Joomla SEO II

Friday, 25 July 2008

It's time to get another insight on SEO techniques. In this article we'll cover the human/social aspects of website promotion, as SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM(search engine marketing) complement each other.

Advice found in this article does not require high technical skills (HTML, meta tags, etc). It's SEO for non-techies.

Google became famous through their PageRank algorithm, designed to sort search engine results by popularity.They observed that people tend to link to and boomark well known sites. So the more important and well regarded a site is, the more links it gets from other websites.

Links from external sites to your own website are called "backlinks".

The more backlinks you have, the more you climb up the search results pages (SERPs).

So what Google did was trying to have their machines compute the degree of human interest that a page gets. This is why you should target humans to get better SERPs in turn.

You need backlinks. And it would be great to have them for free. So even if you're not a technical person, you can still do pretty good SEO by getting people to link to your site. This, as explained above, will increase your PageRank and will get you higher positions in search engine results pages.

"Link bait" is a term for pages designed to generate interest and backlinks. A link bait page should have some elements that drive people to bookmark it, discuss it on forums and pass it to their friends and colleagues.

Link baits are better than buying backlinks because

you get backlinks for free
you get natural backlinks, with diversified anchor text(anchor text=the linked text), which is good for SEO
you get traffic from backlinks, and your website's PageRank increases, which in turn gets you more traffic from search engines

Examples of link bait pages would be:

a loan calculator on financial related websites(a practical online tool to save time and money)
an online color matcher, CSS layout generator on a web development site.
an online review or product comparison on an e-commerce website(you do some research so you visitors don't have to)
an useful tutorial about your site's market niche (people love "101" articles and quick tips like "10 steps for succesful widget stores ")
TeachMeJoomla.net Joomla password recovery tool.

Link bait articles could go many ways.

You can shock people("Elvis is alive")
you can deliberately go wrong("Why Joomla sucks") in order to get attention
you can provide a nice useful little tool or advice
a synthesis of other people's stuff, or a list of tools and resources also works well as link bait.

Page/article title should be carefully chosen in order to make the optimal impact(between me and you, I don't really know about the Elvis stuff).

As you can see all of the given examples bring some advantage to your visitors, driving them to pass the article along.

Make sure you have a "tell a friend" form and a "bookmark this on social websites" widget on your link bait page. This will make it easier for people to spread the article.

Oh, and make sure you link to this article on your own blog/website.

if you're on to in-depth SEO reading, we recommend The SEO BOOK specifically written for Joomla CMS