First of all, did you do your homework on finding the richt keywords?
You will need them in this process, or not :-)

You see, there a two ways to go about this domain name searching, one is to incorporate your main keyword in the domain name, like -seo for instance.
The other one is to look for a domain name that is short and sweet and easily to remember.

Using Keywords in You domain name

Best option af course would be to have both… like joomlaseo.net which is short, easy to remember and contains the two main keywords Joomla and SEO.
Problem with this now would be that Joomla! is more protected than before and the use of Joomla in a domain name should be approved by the Joomla.org website.

This is just an example of how you need to think about using a brand name in your domain URL.
Amazon for instance and Google will contact your and start asking you to give that domain name to theme since they are the holders of this registered trademark.
So be careful if you want to do that, or get permissions first!

Better is to look for a domain name that is simple and gets the richt idea and stickiness to it, like alledia.com which is short, sounds good an is through its website contant now seen as one of the best sources for Joomla SEO.

As you can see, there is no Joomla and no SEO in the domain name itself, it is the content that works to boost its visitors and rankings in the SERPs.

Google doesn’t care much about domain names Yahoo and Live.com however still give you some points for having keywords in your domain.
I have a website about Network Documentation (I am an ICT Manager in my Daily work…)  and it is ranking nr one in Live.com and nr three in Yahoo, just because of the domain name….

I checked Google as well, but could not find it n the first 10 ! pages… so I need to do a lot of work there (its a Drupal site and I am still learning SEO for Drupal as I go along)

Did you also see the main competition? and yes, networkdocumenation.com was already taken so they have a head start on me.
For my own domain name, I had to do a re-inclusion request at Google, since it was a spam site before I got it.
So here is a tip: if you have found a nice domain name and it is free! (check that first with your hosting provider) go to www.archive.org and use the “Waybackmachine” tool to see if it was used before and how it looked like. That is how I found out why I couldn’t get it into Google at all in the first place.

Short and sweet Domain names

You could also do some brainstorming sessions to get spunky names or if you are trying to build a brand on the Internet use that brand name.
Like Alledia or Hummerbie as a simple example.

Just make sure the names are short and use a good keyword richt title for your website, since you now want people to use link to you with the keyword you target.
Mostly they will use the title of you site to create a link. So for this Blog you could link to Joomla SEO Blog but you also could use that same link title to link to Joomla SEO Blog ;-)

Use your imagination and you will see how creative you really can be once you start throwing your ideas on a white-board or a piece of paper (electric ones work oké too).

if you want to go into the deep end and want tons of websites or if your customers aks you to help them, you could buy this book Killer Domains from Daily Blog Tips.

Domain Extensions

A short paragraph on domain extensions or tld’s , you know, the endings of a domain name?

There are a lot of them and it looks like there are going to be even more if al plans as expected.
The best ones for an international market are .com .net .org which are simply the bests tld’s.
But they could be taken and you need to venture out to other tld’s or choose an other name.

.info is not that good since some people think if you use that it is a spam site (I wonder why..)
You could also look at some foreign ones like .tv (expensive) or .it but those are just gadget like domains.
.mobi does work very well if you target mobile users.

What works best in extensions is to choose a tld that is locale to the market you want to target.
I use a .nl tld for my dutch web websites and that works great.

In conclusion: look at your competitors and what they use, look at your keywords list and be creative in finding that domain name that works for you!

P.s. If you have some great ideas on how to ease this process, don’t hesitate to throw them into the comments.

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Finding Your Best Domain Name

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• I had to send a Google Reinclusion Request for Domain !
• The “new” kid on the block
• Google Index Reinclusion and www.Network-Documentation.com
• Do you know if your site is Down?
• So you want to know how your Joomla site is on SEO?

Keyword Research

Keywords are the most essential part of website creation, especially if you want your website to out perform your competitors.
And Since you are here reading this Blog, you must be looking for a way to do that and improve your Search Engine Rankings and user experience on your website.

Improving your website to get beter performance is in the first place a matter off creating a good website structure and for that, you need to understand two things:

• Your website topic
• What terms are used in search engines related to your topic

For the first part, you probably already know more than you think, so first thing to do is to get a piece of paper (or open a text editor) and start writing down all terms you can think of about and related to you website topic.

