Update to a Joomla SEO Site Review from June

Written by Steve Burge

Back in the summer of this year where we had a short series offering free site reviews to companies who didn't mind having the advice made public to help others learn. We had an email this week from John Parker who asked us to examine his site va-home-loansonline.com which provides home loans to Texas military veterans. You can see what the site looked like before the review at Archive.org.

He's really done a great job of taking our suggestions from the analysis and SEO Book, and then implementing them successfully. Here's his update, 6 months after the initial review:

John on the Status of Va-Home-LoansOnline.com

The site is now almost a year old and while I still use the landing pages for pay per click, I wasn't happy with my SEO results until recently. That changed after making some of the changes in the review.

Since the review, I have installed just about every component or core hack that is available for Joomla. I have been trying to get links from other websites and have managed to expand my links from 11 to 140 including DMOZ. I have continued to add content to the website to get traffic.

I also removed JomComment because nobody was leaving comments, they were calling me.

I have pretty much followed your SEO book to the letter, I need another copy of it ... Mine is old :)

Where My Site Ranks Now

Here are my search query results from Google Webmaster Tools. Most of them are very relevant searches.

texas vet loans .... 10th position
texas veteran loans .... 10th position
"texas veteran loans" .... 2nd position
"texas veteran loan" .... 5th position
texas va mortgage .... 7th position
dream home mortgage dallas .... 8th position
texas veterans loan .... 9th position
use of builders lender .... 1st position
va loan energy star .... 9th position
veterans home builders tx .... 2nd position
history of home financing .... 6th position
"veterans home mortgage" .... 8th position
texas veterans home loan .... 9th position
texas va home loans .... 10th position
texas va loan .... 10th position
texas veterans loans .... 5th position
texas vet mortgage .... 8th position
va refinace .... 9th position
texas veterans home .... 10th position

(If you want to find this data for your site, log into Webmaster Tools, click "Statistics" and then "Top search queries".)

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Your Comments (2)

David Towers

December 17, 2007

Nice to see this as didn't see the original review. I presume that adwords for loans is extremely costly? Presumably making organic ranking and SEO particularly attractive for this market segment?

Looking at the site, there are clearly a number of changes which still could be made to tweak its seo potential... Eg. the use of h1 tags on the site...

Are the social bookmarking bookmarks generating any inbound links or traffic?

John Parker

December 21, 2007

Yes, you are correct Adwords is fairly expensive for this segment although I have managed to lower my mosts considerably and Adwords still works well if you know what you are doing.

What things would you do to change the site? The site has h1 tags, is this not a good thing?

The social bookmarking bookmarks do not generate any inbound links or traffic either...