One of the biggest masterpieces is The Nightwatch by Rembrandt

See how the main sponsor of the Rijskmuseum promotes the return of that masterpiece with this commercial:

A great example of the use of video and Youtube for getting the message out to the general public.

Want to see more about the Museum, check out https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en

The problem with that was that I not only created websites for clients but also for myself leaving me with a whole lot of sites to manage.

So this year I wanted to scale down on the number of sites to manage by consolidation different sites into one bigger site. This is that new website: http://www.websitebeginnersguide.com

Which Sites to Consolidate?

Taking that decision is one thing, getting into action is something completely different.

First off all I needed to determine which sites would be good candidates to move to a different domain and if it was possible to do so with a minimal loss in Google rankings.

When the whole project is done, it should even improve on the rankings and the number of visitors, creating a website that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Criteria to take into account:

• Website topic should match the purpose of the new domain
• Permalinks structure should also be the same to be able to da a 301 redirect form the old website
• Export and import of data should be easily doable
• Number of RSS feed subscribers

For me that meant that the first sites to consolidate where:

• www.herbertvandinther.com
• www.pathosseoblog.com
• Others to follow

Setting the First Steps

First off all I needed to setup the new website with the same CMS, in this case WordPress.

Decide on the Layout / design of the site. I now use Genesis with the News theme from StudioPress. Not a cheap premium theme but worth every penny I spend on it.

After installation was done, checked the common plugin usage in both sites and make sure the permalinks settings were identical.

The main reason for this was that it is a lot easier to do a complete site redirect than creating a lot of single 301 redirect rules per site.

The actual moves were done by creating a WordPress export file from the old sites and import them into the new one. I checked the box to import the attachments as well, that saves time and prevented some of the image link problems.

Search and Replace Old stuff and General Housekeeping

Some of the things I did after the migrations

• Using this plugin to change the URLs of the images and old links form http://pathosseoblog.com/ with the correct new uploads path.
• Check Old comments to see if there is nothing left that point to the migrated domains.
• Used Ajax Thumbnail Rebuild for resizing the images for use on archives and layout options.
• Update the Contact form
• Set SEO Options -> I was not sure on using a Plugin or the Genesis SEO Theme settings. I decided to go the Genesis SEO options to see if that would work out better than WordPress SEO.
• Installed the Google sitemap.xml plugin to get the standard xml file to put into my Webmaster Tools account.
• Deleted the two other site entries in Webmaster tools.
• Set up a new Subscribe widget
• Cleaned out old and duplicate post categories

Other this to look out for in the coming weeks:

• Check the error logs for 404 errors that need to be addressed
• Check Stats and Tools to find other problems that might occur
• Decide what other domain could be consolidation candidates
• Write new articles and guides especially for WordPress and Joomla Beginners
• Regain focus and have fun!

Top Heavy

In January we got the original page layout algorithm change that targeted websites that had to many ad-space above the fold.  A lot of Made for Adsense sites got hit as they focus on quick wins sending people away from the site into adsense clicks. This was the first so called Top Heavy update.

Penguin Update

In April Penguin was rolled out that brought a big hit on many site rankings.  The basic idea was to get quality content sites higher in the rankings and demotion of SEO. Or like Matt Cutts stated in the article below:

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.nl/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html.

Penguin was heavily discussed as real good quality websites that had been around for years serving high quality content to their visitors got dropped as well.

EMD & Panda Update

End of September there was another big impact update, this time focused on Exact Match Domains. This update was to clear out spam websites which rankings were based on the fact that they used keyword rich domain names for exact matches on popular search terms.

The EMD update was targeted towards low quality sites, but this time also some very good content sites were hit as well.

The Panda update that was rolled out at almost the same time as the EMD change so its hard to distinguish your ranking update between those two if you have a keyword rich domain.

Panda’s Intend

The Panda update was / is intended to give searchers better high quality content to provide answers on their search. Google wants you to follow their Quality Guidelines and create easy to read content written for users, not for search engines.

These updates mentioned above have made a big impact on search with Google this year. Last year it was Panda, but that did not hit my websites as hard as Penguin did.

Did Panda eat your rankings and traffic?
Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda

Google Ranking Recovering

Recovering from this years updates is taking hard work and a some real hard thinking about what to improve.

In the past creating a site with a clear hierarchy and text links for navigation could bring you a long way. Setup correctly you could get good rankings within a couple of weeks / months.

Now you have to get more updates in, work hard on Google+ and other social media and create more user centered high quality content on your site.

