Website Design for SEO using Joomla

Website design for SEO using Joomla is a bliss - Joomla Bliss!

1. Create 3 levels of your main menu
2. Use 3 column layout
3. Add severla modules on each columns, each with links
4. Use a calendar of events with proper URIs (i.e. search engine friendly)
5. Use aliased with keywords
6. Install a site map component
7. Buy iJoomlaSEO and work your keyword magic into various elements of the site's hierarchy and copy

There are other things you can do, but these alone will take an average site quite far.

That, and you will need to build back links. Focus on relevant links with kywords embedded in the anchor text. Get as many of those links as possible. For your local search, get links from your local websites.

Contact website design Ottawa for more tips.

Website Design Ottawa

How long is too long to close on a customer?

Not sure what other web designers are experiencing in Ottawa, but we certainly noticed an unpleasant trend this summer: it takes much longer to sign a contract. People seem to think much harder before parting with their money than before. And this includes some well off people, like lawyers and dentists. I've had two occasions already when the client took almost three months to sign up, and not for large and expensive web design project; we are talking $1500 web design projects.

With SEO, I also noticed that most clients prefer it if you charge them a certain amount per month. For some reason paying for something for an indefinite period of time gives them confidence. They are afraid to understand that with SEO there is little maintenance required, you don't need to do much to maintain your ranking, once youj've achieved it. Some work might be required, yes, mostly link building (which you can do on your own if you care to spend 45 min once a month, this is all it takes for most small businesses). After the initial investment, the maintenance fees should not be as high and you should definitely not be paying for SEO indefinitely... I guess clients follow the infamous classical logical fallacy "if everyone is charging monthly fees for SEO, they can't all be liers". (wishful thinking). Oh, well, a little research can save them thousands of dollards..but hey, good for my fellow SEO agents, right?

Your Ottawa SEO here..

My new SEO website, just for fun (okay, okay, not just for fun, we are testing some ideas).

Stay Tune: iBible Next!

This is great! iPhone4 has just been released and will start selling tomorrow. iPad has been selling 10 million pieces per months. Lets not forget the darling iPod! Now iPhoneOS morphs into iOS.

Safari5 is coming out. C'mon, what happened here, gotta stay with the brand: iSafari anyone?

I'd say, register domain names: iVodka, iBeer, iBook - oops, it is already a  prodrecognized product!). You'll be rich!

And don't forget iBible, iYoga, iSoul, and heck, iGod too.

How about iSOS?

Enjoy!

Website design from Ottawa and SEO from Ottawa at your service.

CMS for SEO and Web Design

Why Not Use Proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS)
This week I had a meeting with a business owner here in Ottawa who was looking for order SEO for his website. He told me that they are using a proprietary content management system for his website that was provided to him by his web design firm. "Oh, no", I said to myself.

A web content management system (CMS) is a must for any website nowadays. Not having it is like not using email, well, almost. But proprietary CMS would be analogous to buying pipes for your house that were manufactured by your developer who followed their own specifications. So if you want to replace or fix some portion of the pipes you can't just go to Canadian Tire and buy it, you have to go back to your developer. Besides, if you ever want to add some a bathroom or powder room, you will also have to ask your developer to design them all for you FROM SCRATCH - instead of going and buying those pieces ready-made and installing them. This is exactly what you will be doing if you sign up for a proprietary CMS instead of open-source CMS.

But don't listen to me, do your own research. Simply Google "open source content management systems" advantages and disadvantages. Pluses and minuses.  Here is a list of open source web CMS. Focus on the ones based on PHP.

The three most popular open source CMSs based on PHP are Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress. I prefer Joomla because it is much more flexible and scalable than Wordpress and much easier to use then Drupal. Security and load time are virtually identical for all three of these CMSs.

Doing SEO with Joomla or other reputable open-source CMS is much faster. The main reason: there are dozens of plugins and components developed in the last 12 years that make SEO faster. Those plugins and components (i.e. extensions) will not be available to you if you are using a proprietary CMS, so your SEO will need to be done page-by-page by hand.

I had another conversation recently where a company has just built a new website - without any CMS! Using HTML, can you imagine? This was a 800% longer and more expensive project than it needed to be. The reason why they decided not to use Joomla? Someone told them it is not good. Joomla is the most popular CMS on the planet. Does this fact not deserve a little research? How can you rely on one person's opinion without checking it out for yourself? I find it hard to understand. Oh, well, this company paid a huge price tag for this decision. What's most surprising is that the company is in the high-tech field, you'd expect them to be more savvy than an average non-technological business, right? Not so. It is not the first time I encounter this. My coffee business and landscaping clients end up being more clever in web site decisions than many of my high tech clients. Even software development companies - go figure!

I even wrote an article explaining why open-source software is often better than commercial software. Take 10 min to read it and you will understand that using a proprietary CMS would be a very costly mistake.

If you have questions or need help, do not hesitate to contact me via my SEO Ottawa website or Joomla web design website.

Link Building for Top SEO

It has been noted that the anchor text embedded in the hyperlinks adds a lot of SEO value - and it still holds true. It seems now more than ever.

We recently launched Joomla Bliss, our website design Ottawa shop, and we are now doing directory registrations for it. There aren't too many Canadian directories!  And there aren't too many for web design and Internet Marketing.

