MoeDesigns

This article is meant to give newcomers to the SEO world a starting point. It is more detailed than an SEO cheat sheet. It is also meant to help some of us "old timers" remember a few things at the same time. If you are entering into the SEO world and want to know some of the more common tasks that I think will help your site grow, read on.

So what is the reasoning behind this list? I simply want to keep a list of the techniques that I know make a difference to the quality of the sites that I build. I also want to share what I feel it takes to help keep those sites looking good in the eyes of both its users and the search engines. Because the search engines and web technologies are constantly changing, this list will also change over time. Also, keep in mind that this list is not in any particular order, every aspect is important and should be treated as such. To stay up to date I welcome comments from everyone else describing their own situation and SEO techniques.

Let's get started!

1. Content / Keyword Analysis: Make sure your users are getting what they ask for. While writing your content be sure to keep in mind that the more you use certain words the more "density" that word has on your page. If you are writing an article on SEO, you want to use words that would be relevant to SEO, such as "keyword density", "content optimization", or "SERP".

2. Site Architecture: This simply means build it right from the beginning. Make sure you have a proper layout designed before you start building. Make sure you know what your site will need in the future and plan for it from the beginning.

3. Web Analytics: Whether it's Google Analytics, WebTrends or any other analytical software, analytics can tell you exactly what people really want who end up on your site. Using analytics, you can determine how users landed on your site and how they left.

4. Code Cleanly: Tableless div's, XHTML, CSS, proper validation. All this not only makes it easier for the search engines to differentiate the content from the code on your site, but it will help you to perform edits or upgrades in the future.

5. Web 2.0: Everyone has their own take on web 2.0. My belief is that web 2.0 simply means taking advantage of the technologies that are currently available and allow your users to be involved in your site. Whether it be a user community, forum, blog, image / video sharing, whatever... getting the user involved in your site gives them a reason to come back. Utilizing modern technologies can be anything from using Ajax to perform quick database updates to creating full feature rich sites using ajax, css, dhtml, javascript and other technologies to make things as smooth as possible for the user.

6. Accessibility: Make it so the user can find what they want easily and without extra effort. Menus should be clean and to the point. Pages should have a user friendly layout, not just a search engine friendly layout.

7. Inbound Links: Other sites that have content relative to yours that also link to your site, help boost your PR and will definitely boost your position in the SERP's. Although link trading is good, be sure you are trading with someone who has content closely related to your own. Using link farms can be considered an attempt to "trick the search engines" and can actually cause a lot more pain than good.

8. Site Maps: Many search engines now offer site map programs that literally let you tell the search engine about every page of your site. Make sure you do it correctly and a good site map can be your ticket to quicker indexing.

9. Don't Trick the Bots: Do NOT try to trick the bots! It may help your rankings for a few days but if you get caught it could mean spoiling your domain for a long time.

10. Keyword / Content / URL / Page Title / Header (H1) relevancy and consistency: Be sure to use URL's that coincide with the content you are displaying. If possible set up your meta keywords and description to be dynamically generated based on the content or simply the H1 tag. If it is a blog, the <title> of the page and the meta description should both be the title of the blog post.

OK So there is the short list, if you want to know more detail and want to read more than what is on every "Top Ten SEO Tips" list, keep reading. All of the techniques listed above will basically be covered in the list below. They are just not written in the same verbiage and written with more detail. This list will be ongoing.

More Detailed SEO Techniques:

1. Learn to know the difference between a "top quality" site and a "low quality" site.

For a site to be "top quality", it must offer a good user experience while still maintaining a good position in the SERP's. to be classified as "low quality", the site would have to be user unfriendly and also be ranked low in the search engines. The lack of user experience could be as complex as an unfriendly registration or checkout system to something as simple as bad template design. Knowing what makes a site "top quality" before you start building your own can keep you from making many poor decisions and essentially wasting your time and money.

2. Know what you are building.

This may sound simple but it actually goes much deeper than the beginner webmaster could know. There are a lot of smaller attributes to a web site that can be utilized to capture a certain niche of the market. Be sure to do the needed research on your competitors and learn to differentiate between the top quality and low quality sites in your particular niche.

