CMS Pitfalls - Into SEO we go

This blog is a copy of a recent entry from my personal site blog CMS Pitfalls - Part 1

It seems that the use of a CMS product like Joomla! is touted as a quick easy way to get a web site up and running.  And indeed it is a fast simple method of creating a web site.  But for the un-initiated the road to a web site is fraught with unexpected and often times unwanted developments that degrade the overall process and yield unexpected results.

One of the main goals of any site is to have it rate positively on Google search result pages (SERP) but this is no simple achievement.   It takes some for-thought, patience, and knowledge to get to the front of Google SERP's.  So I thought I would discuss some theory about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that can shed some light on the process.   And there is the key word - Process.  Using SEO techniques is best described as a 'Process' of optimizing your site to meet the desires of the search engines on the web.

The Process

There are three key factors in the SEO process - Trust in Age, Trust in authority, Trust in content.   To go into detail in each of these areas is way beyond the scope of this article but they are all equally important and needed to be mentioned.  Briefly stated a new URL will not rate as high as an 'aged' URL.   This is why sometimes it makes sense to buy and existing URL if the content of that site is similar to the content of your site.
Trust in authority is built over time as the search engines see you contributing to the web via social media, blog pages, videos, and other content on higher ranked sites.  So it takes time to do this and it takes time to build web authority.

Trust in content is build when the search pages see content that is related to your site name.  It makes no sense to have a site titled 'Roller Rink Equipment' that contains articles about the snow geese flight paths or other non-related content.  So the site needs to be focused on the main topic or name. The naming of a site, the browser page titles, and article titles are all important factors leading to higher rankings.

There are the big three - Trust in Age, Trust in authority, Trust in content -  much like the 'Deathly Hallows' from the Harry Potter series.  It takes all three to make one invinvible.  And it is not a do once and it is over.   The process's all build on one another and it requires dedication and effort over time to accomplish these goals.
I hope you found this interesting and thanks for reading.  Come back often to My Personal Site Blog.  My personal Site Blog

For a Web Developer the Learning Never Stops!

This blog is a copy of a recent entry from my personal site blog Learning Never Stops

A Journey into the SEO world has begun.......

As I move forward one thing is more prominent than others and that is that learning never stops.   The rules of web site building and Search Engine Optimization are continuing to evolve in the effort to produce a continually improving level of relevancy of search results.   For a long time the buzz was keywords and the tools that allow analysis of just how effective those keywords were in driving traffic to a site.  The words are still important but the results and tracking has become a level of magnitude more difficult.

Google is the most widely used tool to evaluate the effectiveness of keyword search campaigns but now that they are encrypting all search traffic they have managed to obscure the tracking of individual keywords.  It requires special tactics to gain the knowledge of just which keywords are effective and which ones need to be improved.   If a specific web page is pointed to a single or small group of keywords then you can get the stats on the URL that calls that page and thereby get a glimpse at the effectiveness of a specific keyword or phrase.  There may be other ways but this is yet to be discovered by me.   If you have some better insight please comment on this blog entry.

Add to this the localization that Google also places on search engine result pages (SERP) and the analysis gets even more difficult.  However, in Google's defense their goal is to provide you with the most relevant and useful results possible.  The formula they use is constantly being revised and what works today may not work tomorrow. 

I also discovered that in Sitemap submission to Google the 'SEF' URL will not work as expected and you need to submit the 'non-SEF' URL to get Google to properly recognize and index your site.   This is just one more little tidbit of knowledge that is worth passing on to those interested geeks in the web world.  Many of you may already know this but I am sure that there are struggling developers out there that can find this helpful.

Till next time....
Bill S.
http://www.jdevtech.com