It’s a new era in search engine optimization for Google and other search engines will follow. I wonder what 2013 will bring us. Certainly more white hat SEO as several back hat tactics got busted this year.

And you, what do you think about these major algo changes? Good or bad for SEO consultants? And how about website owners?

I will tell you how that turned out in a new post later this month. For now I am trying to get into the Joomla 2.5 game and see how much has improved with this new version.

Did I work with Joomla 1.6 and 1.7? No, and I almost did not work with 2.5 either. I was disappointed with the discussion on the way things went with the version numbering and with the fact that going from a 1.5 to a 2.5 Joomla website also was not an upgrade but instead again a migration. I do believe a lot of potential Joomla! websites owners choose another CMS for that reason. Some even migrated their old Joomla sites into new WordPress websites.

Now back to the topic on hand, I just recently started a new website based on Joomla 2.5 and I wanted to get some guidelines on how to set it up for good results.
I am no newbie when it comes to Joomla so the basics did not change that much I guessed, so why not get a book that could guide me through those changes and show me with clear how to steps how to build this new site.

At this point, I got a hold of Joomla! 2.5 Beginners Guide from Eric Tiggeler (who is Dutch just like me). It turned out to be the right guide to start with, and I can recommend it to anyone who tries to build a Joomla! based website.

A short content introduction with a chapter overview so you can see what topics are covered by this book:
Chapter 1: Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites
Chapter 2: Installation: Getting Joomla Up and Running
Chapter 3: First Step: Getting to Know Joomla
Chapter 4: Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour
Chapter 5: Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively
Chapter 6: Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles
Chapter 7: Welcoming your Visitors: Creating Attractive Home Pages
and Overview Pages
Chapter 8: Helping your Visitors Find What they Want: Managing Menus
Chapter 9: Opening up the Site: Enabling Users to Log in and Contribute
Chapter 10: Getting the Most out of your Site: Extending Joomla
Chapter 11: Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates
Chapter 12: Attracting Search Engine Traffic: Tips and Techniques

For me Chapter 4 and beyond give me the information I was looking for. I did not create the site in one hour, it took me several hours. The reason for that is that I wanted to get some good pictures for the site, and my search on Dreamstime and iStockphoto was longer than expected. Not that the images are hard to find, there are just so much of them to go through and to choose the right ones :-).

Besides getting the site up and running I also enjoyed the book from Eric and learned more on the design part and how to give my visitors a better experience in navigation on the site.
The SEO part is a good introduction, but to limited for me.
All-in-all I recommend this book to anyone who is new to Joomla! and wants to build a good performing website with this great Content Management System. Eric Tiggeler really knows how to make work with easy to follow clear instruction. So if you are in need of such a book or want to give it to someone who wants or needs it, just get it over at Packt or from Amazon Joomla! 2.5 Beginner’s Guide
.

During that time I did a lot of work on client websites and setting up websites to earn money as an affiliate. From the later I learned the most on how search engine optimization has changed in that timespan.

In The Netherlands where I live Google has a market share of almost 99% so you can imagine that SEO here is heavily focused on how to get top rankings in Google.

With the Google Panda update (yes, it hit the Netherlands too) a lot of Affiliate sites dropped in rankings and in visitor numbers. Other large content websites learned from other countries where Panda was rolled out before and prepared for the upcoming algo chance.

Basically the quality of the content and being user friendly has gained importance. Again you see that thinking from a user perspective works best and if you focus on ROI and conversion you have the best strategy.

Google+ and Other Social Networks

Social networking is the big hype in search engine optimization and everybody is focused on scoring well on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

Google+ is growing fast and I must admit that I just recently started to use it. That is the drawback that I am in the Netherlands, I have to wait for it to open up by Google…

Google takes social networks into account for their rankings, so if you have a lot of followers on Twitter it will improve your status.

But… what I see now with a increasing number of people around me is that they move away from social networks. People seem to have lost the urge to share what they think and are more and more concerned about their privacy.

If you look at the biggest social networking site in Holland which is hyves.nl you see that in the last six months they lost 18% of their traffic.

Source Alexa.com

Several of those visitors are now on Facebook getting connected to friends. Most of those Hyves users that are now on Facebook are youngsters who use a Blackberry and WhatsApp to keep up with their social network.

Now my questions to you is: Do you see the same behavior in your off-line social networks?

Is it a general decline that will eventually hit all of those sites, or is it related to the economic recession? Could that mean that people will share good news, but not the bad things that happen in their life…

And if it is a general decline, what would that mean for search engine optimization?