3. Exercise proper coding techniques from the beginning

This can be a very broad subject as it can contain everything from writing code that validates properly to using proper CSS techniques to minimize formatting code in your markup. If you are not sure what any of this means you need to learn XHTML and CSS. There is no way around it, one of the most important things in being able to have an effective web site is coding techniques. If you know that your site will be growing in the future and you plan ahead by creating a modular system from the beginning, you will be able to scale up your site without the headache of rebuilding everything.

3.1 Table less Code

This is simple and is actually a part of number 3 above but it deserves its own number. So here ya go 3.1 Table less code. By using proper XHTML and CSS you can create layouts that offer the same functionality of tables with as little as ten percent of the code. Less code makes it easier for the search engines. There will soon be a new blog post with instructions on creating table less code, check back later.

4. Maintain your file paths (URI's).

If you switch to a new CMS or switch over to a CMS you need to make sure that any content that you transfer over either uses the same URI or has a permanent 301 redirect to the location of the new content. This means that if you had an "About Us" page at www.example.com/about_us.html and you switch over to a CMS that wants to use www.example.com/?1=node&t=about_us, you need to make sure that on the new setup you have a 301 redirect pointing www.example.com/about_us.html to www.example.com/?1=node&t=about_us. This lets the search engine know that you have moved the content and when it finds the new page, it will not consider it duplicate content.

More Coming Soon!

There is a lot that goes into a great product like Joomla and when you are working with such a large product you tend to run into a few snags every now and then. This article is a list of helpful hints that may help get others out of a bind when working with Joomla. This list is a constant work in progress so if you have something you want to add, please use the 'contact us' form and I will add it to the list!

Q: How do I load a module in a content item (article)?

A: Edit the content item that you want to insert the module into. The code you use for Joomla 1.0.X is different than the code you use for Joomla 1.5. Where you want the module to show up, place the following code:

Joomla 1.0.X: { mosloadposition user7 }

Joomla 1.5.X: { loadposition user7 }

Be sure to remove the spaces after the { and before the } but leave the space in before the module position. I had to add the spaces so that joomla would not parse the string :)

Here I will load mod_whosonline in the user7 position. The code for this is { loadposition user7 } because I am using Joomla 1.5

______________________________________________________________________

This module was loaded using { loadposition userx } where userx = user7. You can use this feature for many useful things like easily adding targeted ads to your content or things like the MoeScroll scrolling content module.

{loadposition user8}

_____________________________________________________________________

Change user7 to the module position that the module is set to show up on. The UserX positions are great for this because they are generally not used as a standard template module position. Anywho, if the module is to only show up on the content item and no where else on the site be sure to use a module position that is not in use already.

When choosing a 'userX' position to use be sure to use the helpful hint below to view the module positions for your template to see which 'userX' positions are not currently in use.  It is also helpful to have the module set to only show up on the page you need it and not on every page.

Q: How do I show all module positions in my template from the front end?

A: In both Joomla 1.0.x and Joomla 1.5.x this is done the same way, you simply add ?tp=1 to the url of your site.

Like so: http://www.joomla.org/index.php?tp=1
Be sure to switch out www.joomla.org with your actual site domain.

With all of the SEO tips out there it can be easy to overlook some of the more simple but powerful techniques. One of these techniques is simply ensuring that your website is forcing the use of the "www." in your hostname. This ensures that your pages are being indexed at your full domain name. Why does this matter? Well basically it is about staying consistent for the search engines and your users.

As an example, open up a new browser window and enter "http://moedesigns.com" into the address bar. Once you hit enter, your browser visits my server at http://moedesigns.com and my server tells your browser to redirect to http://www.moedesigns.com. Not only does it check for the existence of the www, but it checks against anything that is not "www.moedesigns.com". So not only will http://moedesigns.com be redirected, but so will http://testing.moedesigns.com or http://anything.moedesigns.com. This all happens in less than a second so you normally won't notice anything except the URL automatically changing in your address bar.

Please note that this tutorial requires you to be running Apache Web Server. IIS is different and this tutorial will not work for it.

In the root of your web folder you should have a file called: .htaccess ( note the . ). If you do not have one, you can use notepad to create a text file on your computer and copy the following code into it. Once that is done you can simply upload the file to your web server and rename it to .htaccess.

