What is the use of building a website and nobody knows about the existence of your website, your products or your services? You cannot think of building a website, and then not marketing it … it’s the same as starting a business and not printing business cards or advertising. You will have to be satisfied with the odd person stumbling onto your website. Having Joomla website is a good start, hosting with ActionOnline will give you an advantage … but you will still be required to have SEO in your head when you design/develop your website. OK wait, what’s SEO?
SEO is the term used by the geeks for Search Engine Optimization. This is a process where in the content on your website will be edited and keywords inserted, highlighted and sometimes be included in titles where possible. Now going back to having SEO in your head when you design your website, you need to have a list of your keywords. Keywords are what people would type into a search engine when looking for your products or services. They don’t have to be words only, and can be phrases as well. Get this list printed next to your keyword, and then think about the pages that you going to have on your website, and their content, as they MUST include as many of the keywords as possible. Then where you have your keywords in the content, you need to select them and make them bold. Here possible and appropriate, also try and increase the font size on the keywords slightly, and/or highlight the word or phrase in yellow. Another factor to consider is keyword density …
While you are working on each page, meta keywords and descriptions must be inserted on each page. Joomla allows you to specify meta data on each page under advanced parameters. So ther than the standard meta information found in the Global Configuration of your Joomla website, you need to specify keywords per page. The keywords you specify on the page’s meta info, needs to be within the content/text of that page.
Pictures contained in the content of the page needs to be optimized to have an ‘alt’ tag or title on the picture.
Once all this is done, the final setup of onsite optimization is to convert your standard Joomla URLs into search engine friendly URL’s. So a Link like
http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=0&Itemid=9
Will not do as well as http://www.example.com/news/new-seo-build-page.html
To do this, you need to install a SEF (Search Engine Friendly) component on your Joomla site. This is normally not an easy install, so pay attention to the readme instructions of your chosen component.
The good news now is if you are a client of ActionOnline, you can login on the website here, and then go to the download area, where you will find SEO E-books that will explain SEO optimization in detail, and also look at other techniques that can be used to promote your website and ensure good placement on proper keywords. The e-book will explain terms and techniques in a easy-to-understand way, and you will be able to follow instructions and apply what you learn to your own website.
