Search Engine Optimization for your Joomla! Website
Here is a huge and complex subject for anyone to grasp, and that is probably putting it mildly. This is only really included in the General Information section because it is our hope that most of what customers ask us on the topic can be answered here. Trust us, we have had the same conversation about SEO numerous times and it can take quite a while.
Our good friends at Wikipedia.org state this in their first paragraph about the subject.
While this is most likely the simplest explanation you will find out there, it is still on the technical side and can confuse anyone not in the business of SEO.
Basically we look at it in 3 main parts.
1- Setting your web addresses looking like readable text. This is what a typical Joomla address looks like in the latest “Stable” version of Joomla!.
http://joomlacrafters.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=56&Itemid=67
Now after the .com, what exactly can a human read and comprehend? Well the same is true for search engines. With the help of some components (free and for a price), we make the new address look like they were actually written by a human, for a human. This is the first and most important step to take towards SEO for you site. The same page after the simplest of fixes becomes:
http://joomlacrafters.com/index.php/packages.html
2- Getting all your text and meta information to match your intended web content. Bots and spiders to your sites must be able to read and categorize what it is your site is all about. This is probably the most labor intensive part of the project, and as much explanation as it would take to tell you about the details of this process has filled countless books on the subject of SEO would be a waste of time here. A simplified example would be that if your site was up to sell lasers, then you would want the word “laser” (and variations of the word) to appear so often in your site, that your visitors would go to bed that night thinking of nothing but lasers. Redundancy is the key in this phase. Please bear in mind again that this example is highly simplified in its explanation and would be laughed at by many companies that would suck thousands of dollars out of your pocket to do an SEO job for you. However, it is a solid foundational fact of SEO development.
Step 3 - “search engine submission”, is probably the one thing about SEO most people do not understand since it involves knowing how search engines work. Not to mention it is the step where you wait. And wait you will, up to 6-8 months. It simply takes that long for search engines to crawl, compile information and rank all that against other similar sites to you and how keywords interact with results. At this point we will submit both your website’s URL and a zipped file containing a site map to the major search engines. Once this is done, we are done and the final invoice for the job is paid.
Now you must understand, even the highest paid SEO specific companies out there can NEVER guarantee that your site will pull up in the number one position on a search engines results page, nor can they even guarantee a spot on page one. There is simply no way to predict what web surfers are going to type into the infamous search field. However, if you do not have this process done the search engines won’t even know you site exists. You would be forced to rely on you personally trying to get your site to any potential viewer and hopefully anyone that does visit your site will tell others about it.
We hope this has helped to at least give you a general outline of SEO and whether or not you need it. Certain sites really have no reason to go through this and others we feel it is imperative for the longevity and success of your Joomla! based website. Please feel free to ask us for any further information you require.
Here is a huge and complex subject for anyone to grasp, and that is probably putting it mildly. This is only really included in the General Information section because it is our hope that most of what customers ask us on the topic can be answered here. Trust us, we have had the same conversation about SEO numerous times and it can take quite a while.
Our good friends at Wikipedia.org state this in their first paragraph about the subject.
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.”
While this is most likely the simplest explanation you will find out there, it is still on the technical side and can confuse anyone not in the business of SEO.
Basically we look at it in 3 main parts.
1- Setting your web addresses looking like readable text. This is what a typical Joomla address looks like in the latest “Stable” version of Joomla!.
http://joomlacrafters.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=56&Itemid=67
Now after the .com, what exactly can a human read and comprehend? Well the same is true for search engines. With the help of some components (free and for a price), we make the new address look like they were actually written by a human, for a human. This is the first and most important step to take towards SEO for you site. The same page after the simplest of fixes becomes:
http://joomlacrafters.com/index.php/packages.html
2- Getting all your text and meta information to match your intended web content. Bots and spiders to your sites must be able to read and categorize what it is your site is all about. This is probably the most labor intensive part of the project, and as much explanation as it would take to tell you about the details of this process has filled countless books on the subject of SEO would be a waste of time here. A simplified example would be that if your site was up to sell lasers, then you would want the word “laser” (and variations of the word) to appear so often in your site, that your visitors would go to bed that night thinking of nothing but lasers. Redundancy is the key in this phase. Please bear in mind again that this example is highly simplified in its explanation and would be laughed at by many companies that would suck thousands of dollars out of your pocket to do an SEO job for you. However, it is a solid foundational fact of SEO development.
Step 3 - “search engine submission”, is probably the one thing about SEO most people do not understand since it involves knowing how search engines work. Not to mention it is the step where you wait. And wait you will, up to 6-8 months. It simply takes that long for search engines to crawl, compile information and rank all that against other similar sites to you and how keywords interact with results. At this point we will submit both your website’s URL and a zipped file containing a site map to the major search engines. Once this is done, we are done and the final invoice for the job is paid.
Now you must understand, even the highest paid SEO specific companies out there can NEVER guarantee that your site will pull up in the number one position on a search engines results page, nor can they even guarantee a spot on page one. There is simply no way to predict what web surfers are going to type into the infamous search field. However, if you do not have this process done the search engines won’t even know you site exists. You would be forced to rely on you personally trying to get your site to any potential viewer and hopefully anyone that does visit your site will tell others about it.
We hope this has helped to at least give you a general outline of SEO and whether or not you need it. Certain sites really have no reason to go through this and others we feel it is imperative for the longevity and success of your Joomla! based website. Please feel free to ask us for any further information you require.
