Re: When will SEO be integrated?

« Reply #252 on: October 03, 2006, 10:10:50 AM »

To clearify some thinks i will explain what is SEO what decisions are made regarding SEO in Joomla! 1.5 and why.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO
(SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a web site in Search Engine Results Placements (or SERP).

SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a web site by improving the number and position of its search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. SEO strategies can increase both the number and quality of visitors, where quality means visitors who complete the action hoped for by the site owner (e.g. product or service purchase, sign up, learn how to,..etc).

Search Engine Considerations
There are a lot of factors that influence search engines algorithms that determine the ranking of a web site, thus the placement of a given web site on its search results.
Today, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret. Most important factors are:

• Content (Quality, Uniqueness, Relevancy, and Age of contents)
• Google PageRank™ (Google search engine only)
• Link Popularity (Back links, Saturation, and indexed pages)
• Age of site
• Meta Tags (Title, Keywords, Discreption, robot,
  Length of time domain has been registered
  Negative scoring (excessive meta tags, heavy advertising, SE spam,... etc)
• External links, incoming Back links from other web sites.
• Overall site's design and navigational quality
• DMoz Inclusion (Open Directory Project listing)
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
• Text within the title tag
• SEF URLs
• HTML tags (headings, bold and emphasized text
• Keyword density, relevancy, and proximity
• Incoming back links and anchor text of incoming back links
• Web host uptime
• Hand ranking by humans
• Search engines specific factors

SEO and Joomla! 1.5

We talked a lot about SEO and SEF on our summit last year and came to the conclusion that creating pretty nice URL's with the current structure will created huge load the server, so we made it easier for 3rd Party to create their own solution by moving SEF to plugins. Changing the structure in Joomla! 1.5 will break any website, so this was a decision to be backward compatible.

Starting everytime flamewars against Emir because of his commercial SEF Advance and repeating this everytimes like a broken long-play record is getting boring, unproductive and childish as Emir is not the only one who is responsible for SEF in Joomla! or the only one who decided what will be added to Joomla! for SEO, the Coreteam is decided this.

SEF is only a small part and if you look to our http://www.joomla.org/ it use standard SEF links, is not valided and also not patched for better SEO, but we have there a Google Pagerank now from 9 (max is 10).

What does SEO means now for Joomla! 1.5?

Many of you know the SEO Patch from Joomlatwork, the Team of Joomlatwork offers us to integrate this to the Joomla! 1.5 Version and we thankfully agreed on this as due to the downloads they have, we saw that it is a really populare patch also it is really well supported and therefor a great additional to rise the SEO ability in Joomla! 1.5.  

Here a feature summary.

http://www.joomlatwork.com/products/free_products_for_joomla/sef_patch_joomla.html

This is what i call productive, so be productive insteed of flaming and complaining, any suggestions about improving are welcome and will be added if possible.

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