Example for the Topic Games: “Online Games, Download Games, Free Games, Video games, Adventure Games, Joystick, Game Computer, WII, Nintendo DS, Games Console”
Just to get you thinking and do some brainstorming before getting to do online research for the best search terms.

Now, before you take the next step, go to Google or Yahoo and do a search for the Keyword you are most likely to know a lot and want to focus on that term.
For “Games” you get 1,430,000,000 results on Google and 5,450,000,000 results on Yahoo.
For “Online Games” you get 111,000,000  results on Google and 2,690,000,000 results on Yahoo.
You can see that these are still very competitive keywords to target…
So lets take it one Little step further in Google and try two extra keywords “Free online kids game” and now you are down to 11,300,000 results.

So what do these numbers tell you? Well, first place, that there are a lot of Games sites :-)
But looking at it form an SEO Point of view, it will be a lot easier to rank for “Free Online kids game” than it will be for just “Games”.
It is time to Introduce the term Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) and this is a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.
Now the competition factor we have seen above, the popularity factor, that you will read about later on. 

Back to getting into the heavy hitters.. there is an the hidden secret in doing your keyword research and building your keyword list the right way:

This secret is called “Keyword Clustering” and is very well explained by the Image from SEO Infographics I used before in Optimize Your Joomla site with Keywords.

As you can see in the Image, building a website with the right keywords targeted, will lift you into the higher competition field, just by focusing on the related words rather then going for the “Games” right away.

How to find keyword clusters

Finding the terms related to your topic, as seen above, you already have some clue about keywords and search terms to use.
You just have to arrange them into “packages”.
But to get you into the right state of mind to do this, you have some great tools on the Internet to help you out and put you on the right track to find out what people are really looking for:

You Free Clustering Keyword tools

There are several great free tools on the Internet that can help you track down what people are looking for, but also what Search Engines find related terms…
Lets start out simple by looking at some of the most your used tools, and how you can use them in a simple way.

Google Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

With this tool you have to check first, if your results are targeted for the right country and language, that is the first bloc you see in the page.
Just select the filters you want with the drop-down list next to the boxes.

After that, fill in your search term, and provide Google with the anti-spam term (Only once per session).
If you get the result page, select the “Avg Search Volume” column to sort the info to get an indication of the volume of searches (the results are from the previous month, so it a good idea to do this several months in a row)

Now you can go through the list and click on “Add” for the terms you think would do well for your new website.
Once you are done, download the results in the format of you liking, txt file or csv so you can work with these later on.

SEO Book Tools
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

This tool from Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com is really a great interface for the WordTracker database, combined with some Yahoo and Google information.

Most people will have problems with this tool the first time the use it, I even forget about the important click myself sometime…
If you do a term research, don’t use Enter !! You really, really have to use the Submit button !! 

After that, you will get an extensive result page, and the nice part with the current version is that you can export the results into a .csv file like Google give you.
Download the file for later analysis in for instance MS Excel.
Keyword Discovery
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Trellian Keyword Discovery, just like WordTracker are basically keyword tools that you use extensively if you get a subscription.
For basic research they both have a free tool that you can use, but is limited in the results and the information offered.
Both will show you the results of the first 100 related searches for free.

Trellian shows also how the search market is divided for the search terms, but these kind of details are into their extended Keyword Research Tool

WordTracker
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

If you are looking for Keyword information, WordTracker is also among the first you will find and that also brings great information on keywords.
You will find a lot of similarities with the SEO Book suggestion, since they both use the same database.

It is whoever a nice tool to double check the keywords found before.
But more than only a Keyword research tool, they also have a great Free Keyword Expert Newsletter that you can subscribe to for Free, highly recommended!

Putting it all Together

Looking at and following the steps and tools above you will find yourself with an enormous amount of search terms that are actually used on the Internet for find information about the topic of your website.

Now here is where you will have to do the hard labour… but it will pay off!!
Yo have to go through the terms and pick the ones that will suite you best, that means that you can relate and write about those subtopics you just found for you site.

