From the category archives:

SEO

How To: The Best Articles on SEO

by Charles Grimm on December 16, 2009

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

These are a collection of articles on the How To: of Search Engine Optimization for 2009. This list was compiled from several websites of leading industry professionals. It is a good place to get started and revisit when defining your objectives, strategy, tactics, Do’s and Don’ts of your SEO program.These articles range from the beginner to the advanced.

1. The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO: by SEOmoz.
2. SEO Guide for Designers: by Web designer wall.
3. The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet: by SEOmoz.
4. The SEO Guide to Information Architecture: by Adam Audette.
5. The SEO Success Pyramid: by Matt McGee.
6. What is the Definition of SEO?: by Jeremy Schoemaker.
7. Online SEO Tools: The Ultimate Collection: by Search Engine Journal.
8. How to Get New Web Sites to Rank Quickly: by Aaron Wall.
9. Tools of the SEO Trade: by Search engine land.
10. Keyword Density SEO Myths: by Hobo SEO.
11. The Most Powerful SEO Tactic: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify: by Eric Enge
12. Content is NOT Always King and SEO is not always bad: by Thinkseer.
13. Don’t Sour Your Link Juice by Forgetting Basic SEO: by Loren Baker.
14. How Much Money is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business: SeoBook.
15. How to be an SEO Service Provider: by SEObook.

Please add your comments or suggestions for this list or any new valuable additions would benefit our readers.

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Joomla SEO – Duplicate Content & 301

by Charles Grimm on October 13, 2009

If you work in Joomla a fair bit as I do, at some point you will be considering the best way to eliminate duplicate content.

Within the Joomla.org site there are a couple of options for the Joomla Canonical URL Tag that you may want to consider. These are pretty simple to use, yet I find not the most effective way to deal with duplicate content in Joomla.

Joomla Canonical and SEO extensions in general are not as effective as the WordPress SEO plugins. If you have a choice in building a client site that needs more SEO ease and effectiveness out of the box then wordpress is your best product.

Joomla however is great product for more functionality and really has a much more sophisticated open source CMS platform for easily building and maintaining more complex business websites.

So if your are building a dynamic CMS using joomla, I find the best way to solve your duplicate content issues is by employing one or both of these methods:

1. Do a .htaccess rewrite and /or 2. Do a simple redirect within your cpanel

1 .htaccess rewrite

This file is located in your public html (www) folder.

What this does. It rewrites your domain from http://yourdomain.com to  http://www.yourdomain.com

This is a permanent rewrite that will also be reflected in the address bar of your browser.

Add this script to your .htaccess.

#  mod_rewrite in use
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ “http://www.yourdomain.com/$1″ [R=301,L]

2. The Redirect

Since Joomla doesn’t have any good Free plugins for this yet, here is a paid extension I found but have not yet tried…Joomla SEO 301 Redirect.

However if you have access to your cpanel you have two easy and better options:

1. Do a redirect under ‘Addon Domains’ and/or 2. Do a redirect under ‘Redirects’

1. Add-on Domains
Use this if you have a parked domain on top of your site domain and you want to make sure that Google isn’t indexing your parked domain. Just follow the instructions in ‘figure A’.

Figure A

2. Redirects

Use this if you want to redirect individual duplicate content pages.

i.e http://yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=photos&return=aHR0c

to:

http://www.yourdomain.com/user/Charles-Grimm/photos.html

I know I have cut to the chase here pretty quickly, but if you have any questions or comments on SEO for Joomla please let me know in the comments area. Cheers C.

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Search Engine Ranking 2009

by Charles Grimm on September 1, 2009

Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors for 2009

If you are really interested in digging into SEO and building traffic to your site then you need to check out the new 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors list. This list gives you an “all you need to know” resource that was scored by a panel of 72 SEO experts…SEOMOZ

With 149 Total Factors there is a lot of information that you can use to engineer your website and marketing strategy for a better search engine rank.

This list is narrowed down to the top 10 factors showing the first most important factor for each category.

The Top 10 Scored Categories

Category                                 Factors

1. On- Page ranking factors Keyword use anywhere in Title tag
2. On-Page non keyword factors Substantial unique page content
3. Page Specific Link Popularity Ranking Keyword Anchor text from external Links
4. Overall Site Linking Factors Trustworthiness of the Domain based on Link distance from trusted Domains
5. Overall Site (non link based) Ranking Factors Site Architecture
6. Social Media Ranking Factors Delicious Data
7. Usage Data Factors Historical Click Through Data
8. Negative Ranking Factors Cloaking with Mal-Intent
9. Negative External Link Factors Domain Banned by Google for Spam
10.Geo Targeting Factors Country Code of the Domain (i.e .uk, .au, .ca etc.)

Bottom Line for Small Business

Concentrate on the top 1-3 factors in each category and you will be well on your way to a higher rank on Google and more traffic to your website and blog.

See the top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors for 2009 and the complete rankings data.

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Blogging & SEO: Joomla vs WordPress

by Charles Grimm on August 13, 2009

I came across Frugal theme for word press. I like the clean structure. It looks a lot like Matt Cutts (Google) theme. I am thinking about using this a main theme for all our clients that want to now add a blog to there Joomla website. The My Blog extension in Joomla1.5 is the best that is available for Joomla but it is still not as good as using a word press theme. WordPress is built for blogging and has the styling that is more suitable for copy writers. It’s SEO structure is much better out of the box than Joomla”s. It appears that Joomla is moving toward more blog type templates and better SEO and WordPress is getting more into business websites. For now  think I will stick with Joomla for websites and WordPress for blogs.

I am thinking about doing an experiment: I have just set up my SearchMarketinglife.com blog site in using a Joomla platform. I think will set up the same structure with OnlineMarketinglife.com using a WordPress platform and see which one does the best from and SEO stand point.  Hopefully I won’t get penalized by Google for duplicate content. If you have any thoughts on this please add your comments.

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Search Engine Ranking and Anchor Text

by Charles Grimm on July 24, 2009

I came across a great SEO resource the other day. Since it can be confusing as to what are the best SEO practices; this resource by SEOMOZ helps by ranking the best organic SEO practices as voted by 37 of the top known SEO experts internationally.

Today I just want examine one of these practices. Anchor text. Some would agree that anchor text is very important in the overall Google algorithm while others will say its importance is below other key factors. What is anchor text? Anchor text are the key words and there underlining hyperlinks that appear in the content body of your articles or web pages. Google weights these words with importance because when you anchor a word or words you are saying that this is a concise description or an accurate extension of what this topic is all about.

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