By P.J. Swesey

Joomla’s default URLs, like the standard URLs of any CMS, are terrible for Search Engine Optimization purposes. They have several querystring parameters, they are not human readable, they offer search engines no keywords or insight into what content the page holds, and they use the Itemid parameter to create multiple URLs for each content item. Luckily there are Search Engine Friendly URL components available for Joomla that solve all these issues for us.

I used to use the JoomSEF component on my Joomla websites. It worked very well to create descriptive, search engine friendly, human readable URLs for my web sites, but it didn’t properly remove the Itemid URL parameters. This meant that each article still had several URLs. This was very bad for search engine optimization and for people visiting my sites. Search engines thought I was duplicating content and often indexed the wrong URLs, and visitors would get confused with different URLs pointing to the same article.

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By P.J. Swesey

Here’s a cool SEO tip that will automatically bring you more traffic from Google and other search engines:  Put a Random Content module on your homepage. It’s better to have it on as many pages as possible, but the homepage is key. I discovered this trick while experimenting with a few different ideas over at http://www.patrickswesey.com.

The website originally had several hundred thousand inlinks as a result of free software and Joomla extensions I had offered. Pretty soon I started up JoomlaDigger.com and moved all the free extensions from PatrickSwesey.com over to here.

Since the move, most of the traffic on PatrickSwesey.com had died down. The content left at PatrickSwesey.com was free software for Windows XP and a blog of stupid dreams I have. It wasn’t a terribly exciting website and its traffic reflected that. I didn’t really care if the site got traffic or not so I decided to experiement a little and see how I could affect its search engine traffic.

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By P.J. Swesey

You may have heard that Google and other search engines prefer that you use dashes or hyphens (-) instead of underlines or underscores (_) as word separators in your URLs. Google actually recommends that you use dashes or hyphens when creating search engine friendly or search engine optimized URLs instead of underscores. Here’s why.

Google sees underlines or underscores as an actual underline character, so a PHP programmer searching for “similar_text” would get results about the PHP function similar_text() instead of all search results for “similar text”. So the hyphens in SEF URLs tell Google that each word is a separate word, while underlines tell Google that your URL is one long word.

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By Rick Youngblood

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the most important element in building a successful website. Most people online have heard the term SEO and have some idea of what is involved yet it remains a mysterious process to many. One of the reasons SEO is so mysterious is that it can be a complicated endeavor and search engines are constantly changing the way they rank sites and the way the recognize the many tools of SEO.

At the forefront of the SEO check and balance system is the leading search engine Google. They have pretty much set the standard for technology in search engine algorithms that can track the relevancy of a website to its content and SEO efforts. Their ranking system remains one of the most popular methods of determining a web site’s quality because of their diligent efforts of weeding out the bad apples that have little to offer a consumer other than skilled manipulation and the ability to ‘play the system’ to their advantage.

Of course taking advantage of the system makes perfect sense from a business standpoint but from the search engine outlook of wanting to provide the best quality sites on their results for the viewer it can become difficult to differentiate the site that is good quality wise from the site that is good because it has a very manipulative operator at the helm.

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By Colm Byrne

It requires a lot of effort in designing and building a site, but it can be all in vain if you can’t attract enough traffic towards it. You put all your efforts in an attractive design of your website and the next step you do is to put it in front of the online world.

You can’t get success only by uploading your website on the www; the target is to attract well-qualified visitors towards your website, which can’t be done unless you put your site in the eyes of the search engines.

Today, all of the internet users use search engines to find the site relevant to their interest. For example, if a person is interested in finding information about on-going and up-coming cricket events, he/she can easily do so by typing in the keywords in Google, Yahoo or any other search engine. The search engine, as a result, will present a list of most relevant websites on the basis of their keyword. So, in short, to get more traffic towards your website, make it more optimized and put all efforts into keeping your website in the eye of the search engine. This traffic is, without any doubt, the life of a business. No e-business can run without adequate traffic.

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