You see the emphasis on write about? that is because you are building the site and you should provide good quality content to your readers.

I like to import the data into an Excel worksheet (Open new spreadsheet, choose the data menu item, import external data, import data and select the csv file as source and don’t forget to select the csv value in the import option field).

In this Keyword list (yes you build one already :-0) you can select, sort and move the search terms around to get “clusters”.

Search Engine to the Rescue

This “clustering” can be a bit overwhelming if you start doing this for the first time, so lets bring in some free professional help.

Ask.com

This search engine has some great features to help you find your basic clusters, just go over to www.ask.com and start typing in you keyword.
There will be a small drop-down box showing you some related keywords.

The results page will also show you the relater terms in a simple sidebar.

Yahoo.com

Yahoo also has a similar way of presenting you this kind of information, they call it search assist

Google.com

And yes, even at www.google.com there are some related terms to be found, although not on every searched keyword, but if there are, you can find them at the bottom of the first results page.

If you are done selection the search terms you want to target and clustered them into topics, you are ready for the next step… your domain name selection… stay tuned.

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How To do Keyterm Research to Build a Keyword List

©2008 Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com. All Rights Reserved.

You might thinks, well that should not take long… just grab a copy of the new Joomla version, install it en you are ready to got, that easy.

But that would be just a tiny little to simple… there is just more to do BEFORE you install Joomla (or any other CMS for that matter)

In the next weeks or so you can read here about how to get started once you have gotten an Idea to create a website about.
You will be reading about:

• Domain name selection
• Keyword research
• Getting into the mind of your visitors
• Setting Up a website structure that is easy to use, good for your visitors and search engines 
• Choosing a hosting company
• Choosing your template and layout
• Installing and fine-tuning Joomla SEO Components
• Writing Content and what to write Search Engine Optimized content
• Tracking visitors
• Promoting your website

As you can see there is a lot to cover and at the end I (and maybe you to) should have a website that is doing well in the Search Engines and is also great for your visitors.

What I am nog going to tell you, is what the sites URL is, just to keep things clean in the process.
Some of the things I am going to tell you will see at the end of the serie, but by then it should not have a large effect on the visitors number.

Warning! Don’t expect a high frequency of posts about this project, since some thing really taken time, however once a week I guess there should be an update on the project.  

P.s. most of the things will also be applicable to a Joomla 1.0.x website.

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Setting up a Joomla 1.5 website The Case Study

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Related Articles at Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com:

• Finding Your Best Domain Name
• Are we teaching our Children to Feed on Other Peoples Knowledge?
• Is Eleven better then Eight ?
• Joomla and Missing Metatags
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On new Blog that definitely goes into my Netvibes Joomla tab is this one from the Joomla developers, Developer Team Blog 

They will Blog about writing, seeking advice, coding and lots more, so as they say, it is a great way to stay in touch with the Joomla 1.6 development action.

And as Barry North already pointed out in one of his recent posts, the Blogs are now on Joomla 1.5 native with a social bookmarking footer instead of the old JD_WP WordPress based component.
Which brings back to mind that you really can use Joomla for Blogging but there are still some things that need to be ported to Joomla 1.5 native before it really would be a great Blogging platform.

But for the Joomla Developers Blog, content is the key! And it will be easy to keep up since they do offer an RSS Feed (No, not just yet via Feedburner, but maybe in time…)

For now, keeping my RSS feed open to new blogpost and looking forward to new improvements in the SEO Field.

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Keeping Up to date on Joomla 1.6

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Related Articles at Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com:

• Overcoming the Joomla RSS Feed Syndication problem
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it is also good to see that this Editor now has it’s own website JoomlaFCK.

I am working on some posts and articles about the new Joomla 1.5 Stable release and how to use and improve SEO for it.

And I couldn’t use my favorite editor… which is JoomlaFCK :-)

Why should you try this editor for your Joomla based website? Either for 1.0.x or 1.5 version…

Because it is the only one, free one that is, that doesn’t mess with your HTML code if you want to get something hand-coded in your content.

Further more you don’t have to install a lot of Plugins, it works for most of the content editing right out of the box.