Be sure to change all occurrences of "moedesigns" to your domain.

This is the mod_rewrite code I use to force the use of "www" when visiting "www.moedesigns.com":

Explanation:

Line 1: <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

This line simply checks to ensure that the mod_rewrite module is loaded into your apache configuration.

Line 2: RewriteEngine On
This tells apache to start using the mod_rewrite engine.

Line 3: Rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.moedesigns\.com
This line sets a "Rewrite Condition". This tells mod_rewrite what to look for. In this case we are looking in variable %{HTTP_HOST} and we are looking for: !^www\.moedesigns\.com

The ! means "does not equal" and the ^ means "beginning with". The \'s in front of the . are called "escape characters". All that they are doing is telling mod_rewrite that the period after "www" and the period before "com" are not command characters like the ! or the ^.

So if we put the entire statement together, we are looking to see if the HTTP_HOST variable "does not equal" a string "beginning with" www.moedesigns.com. So now lets move onto the next line!

Line 4: RewriteRule (.*) http://www.moedesigns.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This is the final step! Setting the "Rewrite Rule". In the previous step we told mod_rewrite what to look for, any string that does not match www.moedesigns.com. Now we are going to tell mod_rewrite what to do if it finds what it is looking for. We do this with a "rewrite rule". Our rewrite rule on this one is simple, redirect to the correct hostname (www.moedesigns.com) but keep all the arguments ($1). This is all we need but as I am sure you have noticed there is still [R=301] at the end of the line. This tells the browser, or search engine spider, that this is a permanent 301 redirect. If a spider reaches this URL and receives a 301 redirect, it will know that the content is moved and will index the page using the new URL. It should also update the URL it has stored for that page with the new link.

Line 5: </IfModule>
This simply ends the block of code that is ran if mod_rewrite is enabled.

Checking to ensure that mod_rewrite is enabled:

If you are not sure whether or not your have mod_rewrite enabled, you can check your httpd.conf for the following two lines:

----
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache/mod_rewrite.so
AddModule mod_rewrite.c
----

If those two lines are in your configuration then you are good to go. Apache comes out of the bag with mod_rewrite enabled so this should not be necessary.

Well that should just about do it, if you are interested in URL aliasing or some of the other features of mod_rewrite you can visit the Apache mod_rewrite documentation page at: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html

If you feel I have missed anything or possibly made an incorrect statement, please use the comment system to leave some feedback.

I recently upgraded my site from Joomla 1.5 RC4 to Joomla 1.5 Stable. The process was fairly painless, essentially the same steps as upgrading any joomla release. Everything seemed to go smoothly on a copy of the site so I went ahead and upgraded the live site. Everything looked and ran great until I tried to login. After clicking the "Login" button I was redirected to a screen that said only "Invalid Token". I know joomla has a login form token generator and I figured it was the problem but I decided to do some google'n to see if it was a known problem. Sure enough, it is a known problem with a known solution.

"masterChief" (Andrew), at joomla.org has a solution here:

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,251273.0.html

Here is the cause, Joomla 1.5 login forms need to have what is called a 'hash token' created that gets sent along to Joomla with login information of the form. From what I know, Joomla uses this technique to ensure that the login request is coming from itself and not an outside source like a bot or script attack. The code used to create this hash token changed from Joomla 1.0.x to Joomla 1.5. So, if you have a custom login module, or you are using an older login module from an RCx release then you need to update it.

Old Code:

[code]<input type="hidden" name="<?php echo JUtility::getToken(); ?>" value="1" />[/code]

New Code:

[code]<?php echo JHTML::_( 'form.token' ); ?>[/code]

If you do not know where to look but you are using the standard Joomla 1.5 login module. Either use FTP or SSH to edit 'modules/mod_login/tmpl/default.php' In that file look for the old code from above and replace it with the new code. If you are not familiar with either one of those methods you will have to hire someone to do it for you. If you would like assistance from MoeDesigns use the 'contact us' form to send us your details.

Once you have updated your module everything should work fine! If you are still having problems make sure that you have cookies enabled. Joomla can produce the same error if cookies are disabled in your browser.