database before you run this component, although I have had no problems any time I ran the component.
It runs fast, and gives you a nice list of what tables where repaired and which ones where optimized!

Yes, it even optimizes your database tables!
A very nice component, that you should use once a month ar so.

And as a bonus they have another nice Plugin for you to keep you site optimized and running, you can read more about that on my http://seo4joomla.wordpress.com site.

You are reading a post from: Joomla SEO Blog by PathosSeoBlog.com

Optimize your Joomla website from the Back-end

Simple things to do on Your Joomla site to avoid basic Duplicate Content

Herbert-Jan van Dinther — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:12:00 +0000

I was reading a Post on Pandia on Duplicate Content on then I realised there are some basic settings in a standard Joomla Installation that create Duplicate Content.

As you look at your standard installation, you will see three icons on every page:
- a PDF Icon to Create a version of the page in PDF format
- a Print Icon to Create a basic version of the page to be printable without the Template settings link Menu and Headers.
- a E-mail icon the send the URL to any email adres.

Turning the Dups off

On the post 10 Things to Do on Joomla you could read how to disable the PDF Option, because they are “Dead-Ends” for you visitors, there are no navigation options in the PDF.

But they are also Duplicate versions of your page, so another reason to disable this in your Glogbal Configuration.
And while you do that, please disable the “Print” function as well… this again is another version of your page.

The E-mail link is fine, because there are no pages generated.

Stick to One SEO Option

Now this one is also Big!
Choose your SEF Component, set the configuration option on how the URL’s are rewritten, and don’t change them after that !!

I did a test with several SEF Components, which did not all have the same options.
The site has no 1430 !! pages indexed in Google… but the site is currently on 91 Content pages..

This means that google will pick the pages they think are most relevant and that might just be the PDF version!

Start now and prevent the Duplicate Content penalty an keep control over your own index pages!!

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Simple things to do on Your Joomla site to avoid basic Duplicate Content

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