Images handling

You might have noticed that I try to use a lot of images and screen shots to explain things.
JoomlaFCK give you the tools to upload your images without closing your page and does something pretty great for SEO as wel…

It takes the width and height values from the image and puts them in the code, you can also fill the Alt tag and on the Advanced tab also the Title of the images.
Then its up to you to make sure your images have the read name before uploading.

I could go on and on about this great editor, bu you just should try it yourself.

Download the right version, install it as a Plugin and activate it.

If you want to read more about this editor , go to the Homepage of JoomlaFCK editor or have a look at the impressive JoomlaFCK features map

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The JoomlaFCK Editor for Joomla 1.5 out now!

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• How To do Keyterm Research to Build a Keyword List

Joomla 1.5 Stable is released!

Congrats to all who worked on this great new Release!

Here is the official release of Joomla 1.5 Stable announcement  you can down it from Joomla 1.5 Files

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Joomla 1.5 Stable is Here!

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• Joomla 1.5 RC2 and RC3 The SEO and Other Differences

Like:

• Metatag keywords
• Search keywords
• Targeted keywords

And the latter is what I am going to give you some extra inside information on, and it will show you how easy it is if you really want to boost your sites ranking for your mayor keyword that you are targetting.

Optimizing your site structure

First things first… do your keyword research and find the topics related to your website main topic.

Then reorganize your site structure to reflect that relations.

So if you would create a website about, well lets say eheh… Joomla! then you know it will be very difficult to rank for the search term Joomla! itself.
But there are a lot of keywords related to Joomla, like Templates, Components, Modules, Plugins, Mambots.
See how these terms kan create a cluster of keywords?

Here is an image of elliance infographics that shows it all:

And the best part is… Joomla will actually force you in to structure it the right way, if you do you keywords research!

You see, were may people think of the rigid structure of Joomla for placing content is a bad thing, it is actually a great thing for SEO.
In Joomla you have to set up a structure in Section, Categories and Items which is pretty simple as you can read on Understanding the Joomla structure

But clustering you keywords in categories within the a section is the best keyword cluster you can create!

In a more diffecult term this is called LSI, Latent Semantical Indexing which is covered in Joomla and LSI for SEO

So if you really want your site to rock in the search engines, get your keywords together, create categories for them and start writing your content items accordingly…

Oh, one more thing… if you are going to restructure you Joomla site, make sure you 301 redirect your old URLs to the new ones!

You are reading a Post from Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com

How to Optimize your Joomla site with Keywords

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Related Articles at Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com:

• Optimize your Joomla website from the Back-end
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• Cutline Theme Optimization for Joomla SEO Blog

This one is about the new Content analysis page in Google webmaster central:

Google helps with Meta description and title errors

You are reading a Post from Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com

Google lets you know about your SEO errors

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So my time is already limited, because I do all this stuff on the Internet after my normal daytime job.
Why? because I like to share knowledge, get in touch with new idea’s and try them to see what happens, and of course communicate with others about Joomla and SEO. (See the Blog-roll for my favorites!)

But today I found a little website that will give you an impression on how well your are doing with your SEO efforts.
You do have some idea from your visitor counts I hope!

But here is the URL to get a really nice overview of SEO Information like:

• PageRank
• Backlinks
• Indexed Pages
• Rankings
• Social Bookmarking
• RSS Feed counts and more

So go and check your own domain at http://www.xinureturns.com/

Below you can find a sample image of one of my websites.

O, and yes, I will try to post more with the coming weeks and months to come… most will be on Joomla 1.5 I think!

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So you want to know how your Joomla site is on SEO?

©2008 Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com. All Rights Reserved.

Altough the Title of 30+ Joomla Tools and Resources doesn’t really give you tools like modules or components, a lot of the sites featured in this post do have some fine extensions for your Joomla website.

I know I have to look over some new sites and see what they have in store!

The one I already visit a lot to get great add-ons is http://www.joomla-addons.org/ please check that one for sure!

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Joomla Tools and Resources from Mashable

©2008 Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com. All Rights Reserved.

Don’t take my word on it, this is the what the Packt Publishing Award judges say:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/joomla-wins-best-php-open-source-content-management-system

Joomla Wins Best PHP Cms

But it is nice to see ”Once again, judges commented on the size and responsiveness of the community, which translates to potential problems being dealt with quickly.”