I do foresee that a lot of people are going to reduce their use of Twitter and Facebook updates, mainly to reduce the current information overload brought onto them by those social networks…

P.s. The site is now on another theme based on the Genesis WordPress Theme Framework by StudioPress to show my renewed focus on SEO and its future. I hope you like it.

So here is a short overview of basic Joomla 1.6 Do’and Don’t for Search Engine Optimization. Let’s start with the Do’s…

Global Configuration SEO Settings

Like the SEO Setting that you can reach via -> Global Configuration -> SEO Settings.

Joomla 1.6 SEO Settings

For Search Engene Friendly URLs should always be active to convert your article title to a clean URL.
The big difference with previous versions is that this will work even without .htaccess by adding /index.php/ into the URL!

If you don’t want that you should activate the second option Use  URL Rewriting and follow the advice given in the Exclamation mark! That means you have to change some settings on server level or start using .htaccess on an Apache Based hosting program (Most of the hosting providers use Apache)

Adds Suffix to URL means that the extension .html is added to the URL. So instead of http://www.example.org/using-joomla you get http://www.example.org/using-joomla.html

This is a small change but it gives you the benefit that people will see that this is a content page and not a category directory, so it creates a real clear endpoint.

Metadata Settings

In the Global Configuration you can also set some basic Metadescription and Keywords, but I never use that option. But keep the last two options active!

Joomla 1.6 Metadata Settings

As I mentioned you have to keep the last two options active because you want to see the following options in you articles writing panel.

Joomla 1.6 Article Metadata Settings

Use the Metadescription on every page for the best results, just write a short excerpt of the page with the keywords you want to target and make it like a small advertisment for you page. Google and other search engines can use these text just under the Title of your page and it can give you a better click through rate from the search page.

Keywords is debated because Google and Yahoo won’t use them. I do put in some main keywords, but never more than five, you don’t want to stuff that field! Stuffing will get you worse rankings…

Joomla 1.6. SEO Don’ts

With Joomla 1.6 you don’t have the previous unclear function’s like Section’s and Categories in those sections. Instead you can now have nested categories.

Joomla 1.6 Category Nesting

And although it is a good thing to have a better user experience and people can create content a lot easier, there is also a drawback.

You can now have a category in a category in a category in a category… and that can make the URL for you article very, very long as every category name will be in that URL.

For example http://demo16.cloudaccess.net/index.php/using-joomla/extensions/components/content-component

Don’t go overboard with this feature! Just do like you did before, make a small number of main categories with only one level deep extra categories so your URLs stay short! Also keep the naming off this categories short..

Keep these thing in mind and your basic is set for SEO, all that is left now is for you to create Quality Content that Google and your visitors will like :-)

But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your visitors.

This book is a great addition to your search engine optimization efforts as we all now that video, mp3, podcast en mobile web interfaces are becoming more important everyday.

Joomla Multimedia

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia will have some information for you that you can skip through if you are building Joomla! websites for a longer period of time, but the main part of the book will help you to further improve your and your customers websites.

I am not going the repeat the complete list of chapters of this book, you can follow the link above to get a better content listing than I can do… what I will tell you which chapters captured my special interest:

• Chapter 3: Text, Characters and Fonts: This shows you some good information on how to improve accessibility and still play with fonts in your design.
• Chapter 5: Using Audio: How to set up podcasts and the handling of mp3 files which is very good in combination with normal blogging.
• Chapter 6: Using video: Of course information about Video including a few extensions that will aid you in your efforts to use video in Joomla!
• Chapter 7: Collaboration with external resources: You don’t need to produce all the videos yourself, you can also pull from other resources and this chapter shows some very neat information about how to do that the right way.

Chapter 8 about templates is also good, but for me personally not that interesting, Chapter 9 gives you a complete step-by-step overview of the building of a Multi Media Joomla! based website and can be a great help if you start out to implement the other ideas that come from this well written book.

Don’t take my word on it, check out this sample Chapter 4 from the book: Adding and Managing Image Content.

For my, this book will stay on my desk for a longer period of time as I am going to use a lot of information from it :-), thank you Allen Walker and Packt Publishing for this great new book.

But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your visitors.

This book is a great addition to your search engine optimisation efforts as we all now that video, mp3, podcast en mobile web interfaces are becoming more important everyday.

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia will have some information for you that you can skip through if you are building Joomla! websites for a longer period of time, but the main part of the book will help you to further improve your and your customers websites.

