After the first few pages of this chapter, let's get into the real mood of things, it's now time to work on your site. Armed with the list of places to put your keywords in, improve your pages.
I will take you through a sample article and show you how to change the most important items on every page. For this, I will show you an example of how a page changes from flat content to an optimized and scanable page.
Writing content can be a long process once you start putting the content into your Joomla! site, even if you prepared your content before you logged in to your site. In the standard setup of Joomla! you have a limited session time for working on the content and hitting the Save or Apply button. You would not be the first one to lose all your hard work because Joomla! ended your session. To prevent that you have to change the value of the Session Settings in the Global Configuration. Choose the System tab and on the right side of your screen you will see the Session Settings. Change the value to something that fits your writing time. I have set it to 60 minutes as I tend to write long articles.
When you start writing your article, just do it in a natural way, write like you would normally do. Focus on what you want to tell your visitor as if you were talking to that visitor in person. Changing the way you write is something you shouldn't do, keep your own tone because that is what your visitors are used to.
What you can do is pick a content page from your site that doesn't get many visitors from the search engines, but you feel is a sample of your quality of writing and should deserve more attention.
The first thing you should do is look at the title of that page and analyze the following:
- Does the title contain the right keyword?
- Is the title catchy enough for a searcher to click on?
- Is your page scanable?
- How frequently did you use your keyword? In the title you should use the keyword once or twice, not more than that.
- Does the article fit the overall topic of your site?
- Did you use the meta tag description?
- Did you fill in the meta tag keywords field?
Titles are the most important aspect of your content for search engines. In 2007, seomoz.org publicized an article on Google's search engine ranking factors, the article is still a great resource if you want to know more about SEO factors. You can find it at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors.
37 of the world's best search engine optimization specialists worked together on this piece of information, and the number one factor for good rankings was, and still is, keyword use in the title tag! Simply rewriting the title of your page can help you to get better rankings.
If you started with a title such as "Japanese Garden" it would be in competition with about 21,000,000 hits on Google. If your article is about the design of Japanese Gardens, and you add the keyword "design" to the title, it is:
- More on topic and relevant to the search results
- In a much better position to compete
Changing your title from "Japanese Gardens" to "Japanese Garden design" will get you in competition with 735,000 competitors. Those are numbers that you can handle to start with and try to rank better.
Now it's time to look at what your article is about—did you write about the design of Japanese Gardens in general, or about the structure of the Japanese Garden, or maybe even a specific garden in a museum in Tokyo. The article I am writing about contains a lot of information about the use of garden elements such as stones, water, and plants.
The title could now be changed to "Choosing design elements for your Japanese Garden" or "Japanese garden design—choosing the best elements and structure". In these titles you have the main keywords "Japanese Garden" along with additional keywords such as design, elements, and structure. So now you have a lot more possible keywords to rank for, than just "Japanese Garden".
The best part of this title rewriting for your web site is that you get more visitors who have found your site on the topics related to Japanese Gardens. In the long run, you will start ranking better with those highly competitive keyword combinations, because of this relevance.
Writing titles this way also makes it easier for people to filter the search engine results and choose your page title to click on, as it gives more information about the topic of that page. In simple words, it becomes more clickable because of that extra information. In Joomla! you can also change the page title, without changing the URL of that page. This means that your current rankings are not affected by the change, as long as you use the Alias as a part of URL creation.
With the SEF patch in place, you can write the main title as you normally would and use the HTML Title field for the extended version. The previous screenshot shows the normal content title for the article.
In the following screenshot you can see the extended version with the META tag description and META tag keywords added. You will learn more about these options in the following pages.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your web site is to write about tons of different things that are not related to each other. If you write about garden design on one page and then about diet pills and exercises on another page of your site, it will not only confuse your readers, but also the search engines. They will be wondering, what your site is about, as they wouldn't see any relationship between the two topics.
If you build a web site that you want to rank well in the search engines it is very important to stay focused. Pick the main subject of your web site and stick to it. Don't make the mistake of taking a very broad topic unless you want to build a really big web site. It is much easier to look at the subject of your choice and see if there is a special topic within that subject on which you can focus in order to attract lots of visitors to the site.
For example, instead of trying to rank for "landscaping gardening", you can choose "Japanese Garden" design and start building your site on that topic first. Once you have visitors for that topic, you can expand your site to other topics such as "English Garden" design and build your site brick by brick. This approach will give you a solid base to work with and the possibility to get lots more traffic from both the gardening related topics, along with the flexibility to add other gardening related topics in the future.
In writing your articles you will use the keywords related to the topic of the article many times in the content. You should use keywords in the most natural way so that the text is readable for normal visitors. The number of times you use your main keywords in relation to the total number of words in your article is called the keyword density.
Using the keywords too many times within your article will make it difficult to read and, from a search engine's point of view, it also looks like you are stuffing your keywords. Stuffing means you are trying too hard to rank for that word. The number of times you use the keyword in your article is related to the length of your article. If you have a short article, it is natural to use the keyword three to four times. Writing your keyword more than ten times in a short article will break the natural flow of your text. Most of your articles should not have this problem if you write them normally. If you are trying hard to get your keywords in place in the article, you will get the opposite result of what you wanted to achieve.
Look at your article after you finish writing it. If it looks like you have written your keywords too many times, try to change a number of them by using a synonym. This gives you an opportunity to rank for those words as well.