This thread discusses the Content article: SEO, a mis-guided cause?

I think the big thing that was missing until 1.5 was a good system for (search engine and human) friendly URLs. With this and the new API calls for JDocument in place, I think that people who care about advanced SEO will soon have the tools they need.

And yes, site maps are evil.

Lol... No argument here... Again, I'm not saying SEO doesn't have its place, I'm just saying it's over emphasized (IMHO).

Yeah I try to tell people "you need incoming links," but it just doesn't quite sink in.

Agreed. Too many webmasters focus on SEO to get people to their site for the pay-per-click. Unfortunately, substandard values and selfish motives tend to be in the majority. You see it in poopular culture, the muzak industry and the internet.

If you have something good to offer on your site, SEO is just as important as EUO.

First and foremost, you need to have quality content. Then you need to make it intuitive and easy to navigate so visitors get the most out of their visit. Finally, you need to get people to the site and share the content - quality content with nobody seeing it is worthless.

50% content
25% EUO
25% SEO



Post edited by: undoIT, at: 2008/02/26 03:01

Hi Anthony

I think you know what angle I'm going to come at this from

Nothing else effects a website's bottom line as much as their rankings. That might not matter much for a non-profit or personal site, but its life-or-death for online businesses.

1) I come across a lot of people who've lost a lot of money because they've moved their site to Joomla and the out-of-the-box settings have failed them. Partly thats their problem for not doing their research, but Joomla is meant to take away some of that heartache of managing websites. Improvements in 1.5? I don't trust the new SEF URLs for Joomla 1.5 and advise people to keep using a plugin.

2) I've seen a quite a few big companies choose Drupal or Wordpress instead of Joomla because they simply don't trust Joomla not to sink their rankings.

Too much emphasis on SEO? Perhaps. To extent I've been a lobbyist to improve SEO in Joomla. Anthony ... you seem to be in a similar position for performance. I'd love to see someone take up baton in a similar way for security, semantic design and other important topics.

FWIW, I'd rather be able to say we're an SEM company (encompassing analytics, SEO, newsletters, landing page, EUO etc.) but for better or worse, SEO is the term people use.

Post edited by: alledia, at: 2008/03/17 13:18

alledia wrote:
Hi Anthony

I think you know what angle I'm going to come at this from

Absolutely... :-D


Nothing else effects a website's bottom line as much as their rankings. That might not matter much for a non-profit or personal site, but its life-or-death for online businesses.

I disagree horiablly here. Having a functional site, with a reason for people to say is far more important. Not saying that rankings arn't important. Just that ranking without content (or items to sell) is useless...


1) I come across a lot of people who've lost a lot of money because they've moved their site to Joomla and the out-of-the-box settings have failed them. Partly thats their problem for not doing their research, but Joomla is meant to take away some of that heartache of managing websites. Improvements in 1.5? I don't trust the new SEF URLs for Joomla 1.5 and advise people to keep using a plugin.

Honestly, this begs a question. I would like to see hard evidance that sefurls play any role whatsoever in rank today. A few years ago, absolutely. But today?

Oh, and I'm not saying that improvements shouldn't be made. I'm just saying that people need to remember content first...


2) I've seen a quite a few big companies choose Drupal or Wordpress instead of Joomla because they simply don't trust Joomla not to sink their rankings.

Honestly, I've also seen people move to Drupal because it provides a "framework". It's marketing FUD.


Too much emphasis on SEO? Perhaps. To extent I've been a lobbyist to improve SEO in Joomla. Anthony ... you seem to be in a similar position for performance. I'd love to see someone take up baton in a similar way for security, semantic design and other important topics.

I've never seen you say anything that I've disagreed with. Please don't feel like this article was targeted at you. My point, is that SEO is all that a lot of people focus on... While in actuality, it's part of a big picture...


FWIW, I'd rather be able to say we're an SEM company (encompassing analytics, SEO, newsletters, landing page, EUO etc.) but for better or worse, SEO is the term people use.<br><br>Post edited by: alledia, at: 2008/03/17 13:18
Sounds good to me...

Hey Anthony

SEF URLs ... Some points here:
http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-urls/in-defense-of-search-engine-friendly-urls/

Bottom line ... you're right, good technical SEO can only do so much. However bad technical SEO sure can sink a site very quickly.

Drupal ... to an extent I think Open Source projects rely a lot on the confidence people feel they can place in them, particularly non-IT-professionals. Marketing works, even in the FOSS world.

Lobbying for a topic .... I've actually been urging a couple of people to try and do something similar to me and you in areas like security and semantics. I know theres a business there for someone, and also a business that can help Joomla and provide needed answers for a lot of people.

Post edited by: alledia, at: 2008/03/18 15:29

Having good technical SEO tools to start with is definitely an advantage with any system you use. You want to have your URLs and navigation planned out from the beginning and set in place so that indexed links don't get broken or need to be redirected in the future. This is why it is so important to have solid SEF URL functionality from the beginning.

It is hard to gauge how much of an influence each aspect of SEO plays in SERPS, but in my experience clean URLs do make a difference. On http://themebot.com I received a google pagerank of 6 several months after going live. However, it was buried deep in the search results for any related keywords, even with the decent pagerank and quality content. I put a lot of time and effort into optimizing for SEO. A couple weeks after doing this I noticed a big improvement. Also, the old download section had joomla 1.0 core SEF links i.e. no keywords in the URL. Many of those pages were supplementary and did not perform well at all. The new download section is written with full SEF URLs and is performing quite well.

Now Themebot is in the top 10 if not top 5 for many related keyword phrases.

Hi Anthony,

You might be interested in this article I wrote a llooonnggg time ago.

Somewhat like what you are saying I think... SEO doesnt occur in a vacuum.

//www.compassdesigns.net/tutorials/17-joomla-tutorials/55-usability-accessibility-web-standards- seo.html