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia by Allan Walker

I am not going the repeat the complete list of chapters of this book, you can follow the link above to get a better content listing than I can do… what I will tell you which chapters captured my special interest:

• Chapter 3: Text, Characters and Fonts: This shows you some good information on how to improve accessibility and still play with fonts in your design.
• Chapter 5: Using Audio: How to setup podcasts and the handling of mp3s which is very good in combination with normal blogging.
• Chapter 6: Using video: Of course information about Video including a few extensions that will aid you in your efforts to use video in Joomla!
• Chapter 7: Collaboration with external resources: You don’t need to produce all the videos yourself, you can also pull from other resources and this chapter shows some very neat information about how to do that the right way.

Chapter 8 about templates is also good, but for me personally not that interesting, Chapter 9 gives you a complete step-by-step overview of the building of a Multi Media Joomla! based website and can be a great help if you start out to implement the other ideas that come from this well written book.

Don’t take my word on it, check out this sample Chapter 4 from the book: Adding and Managing Image Content.

For my, this book will stay on my desk for a longer period of time as I am going to use a lot of information from it :-), thank you Allen Walker and Packt Publishing for this great new book.

The site was number One on Google for a long tail keywords phrase and it site was getting some nice traffic from this term.

After the move from its sub-domain life and going into its own domain I changed the template to a more suitable one and optimized the site to get more traffic.

One thing I did was the craft the Home page title so it would get even more traffic and it worked out nicely. The new theme was search engine optimized and I did not feel like I needed to do anything about it…

As I said, the site had a No. 1 position on Google, but after I wrote a new post on this site this happened to the traffic.

Click to enlarge

Once I noticed the drop in traffic I checked Google and saw the site was still No. 1 but not with the title of the homepage anymore.

The title shown by Google was the title of the last post and no longer this traffic attracting title of the Homepage!
This title was not really on topic of the search term so nobody clicked on it to check out the site!

I checked the theme and changed the header option to make sure I got the Homepage title back into place.

Bringing it Back on Track

So everything is technically set back to how it should be, and now it was time to get Google’s spider to re-index the site so the homepage title was back where it belonged.

Writing a new post that to update the site did the trick and the site was back in a few days.

All looked good, but a day later there was again this drop in traffic. Now I can explain the first drop, then the recovery but not the second drop.

The only thing I can think of was the short time upgrade followed by something Google might do like switching back for some time serving search engine cached indexes if they upgrade the primary index.
If you have another explanation, I would love to here it!

After this initial drop and kick back the site is now doing well, thank you for asking.
It is still growing in traffic.

Conclusion: Keep track of your site after you do a mayor upgrade like changing themes or even system upgrades.
The thing you need to watch closely is that the so carefully crafted title of you homepage is still the same so it will keep getting you the traffic. Especially it you have the No. 1 position on Google that you wanted to get.

If you are reading this post via your RSS Feed reader or your Feed Mail subscription the Joomla SEO Blog is now on HerbertvanDinther.com, yes on its own domain and no longer in a subdomain of a Joomla! based website.

It has served its purpose in getting traffic for its Big Brother, and now its time to set it free on its own to see if it can grow further into a mayor force on its own.

There was af course an other reason for giving this blog its new domain: Branding… I have been blogging on several sites and platforms under the name Hummerbie and now the Blog lives under Herbert van Dinther and the posts are also posted with the name Herbert-Jan van Dinther.

There is also a domain herbertjanvandinther.com and that is setup with Joomla as Content Management System, but that is my next project to get some content and articles on.

Joomla, WordPress and SEO

For those who have been reading this blog for a longer period of time know that the focus was on Joomla! and SEO, well there is going to be an extra topic on this site and that is going to be WordPress. The system this blog is build on.

I think they can work together to give you the best of both worlds and a feed of this site will be part of the Joomla! site.

One great thing I recently came aware off is that http://www.rockettheme.com/ now is offering Joomla and WordPress themes and if that is not enough, they have this fast Joomla! Theme called Afterburner and the same theme for WordPress Afterburner and they are both Free. So you can have your Joomla! site and WordPress Blog with the same look and feel.

Redevolution has been doing the same thing for a longer period of time now. They also have a great SEO Blog that is worth visiting.

So you see, Joomla and WordPress match up just fine and I have been promoting Joomla on several wordpress.com based blogs like seo4joomla.wordpress.com and joomlablogging.wordpress.com.

As I said before, I needed a new focus for 2010 to get more done and to blog more about the topics I love to write about and I think this move will give me new and fresh idea’s to write about. I do have some things in mind to share with you, so lets make this a great year for all of us.

P.s. If you find any problems on this site after its move, please contact me so I can fix it :-)