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Joomla! Best PHP Open Source Content Management System

©2008 Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com. All Rights Reserved.

No just last week www.joomlafun.com released version V1.1.o , a stable release with a few new features.
One of the things I like the most is that you no can select a Section! Instead of putting all categories separately into the Feed you create, you now can select a Section, and you are done…

But you can also give people a feed of every update of your website… and not just the Frontpage.

Upgrading to this version is also easy, just download the new DS Syndicate version.

Uninstall you previous version via the Component Installer (Please do not use the uninstall function of the component !! you will loose every feed you configured.)

Now install the new version via the Component installer, you receive a message that everything is upgrade correctly.
If you check the feeds you already created, you will see everything is still there.

But you might want to check the new section functions, you might want to use this function if you want to further improve your feeds for you Joomla site visitors.
And if you did run your Joomla feeds through Feedburner, it is automatically done for your feed subscribers :-)

Here is the Full feed of Hummerbie.com as an example.

You are reading a Post from Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com

DS Syndication for Joomla Feeds new improved component v1.1.0

©2008 Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com. All Rights Reserved.

But I found an item in RC3 in the Advanced Parameters of the article section that makes in possible to do an “Click here to read” text per article..

It is all the way done and marked as “Alternative Read More text:”

If you put you own text in there you can have something like:

If you use this option, you will loose the replacement of article title that since RC3 is attached to the Read More.. yes I missed that great new SEO Feature at first glance :-(

These two combinations are a great asset for Search Engine Optimization and for the visitors of your Joomla 1.5 RC3 based website…

For a production site, I still want to wait for the Stable Release, lets wait and see what else for great little improvements the Joomla Developers have in store for us!
I must admit that the more I find in RC3 the more excited I get about this new 1.5 release.

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The Read More option in 1.5 RC3

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First off, the difference in Options in RC2

The SEO Settings in Joomla RC3

So what are the results of this settings:

With the Suffix Active

As you might notice, the last new option attach’s a .html to the URL

The URL itself is build on the basis of the menu type used:

• section-blog
• section-table
• categoryblog
• category-table

After that you will find the /section-name/ID-Number-Categorie/ID-Number-Article-Title

There is no option to reduce the length of the URL to (my favorite) /category-name/article-title.html

So there will still be a need to have an SEF Component like sh404SEF for 1.5

The Feed Option 

An Other thing that changed is the Feed option, which was placed below the SEO Options in the Global Configuration screen.
Is is know part of the Site settings.

But although there is a small text below the Syndication module, the Feed is still only the Frontpage but the Layout is better now, not just the Text without HTML.

One thing that has radically changed in Joomla 1.5 is the place where you set your standard Content Options…
It is now in the Article Management control panel under preferences.
Here you can also set if you want to publish Full text feeds, or only intros.

But what I find most troublesome, is that I can’t seem to edit the Language File anymore from within Joomla itself.
There is no edit option… so I cannot change some of the standard text that have been translated.

As for the Read More option, which is now a Plugin, there is no parameter to change the way is might read differently.

Guess we have to wait until the Stable release will be ready for download, or will there be an RC4 before that…

I still would like to have more options and parameters for SEO, but that might just be me :-)

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Joomla 1.5 RC2 and RC3 The SEO and Other Differences

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Well, there is a new version of this component since August of this year and I must say it is better then before!
Putting in multiple categories in to one Feed.
Not limited to the Frontpage any more.. choose to show HTML, Images or not in your Feed, using your special images.

You can create multiple feeds with different categories and different images for the feeds.
There is also a module that can show each of these feed images to subscribe to or just the ones you selected

Running your Feeds through Feedburner

I always like to run my Feeds via Feedburner, because they have some great options!
So for my new website a used the DS Syndication component to get two separate Feeds

And I have written a Tutorial for you on how to use the DS Syndication Component and where to find it!
You can find it on Improve you Joomla RSS Feed and if you don’t know why you should have Feeds?
Read Why Every website should have a Feed

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The New and Improved Joomla DS Feed Syndication Component

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