SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization a kind of complex area of web development. After working with SEO for a number of years, and especially 4 years with Joomla and SEO, I have gain myself some certain experience. In this post, I will share it with you guy: 10 important factors you should consider when optimizing your site.

In my opinion, SEO isn’t a quick fix but a long term strategy, it is about what you do every day. If you exactly implement these factors, you can see the increase of search engine traffic to your site. Now let’s begin with our post:

1/ TITLE tag

TITLE tag is very important. This is what shows up in the search engines as clickable headlines for your page. Google will takes most notice of so include your main keywords if possible so take time to create your own title tag and make sure it includes all your main keyword.

2/ Too many keywords is unnecessary

Most webmasters know that the most important one or two keywords for a page multiple times in an article is essential if you want to compete for positions. However, too much of any thing isn’t always good. You have to remember that the text must be readable and fluent for the reader, you can not ‘please’ the search engines by stuffing too much key words in your article. It annoys your readers and can backfire by excluding you from the search engines.

To deal with this question, you can use “Scribe SEO for Joomla” – a tool that can analyze your content and help you remember all of the content ‘rules’ that impact SEO.

3/ Get lots of inlinks

Inbound link to your pages is another very important factor. The best way of getting inbound links is to create compelling content that the readers want to share with others. Use Digg, StumbleUpon and other services to spread word of your pages. If the content is good, bloggers and other site owners will link to it.

A great example here is Wikipedia. People are linking as crazy to it, because it contains relevant information about almost everything.

4/ Internal and external linking

Do you have a page with content relevant to what you’re writing about at the moment? Link to it internally – it will improve your rankings. You can see examples in this very post.

Linking externally, you might want to consider using the rel=”nofollow” tag in your links. Too many links from a page can be bad for SEO, so setting some of them to nofollow can be good.

5/ Anchor texts (linking words)

Pay attention to this. To get the most from a link, consider carefully about the text that you are linking from (the anchor text). For instance, a link saying the product will be less efficient than a link saying iPhone 4. The word or phrase you link from will be the one Google will improve the ranking for. So, the page you link to will get a boost for the word iPhone 4 when you create a link on the word (to put it simply).

6/ XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is an XML file that shows all pages in the site for easy inclusion on a search engine. If you have just a few pages, use a service like xml-sitemaps.com to create an XML sitemap for free. Or you can install “XMap” to create the sitemap automtically from your Joomla menu.

7/ Use the robots.txt File

The robots.txt file is in your site root folder. It contains info on which folders should be indexed and not. It can also include information about your XML sitemap.
Tip: Remove the line excluding the Joomla /images/ folder. Otherwise, none of your site images will be indexed in the Google image search.

8/ Use Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a tool that analyze and improve your site. If you have missed the title and/or description, these tools will make it’s very easy to spot any place in your site where you might have missed. You can also submit your sitemap XML and test your robots.txt file, to mention some. Read more about Google Webmaster Tools and Joomla.

9/ Track and analyze

You need to track the traffic and analyze it regularly to improve your site. You can use Google Analytics for reporting and frequently take a look at the reports. Here are things that you should consider :

    • Traffic sources (search engines, direct, reffering sites)

 

    • Bounce rate (the number of people seeing only one page)

 

    • What keywords are generating traffic (get ideas for content and consider creating)

 

    • More to get additional traffic on these words)

 

    • Most popular pages (what do they have in common?)

 

    • Most common exit pages (how can they be improved?)

 

    • Using the segmentation tools of Google Analytics. This can form the basis for your future SEO work.



10/ Keyword research

This is the very first thing you should do. Knowing what people are searching for is an advantage when you create words and phrases to optimize for. You can use the Google Adwords keyword tool, or a specialized software like Market Samurai.

Source