KINETIC PRESENTATION SYSTEMS

After reading Stephanie Chang's SEOMoz blog on CMS Tips for Large Enterprises, and having had a few clients this week all very keen to get blogging, I thought I'd start a list of tips on how you can make sure your Joomla Articles are as SEO friendly from the moment you start typing them.

Reading through the blog above - and the others on SEOMoz including this one about ways to conduct a site SEO audit - a Joomla specific checklist is in order. Stephanie's list items are in italics below, and over coming weeks, I'll be adding articles here on how to do each of these items in Joomla. Over time I'll also be adding to the list from the joomla perspective, with things that I've found work well in articles and on sites.

• Required

  • Include a meta description that is less than 155 characters
    In Joomla, you can initially add custom meta description data to an article by clicking on the Meta Information tab to the right of the article editor and entering Description value. In 1.5 & 1.7 there's not a word counter on the textarea for description, but 155 characters is about 3 to 4 lines of text in the box.
    
  • Content must contain a minimum of 80 words of unique content
    This shouldn't be too difficult if you have a topic that's easy to write about. In the JCE editor, there's a word counter at the bottom of the WYSIWYG editor screen to tell you how you're going.
    
  • Content must contain a unique headline
    This is both so that the article indexes uniquely on the site, but if you're using sh404SEF, it doubles as a prevention measure for ending up with clashing URLs that then get generated as duplicate URLs.
    
  • Images must contain an alt tag
    JCE Editor automatically puts the filename in as the Alt tag value when you insert an image in your article. I always advise clients to change the value to better text as soon as they select the image, as otherwise there's little likelihood of them coming back to fix it later. Alt text is not just so that there's a title when you mouseover the image (in JCE that's also a seperate title tag btw) but it's critical for making sites accessible.

• Recommended

  • Include a few meta keywords for your article
    If there's obscure or related terms and alternative terms for the topic of your article, put them in keywords. Though it won't help with much to do with external SEO (not many search engines use keywords any more) it is still used as part of the internal search in Joomla, as well as being part of the related items module trigger in Joomla. So you can actually end up with an elaborate web of related articles through cleverly using the Keywords in the Meta Information for the article.
  • Customise your Read More Text
    On the blog views in Joomla, you can have customised Read More text, rather than dozens of links that just say "Read More...". Each of these links become internal backlinks on the site, so keyword anchor text is able to be used here.
  • All images have captions
    JCE has a plugin for Captions (commercial subscription) which makes the process of adding captions to images much easier.
    
  • Content contains at least 1 image
  • Headlines must contain one suggested keyword
  • Content contains at least 1 link with optimized anchor text
    On a blog layout page, this is where the Read More text change is helpful.
    In the article itself, having internal keyword anchor links to other parts of your site achieves this aspect.
    
  • Image file names contain at least 1 descriptive keyword
    Taking the time to name your images at the time you prepare them for uploading saves lots of time fixing them later. By including a keyword in the filename, and even by making the filename similar to the alt text being used means that inserting the image is already suggesting the alt tag and will have the keyword in it when it's inserted into your article.
    From an SEO perspective, having descriptive filenames, coupled with alt text, titles and captions, means that indexing by search engines like Google Images works better.
    
  • Content contains at least 2 keywords
    If you've created the meta keywords list above, then you've done the initial step of coming up with keywords. Next up include them in context in the article.
    
  • Event name is the first word of the headline for news event articles
  • News article images are at least 300px in one dimension
    The article these two points links to clearly outlines simple strategies for where articles are being picked up by news sites. Even if you're not being indexed on news sites, the strategies still apply in regards to creating consistent content.
    
  • For slideshows, include unique content about each image that is crawlable
  • For videos, include full transcripts on the page
  • For videos, the word "video" is included in both the title and the description
    These final three points relate to having multimedia on your site that you want to have specifically indexed by search engines. Certainly having text relating to the video to describe it is essential, but it will depend on what type of video content you have as to whether or not a full transcript is worthwhile. In the case of a news video, yes definitely. But for a quirky viral clip you've got for purely amusement, it's unlikely that a transcript is going to help your cause.
    

Customise your Read More text

Change the setting in the Parameters (Advanced) sectionTo change the Read More text, click on Parameters (Advanced) on the right of the article editor page. Scroll to the bottom of the list of parameters, and enter your new text in the "Alternative Read more: text" box.

When creating the new text:

• Make it unique, and different to the article title.
• Make it enticing, as you want the reader to have a reason to follow the link
• Include keywords, as search engines will index the link.