There's a few objectives that pretty much all websites have in common and one way or another they all depend on SEO. Joomla! can be your friend, with out of the box SEO and functionality enabling you to attract your target market, convert visitors and rank higher. We've set ourselves a 10 minute time limit... so let's get cracking.
SEO Factors to Get You Big Wins
Number One – Attract Your Target Market
Define your target market and identify your competitors. Once you've done this find out the keywords that people use to find your products and those of your competitors. There's a range of paid and free tools to do all the hard analytical work for you. Here’s a “small” selection to get started http://goo.gl/m9nMAz
Once you've worked out the highest traffic and value keywords, Joomla gives us an easy way to ensure you can get found for the keywords your target market is using. Now remember, content is King, marketing is Queen, so make sure you concentrate your initial efforts on content. And Joomla is awesome at letting us create keyword rich content to attract customers.
The base for the content is our article. When we create our article we should be writing about the topics we've discovered in our research. This being the case Joomla allows us to set the article title, URL, meta description and headings within our article – here's a hint, use the article topic keywords in these places and you've moved your page closer to your market.
The views for our content can also be controlled by our menu items – not just the ones in our actual navigation, but also by using hidden menus. Ensure the parent and child relationships of your menu structures follow keyword rich plain English terms. This is highlighted in search results and presents really well, leading to more people in your target market clicking through to your site.
Number Two – Convert Visitors
So once we have some targeted traffic able to find your site for the right keywords, we now have to engage them in some fashion. Not everyone who comes to your site is ready to fully commit when they first visit, so we need to be able to interact with the site visitor at the stage they are ready for.
If you've got some great content they may be able to sign up for a newsletter, follow you on social media, or click a Call To Action Button for some premium content. All of this gives you an opportunity to connect with the site visitor and hopefully get some contact information so you can start building a trustful relationship with them.
Joomla helps us do this first off by enabling keyword rich content; but also by enabling us to have special purpose and custom-html modules for targeted Call To Action on individual pages and inserted in-line to articles via shortcode.
Modules are the bits above, below and to the left and right of the component / article content - like widgets in Wordpress. It can control which pages the menu shows, as well as which pages you have newsletter signup forms, premium offers, CTA buttons, etc. What's also really cool, is that you can use A/B testing using the inbuilt Joomla banners module to see which CTA gets higher click through and conversions ... try it for easy on site testing :)
Also, we want to try and make sure our visitors don't leave straight away. Out of the box Joomla is mobile friendly, utilizing the responsive Bootstrap framework. With a bevy of responsive Joomla templates available, as well other visual treats like sliders, Joomla can be a designer's paradise to creating mobile friendly, rich and immersive websites.
Number Three – Rank Higher
You can see from the above, we're already going to produce nice keyword rich search results ... but Joomla core keeps helping us to get better ranking in the search engines. Here's just a few:
- Google loves rich-snippets and metadata and Joomla has them already baked in, with additional functionality being added with each release. Not only can you rank higher, you will also get rich content display on mobile devices. Find out more about Joomla Microdatafeatures.
- Load time is an important ranking AND conversions factors, with updates to the Joomla router making load times and page rendering faster, this will make Google and site visitors happy.
- The Joomla editor allows you to have good structure around your content, using logical document like headings, subheadings and content areas - of course all being keyword rich as described above - this will help you rank well in Google. Heres a simple SEO rich web page content template.
- With the easy use of modules and many social extensions available, you are able to add social, display sharing and account follow/like buttons easily. Social validation and backlinks help increase rankings AND conversions. Check out the Joomla Extensions Directory for a huge listing.
Well, that's our 10 minutes finished. The basic requirements to achieve good on-site SEO remain fairly consistent over time and the CMS being used – it’s good to know that Joomla helps make this easy. These SEO tips are the ones that will give you_fast and easy return on your investment in Joomla content, but it’s the tip of the iceberg and I recommend this page at Moz for more detail. Start utilising these tips NOW and in just a few minutes, you will be well on the way to improve your Joomla site's SEO and conversions.