Welcome to Alledia - the Joomla SEO Experts

Today we're launching a new blog series called "Joomla SEO Site Review".

Every Wednesday for the following few weeks, we're going to look at a new Joomla site and address several questions the site owner wants answering about their site's SEO. We'll discuss them on the blog and then open things up for other people to give their feedback as well.

Hopefully it will raise some topics that will be useful to lots of people, not just the site owner. If you're interested in having your site featured, feel free to contact us with your site's URL and 4/5 questions you'd like answered.

Site Review #1 

Our first site is MommyClub.ca - a social network for Canadian moms.

Some brief facts about the site:

• Launched in January of this year, picking up some pretty good publicity from sites such as Mashable.com.
  
• Uses every key Joomla social networking component, intergrating GroupJive, Community Builder, MyBlog, Joomlaboard and RSGallery.
• 1,370 Yahoo links. Page Rank 4 on the frontpage and PR3 on most key menu page links.

SEO Questions

Michelle, who runs Mommy Club, has the following question about her site:

1) How do we choose keywords when we have over 5000 pages of content?

You're right - you have a very large number of keywords to think about, not just because of your content but also because of your diverse site focus - dealing with the whole of Canada and with Mommy-issues in general, so lots and lots of keywords come into play. You may get some traction from keywords tools such as Overture and KeyCompete, but my first piece advice would be to take advantage of your main competitive advantage - your own statistics from Google Analytics and AwStats. What key phrases are people looking for when they find you?

The second tip would be to optimize for local search phrases. Edmonton *****, Ottowa ***** and so on. As Mashable noted, you have a unique selling point by focusing on the Canadian market. Someone searching for "moms groups in Toronto" is a much better targeted visitor than someone searching more generally for "moms groups".

2) Does adding your site to the Yahoo Directory etc. really increase your Page Rank?

Yes - in certain cases. If you don't rank well in Yahoo and you're in a competitive industry, its possible to justify dropping $299 on the Yahoo Directory. However, your Yahoo rankings are great and that money might be better spent elsewhere. Directory submissions in general can help a site get started but they aren't a priority for sites in your position (you already have more links that most of the competition).

3) What are some other ways to increase your Page Rank?

PR is overrated when it comes to generating good rankings and traffic. Concentrate instead on traffic and rankings. A better way to keep track of your site's standing is to monitor the number of pages you have in Google's supplemental index and track your rankings across a large number of keywords with a program such as WebCEO.

4) What about re-contenting? Does Google penalize you for adding re-printed articles to your site?

Should only be a problem if you let it get out of hand. Plenty of high-quality sites are full of recycled content from the Associated Press, Reuters etc. So long as you maintain a high ratio of original content to recycled content, this shouldn't be a problem.

5) Our short-term goal is to double our page views? What strategies would you recommend?

There are two parts to this. One is to attract new visitors and the other is get current members to logon more regularly and for longer periods. The best way to do both may be to build a successful forum. We find that information sites have a ratio of visits/pageviews of about 1/3 whereas forums are often close to 1/10 or more. Consider opening up the forum to the people browsing the site and to run competitions and contests inside the forum.

Over to you guys.... Do you agree with my advice? What other ideas would help Michelle in improving MommyClub's SEO?
 

Comments (5)

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Fab-o!
written by Michelle, May 23, 2007

Thanks so much, Steve! We have considered opening up the forum to be public view / private write.

Can you tell me more about the "supplemental index"? How exactly do I get that info for MommyClub?

Thanks again and would love to hear everyone else's thoughts too!

...
written by steve, May 23, 2007

Hi Michelle

Basically these are pages that are in search purgatory. Every site has plenyt of pages in here - the key thing is how it relates to your total number of pages.

Search Google for this: site:www.mommyclub.ca *** -sljktf

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written by brian teeman, May 23, 2007

Thanks for starting to do this.I look forward to reaing this each week and learning by example. Your SEO guide is great but there is nothing better than seing that advice turned into real world exampls

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written by steve, May 23, 2007

Thanks Brian - seemed like the logical next step.

I'm also working on a couple of case studies of what has worked, rather than just giving my opinion of what may work in the future. Should be ready shortly.

...
written by brian teeman, May 23, 2007

It just gets better..

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