In my view directory links have a higher impact on your SEO than links from blogs and forums. With directory registrations the focus should be on relevant directories. One link from a relevant directory is worth five general ones. What is important is directory listings need to be indexable, i.e. easily accessible to search engines. And above all, links from websites with high Page Rank (PR) is what matters the most nowadays. Any website with a PR of 5 and above is a great catch. It is not easy to find such igh PR sites which would not have a "nofollow" tag set up for their outgoing links.

So your best choice for top SEO: relevant directories with PR of 5+ and without 'nofollow' tags. And if you can find a category for your geographical target - bonus!

Oh, and should you worry about paying for your links? Google says yes, yes, and yes again. Google talk so mcuh about the danger of paid links that it should make anyone suspicious (why do you need to talk? just get paid links penalties implemented and it won't take a long time for the SEO and web design communit to notice, in fact, those folks are so savvy, it won't take more than a week - and you won't need to talk about those terrible awful paid links.

In my view, paid links work fine, especially directory links. And how would search engines know you paid for your link anyway? Besides, directories need to be maintained, so charging webmasters a fee for the listing is legitimate business if you run a huge directory website.

Then Google is pushing this "nofollow" business. Again, why would you need that if your spiders can distinguish between paid and non-paid links, eh? I suspect, along with some other SEOs, that those nofollow links still count.

I posted a few comments on two websites related to web design with PR8 and PR9, and within a couple of days, my site jumped 30 links up! Google denies that nofollow links matter, of course, but I am not the only one who noticed that they do.

Try it for yourself and you'll see. Just make sure not to do anything else in the meantime, i.e. do not optimize your site, do not register in directories or build any other links. Give yourself a few days, then post a comment on a related website with PR8 or PR9 with a link back to your website (include your keywords in the anchor text). Then wait another few days - and check the results. And then come back and let me know, the more we know about it the better it is for all of us. There is no other way to find out but trying it with different sites, Google is not going to reveal its secrets anytime soon.

And if you need help with link building, contact me via my SEO Ottawa website.

Directory Links for SEO

We just completed a link building package for a client. I was pleasantly surprised to see that directory links now seem to give a faster boost to a website positioning on search engines, especially Google, than other types of links. Registering in Yahoo! directory alone - for $299 per year mind you! - boosts your site's positioning significantly. So much for Google's grudges against paid links. Some paid links are less paid than others, eh?

To get the most value from your directory back links, register your site in related directories with high page rank (PR), which is anything over 4.

If you need help with link building, contact us via our website design Ottawa office or SEO Ottawa office.

Joomla SEO

Over the last two years, at our Ottawa SEO consultancy we began offering website design services. This year, we decided to branch it out into a separate business - Joomla Bliss.

Why Joomla?
There are number of reasons. Some of the most important ones are these:

1) Joomla has the largest support and development community among all other content management systems. There are thousands of free and commercial extensions and add-ons that are available for Joomla. This is not the case with other content management systems. Not yet.

2) Website templates that are designed specifically for Joomla are much better looking than those designed for Wordpress and Drupal, and the sheer number of Joomla websites is impressive.

3) Joomla has an excellent in-built SEO framework. It fas fantastic SEF components, article editing and formatting components, META tags modules and plugins, etc etc.

4) Joomla is very easy to use. And if you have a question, you can find an answer to it within second by Googling it. The amount of information and help tips for Joomla is incredible!

So we are very close to finishing the website, which we already hosted live to start accumulating age and back links. We believe that our background in SEO would allow us to offer a turn-key website marketing solution to clients of all budget size.

Check out our nw site and send us your feedback, but keep in mind, it is not finished yet. We need a few more days..

SEO: Indexed pages

Pages indexed by Google is one of the most important factors in SEO. What's interesting is that Google does "see" all pages on a site but it does not include all of them in its index. Yahoo, on the other hand, seems to index all pages that it sees.

To find what Google has indexed on your site, go to Google and then type in the search bar the following: site:www.yoursite.com . Note, there is no space after "site:"

But note that this will not work with the "link" operator. In fact, the best way to see what Google has on you is to go to their Webmaster Central, signup and add your site. Once you get the ownership of your site confirmed, you can run a lot of vital statistics on your site using Google's tools. And you will get a lot of valuable information.

To find what pages Yahoo has indexed, go to Yahoo site explorer and enter the URL of your site in the very top search bar. The difference between Google and Yahoo is usually quite stunning.

Unfortunately, there is only partial control over how to make Google index more of your pages.

One of the most common SEO tips for page indexing is to create a Site Map, put it a link to it on your home page, and ensure that the Site Map contains links to all other pages of your website. The second SEO tip is to have no more than 3 levels in your site's navigational hierarchy.
And the third SEO tip is to interlink your site's internal pages as detailly as possible. Together, these three SEO tips will ensure that more of your site's pages get indexed by Google.

In my experience, I noticed that websites that are using a content management system (CMS) of some sort - such as Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress - get much "deeper" indexing by Google. In addition, using a CMS like Joomla, for example, allows you to install a Site map component which automatically creates a Site Map page and lists links to all your other pages on it. All new pages are added automatically and all archived pages are removed automatically as well - which is very convenient. Both Joomla and many of its components are free and very easy to use.

So, if you want to have more of your pages indexed by Google without too much work, I suggest you use Joomla and install a Site Map component (Xmap is the one I like).

And if you need help, do not hesitate to contact me vi my Ottawa SEO site.