10 Tips on How to Optimize your Joomla website for Search Engines

The most important factor for a website to rank well and do well in the search engines is the Title of your page.

Creating the right title can be a very tedious process and you might even do it over and over agian until you think it is really well enough to publish your page.

The Title should do three things:

• Help your visitor understand what your page is about
• Get the searcher on the search engines to click on it!
• Contain your mayor keywords you want to rank for.

That is it, nothing more and really nothing less.

And because of that it is really hard to create one that does all that in 60 character postions as Google will no show the text of your title beyond that point.

That said, now its time to get to the factors that will make your Joomla website stand out of the rest of the crowd adn will outperform your competition.

Although this first item is not just for Joomla! websites it is the best way to get targeted visitors.

Use keyword tools like Google External Adwords tool to find related keywords on the topic of your website. You should also look at the search volume of the words and phrases used by searchers.

Naming your sections the right way and sorting your categories into topical entities. You can find related topics from the keyword list you build before.

At Joomlatwork.com you can download a patch for the latest version of Joomla! that will extend your menu items and content articles with extra's like seperate HTML Titles that Google and other search engines use as the title in their results pages.

Installing a good SEF component like sh404SEF will give you even better URLs and redirects old URLs automatcily to new ones. With a SEF component you can also create better URLs for content components that don't support that kind of URL rewriting.

The best sitemap component for Joomla 1.5 is definitly Joomla! Xmap which not only provides you with an onsite sitemap page, but also with a Google sitemap file that will validate in Google's Webmaster Central.

The looks of you site is very important for you visitors, speed and correct valid HTML code is important for search engine robots so they can index as much as possible from your site. You need to find a template that will satisfy both options.

Joomla! has a build in Cache function, activate and use it. Try to set the cache time right for the kind of site you run. Short cache time for news sites, longer cache time for static websites low on updates.

Keep track of what works and what doesn't work by using free counters and analytics like www.statcounter.com and http://www.google.com/analytics/, both are fast enough so they won't slow down your site too much.

 Creating a Blog on Joomla! is now easier then even with components like K2 and myBlog (commercial). Blogging will give you several new options to get incoming links which in turn will get you better rankings.

All the things you did before you arrived at this number 10 are important, but content still rules. Not only what you write about is what attracts search engines, also how you write and structure it:

• Use keyword rich titles
• Use Bold Paragraph headers
• Use keyword rich images and fill in the Alt tags.
• Use the Metatag description fields to get those into the search engine snippets (text below the Title in the search results pages) and make them stand out so people will want to click on them.
• Create pages and more pages and even more pages as with every page you build you get a new possibility to get better results in the search engines.