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Top 6 Joomla SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Feb 16 2007

Top 6 Joomla SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Friday, 16 February 2007

Using your keyword list as a meta title. "Dogs, Boarding, Grooming, Pets, Pooches, Kennels, Food" is not a decent meta title because search engines see these as separate keywords. Dog Boarding - Dog Grooming - Dog Kennels is much better.
Not redirecting the www and non-www versions of your site to the same place. Barrie North blogged about this recently and provided an easy .htaccess hack to avoid this.
Not checking to see how many pages you have indexed in Google, MSN and Yahoo. This is a simple way to test for potential crawling problems. We had one client recently with 2,000 Google pages, 16,000 in Yahoo and 24 in MSN. Something was amiss.
Treating headlines as an afterthought. David Ogilvy wrote that once only 20% of people read past the headline of an advertisement, so that you've spent 80 cents of your dollar once you've written it. This story about Wikipedia made the frontpage of Digg and Reddit on the same day with the headline: "U.S. senator: It's time to ban Wikipedia in schools, libraries." The story was almost nothing to do with Wikipedia but smart headline writing led to plenty of new traffic.
Being lulled into a false sense of security by Joomla. "It works right out-of-the-box! I don't need to worry about extra SEO!" Ron Liskey posted about this attitude on the Joomla! forums with regard to security. Do install an extra SEF URL component. Do consider something like Joomlatwork's SEF patch. Do use Octagate's SiteTimer to pinpoint modules, code and images that are slowing your site down. Do use external statistics such as Google Analytics to track your visitors and conversion rates.
Wasting your site's link juice with social bookmarking links, technorati tags, RSS Feeds for every component, print and PDF buttons and anything else that is cluttering up your page. Lets face it.....You're not going to get Dugg. If you're lucky people may subscribe to ONE of your RSS feeds - the rest are junk. Your Technorati tags are making those guys rich but bleeding your site's authority away. No-one downloads your pages as a PDF. On the other hand, your visitors and search engines do appreciate clean, uncluttered pages. More signal, less noise as those Web 2.0 folks say.

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Comments (7) Add Comment

OSCMS
written by AmyStephen, February 15, 2007

Steve - you need to go to the OSCMS and hold a session on SEO issues PLUS your testing between Joomla!, Drupal and WP. You really need to do that. Friday is the last day to get your session signed up - and you really need to do this. Every single article you write, I am amazed by what I learn. Now - go west young man!

Spot on!
written by Hummerbie, February 16, 2007

Steve I totally agree with you on all points, with nr 6 as most prominent.
Just use what your really need !

Here is another mistake: Not filling your Description Metagtag for each page.

Ps. note to myself...check all sites with Octagate SiteTimer!
New to me, so a great find thanks!

...
written by steve, February 16, 2007

Hey Amy - thanks for the kind words. I've been in the States three years and only made it to West Coast once, also for a conference. It'd be great for a whole bunch of Joomla people to go, but I guess those old bugbears of time and money will get in the way for most.

Hummerbie - curiously enough the Octagate SiteTimer always seems to bring up the same culprits slowing sites down - the linkjuice wasters mentioned in #6.....Ajax widgets, Javascript mambots, RSS Feeds etc. There are some mambots available that produce beautiful effects, especially lightboxes, but some add up to an extra second to a page's load time.

PDF clutters the page?
written by Josh Lyon, March 26, 2007

Nice article. smilies/wink.gif

I thought it was mildly amuzing that I found this page while trying to figure out PDF versions of content are showing up higher in search engine rankings than my actual content items are. I still haven't figured out why, but by your article the PDFs are clutter. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not taking down the PDF feature until I can figure out how to get my content higher in the search ranking. Thanks again for the good read.

...
written by steve, March 26, 2007

Hi Josh

I think you've a duplicate content issue with the PDFs:

You're in good company - the same thing happens on Joomla.org too.

You could use a robots.txt command to block Google from indexing the PDFs
Disallow: /index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf

RE: Robots.txt for the PDF's and view/5/5's
written by Justin Frost, April 24, 2007

Great article, joomnla SEO is a feat I run a combination of SEF modules and code mods to allow for individual page titles and sef URL's...

It would be nice to find a robots.txt snippet that helps with the PDF's. The google webmaster tools interface allows you to test the robots.txt file against urls.

Another thing to watch our for is duplicate urls [like content/view/5/5] that will still exist with the implementation of the JoomSEF module.

Cheers!
Justin Frost
http://www.realstock.ca

RE: Robots.txt for the PDF's and view/5/5's
written by Justin Frost, April 24, 2007

So I just noticed that you already replied to that Steve!! My apologies!!!

So you have supplied the robots.txt snippet for the PDF's [thanks] can you help with a snippit that disallows the default url paths? ie: www.realstock.ca/content/view/5/5/ [should be only http://www.realstock.ca/pricing.html ]

Cheers!
Justin Frost
http://www.realstock.ca

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