Welcome to the Joomla SEO Club and Book

Ever see a real, live champagne tower? They look great, flow smoothly and get the party started in no time.

Allow me then, to make a very cheesy analogy: You should build your website like a champagne tower.

The tower is your site, the glasses are your pages and the champagne is that lovely link juice (Page Rank) that Google pours down our throats? Stick with me and I'll show you how to build a great tower:

First, what can go wrong?

• Missing glasses. How will champagne flow to the bottom if you don't construct each level carefully? Make sure that you get all the glasses in place (indexed) for the second and third levels.
  
• Too many levels and not enough juice. Why build a large site with many levels when you really don't have enough champagne to reach the bottom? Virtuemart sites are particularly bad for this.
  

How do you make the champagne flow smoothly?

• Go get the Page Rank toolbar for Firefox. Browse around your site and see which areas lack PR. If they haven't been added after the last PR update, those are weak points in your site architecture.
  
• Make the Section List and Category Table pages into center pieces of your site. Have one menu that links to each of them.
  
• Fill in all detailed descriptions for each Section and Category. Make them into a real destination for visitors and PR.
  
• Good sites start shallow. Stick with a relatively small group of sections and categories to maximize your link-passing power. Only add more as your site grows in age and PR. When you're Amazon.com, then you can build a site 15 levels and still get your pages indexed.
  

Comments (9)

thanks
written by jansie, August 01, 2007

really enjoyed this. can be applied in other apps as well.

Nice
written by Justin Whittaker, August 01, 2007

Very helpful as always Steve. I should download that Google PR toolbar.

...
written by steve, August 01, 2007

Thanks for the kind words, guys.

Justin - I've just realised I should have added a link to download the toolbar:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2007

...
written by compass, August 01, 2007

These articles are also a good read. From a Joomla perspective, the themes are the sections/categories....
http://www.searchengineguide.c...orb1.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10003/3060.htm

...
written by steve, August 01, 2007

Hey Compass - thanks for those useful links.

I think this is important stuff, because Google will index all your Joomla sections and categories pages. I say this for two reasons:

1) Most templates have pathways. Those link to all your section and category pages.
2) Google just digs out everything Simple removing the article name and examining whats in the folder is something the bots do all the time.

So if Google is going to index them, we may as well make them as good as possible. Often I'll see people focusing on getting individual pages indexed without looking at the 2nd and 3rd levels.

Because our blog category pages (right menu) often have a PR of 3 or 4, its easy to get our individual pages indexed.

Joomla pagerank ...
written by Anthony, August 15, 2007

Hey Steve,

I just did a quick scout around some other major Joomla sites after seeing that your site has a pagerank of 5 and found that most of the template sites rocketheme, joomlart, yootheme, joomlabamboo also had 5 and joomlashack was a stirling 7. So it made me wonder what you think the highest pagerank a Joomla site could achieve get was and given that jooml.org is 9/10 what it takes to squeeze the juice out of the google page rank-o-meter to push into the top half.

Cheers Anthony.

...
written by steve, August 15, 2007

Interesting question - I've always taken PR to be simply a matter of link quantity rather than an accurate indication of a sites quality in Google's eyes. After all, lots of low PR sites will outrank high PR sites. However ... the PR certainly helps when it comes to passing link juice to other sites.

I have a feeling that to get up to PR 9, it doesn't matter what software you use. Instead you may need to be tagged as an "official site" by Google rather than a "commercial site".

...
written by Anthony, August 15, 2007

Yes sorry didn't quite phrase the last part of the question properly but you answered it for me

Would you say that the difference between the joomlashack pr and the others would be their tutorials or non-commercial content and the number of inbound links coming from their templates and other sites plus an active and large forum/user base? Or are all of these factors contributors to why they rank so highly in a google searches for joomla templates?

Sorry if its a bit longwinded ... Im just trying to get my head around what google perceives as being important in terms of search terms ...

...
written by steve, August 16, 2007

Interesting question .. I'm not sure there are any hard and fast answers but generally I attribute PR to incoming links and good rankings to a whole range of things that they're doing right.

Name

Email

Website

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

Add Comment