I would like to know if there is any TECHNICAL reason that a Joomla site would not rank high in Google or any other Search Engine.  Meaning TECHNICAL reason for a very competitive keyword.

Does anyone have a top 3 listing in Google for a competitive word or phrase?  Any #1's for competitive keyword or phrase?

Thanks very much

I have no issues with ranking in google.  I'm third for 'currency news' while only being beat by Yahoo! and Bloomberg (while beating forbes and reuters.)  Honestly, it would be rather hard to beat Yahoo! for that especially since most of our news is also published on Yahoo!  My company also has a pretty large marketing budget, so that doesn't hurt either.

I am number 1 for many searches and number 2 for "Joomla Components"

Well, I'm not one for Google, but here's a test.

Huddersfield Air Cadets
- Google... not on the first page
- Google (UK pages only)... same again
- Ask... first entry (but with a two-month old homepage stored)
- Ask (UK pages only)... same again

59 Squadron (bear in mind that there's 59 ATC and 59 RAF squadrons to search for)
- Google... we're not on the first page, but the other squadron is
- Google (UK pages only)... same again
- Ask... first entry (and it's the new site)
- Ask (UK pages only)... same again

Moral: make sure our web site address is on all our media releases!
Gary

PS - Additional: We come top using AltaVista, and with the most recent-but-one home page (which only changed last night, automatically, anyway).

I'm having problems appearing anywhere in the first 30 pages yet alone first 3  I only discovered to late that my content pages could have numerous different urls for each page, so didn't exclude them in the robots txt till after google had indexed them & currently my home page has about 4 different urls indexed by google - 
mysite.com
mysite.com/index.php
mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=64&Itemid=39
mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=64&Itemid=39=5
There's probably more.
So it seems I'm getting a duplicate content penalty

Phil: which SEF Comp are you using?

is there any SEF Comp which gives a content page an id? So if we move it from one category into another category/section the URL would not change
thanks

Not necessarily - there's a lot more to getting good positions than just the urls 
When you search on Google to see where your keyword or key phrase appears you also need to look at where, in what context, and how often it appears on your page.
Have you used meta tags? Do you have good descriptions?  Are these directly relevant to the page they appear on?
Joomla! does not disadvantage anyone from getting good rankings, but optimizing pages/content for search engines needs a little more thought than it does with a plain html site. Many people put every keyword they can think of in the config file while completely overlooking the fact that many of the pages may not contain even one instance of any of those keywords.

Also, a tip worth noting is that the titles of the pages are not picked up by search engines.  I make a practice of hiding all titles and adding the same words into the html with

tags.  These are read by search engines and give some context to the body of the content.

Getting rankings is tricky, but not difficult once you get the hang of it.  On the Disastersearch project we recently had just under 90,000 listings in Google.  One of the team did some tweaking of pages and within a week we had lost close on 70,000 of those listings.  Our frontpage had a page rank of 8 and dropped to 7 in that same period.  Instead of the whole site being indexed, we were dropped down to 3 pages.  Heartbreaking stuff.  Especially since we had got that far in less than 2 months.  We are back over 30,000 again now, and might get better but this really shows that listings and rankings have nothing to do with the cms and everything to do with how you use it.

Incidentally, when we hit our peak of just under 90,000 we were not using SEF - the drop started as soon as the changes took place and continued downhill as the pages were tweaked.  Sometimes, it doesnt pay to make such changes to urls 

Very interesting Elpie,

My goal in starting this thread was just that, to look at the impact of rank as it relates to the CMS from a technical view point.  As we all know there are many issues that impact rank.  I am trying to look at the technical issues of the code.  All other things being equal does a 'valid' html site rank higher than a CMS that does not validate?

I don't think it really matters if it's valid.  Take a look at all the big guys on Google.  eBay doesn't validate, CNN doesn't validate, Amazon doesn't validate.  As long as you have relatively structured and properly thought-out code, validation isn't that big of a deal.  Of course there will be exceptions, you can create really, really bad HTML that a robot will hate, but I think any regular Joomla template should be fine.  Of course, if you're serious about SEO, you'll probably want to do some manual tweaking.

I've got two joomla sites which have #1 placement.  BUT the keywords are very uncommon.  In fact, one isn't even a real word (it's a band name).  So I know google can see the data in joomla.

Are you in the sandbox?

All other things being equal, a page that validates will almost always rank higher. Ebay, Amazon, et al. don't need to validate because they have millions of backlinks.

Hello,
Joomla is ok (more then that) by SEO point of view. Couple of things to fix (hi dev!: ability to manage keywords-description meta tags, expecially fot blogsections-blogcategories; better control over page title) and it will rock.
Here 6th position for my most important keyword over 2.000.000 results. Not bad for Joomla.
(a little tip: don't get mad around friendly urls, Joomla sef is enough).

Ciao

Macchine fotografiche digitali
www.dphoto.it/

I don't buy it.  If my DTD is for XHTML strict and I put
in there, that's invalid.  Is that going to rank lower than an identical page with
?  How far off 'valid' are we talking?  Are we talking about making up our own tags, disregarding , any closing tags, and using spacer images for regular spaces with absolutely everything encapsulated in ?  Or just someone forgetting to put alt="" for an image?

If you have mangled HTML that looks more like Word's HTML output on a killing spree, that's going to rank badly.  But relatively neat HTML, even if not valid, I don't think it's really going to hurt.

For me, I don't like Joomla's code-to-content ratio with the default template.  So many tables.  I think an overuse of HTML hurts more than invalid HTML.

I don't know if excess html really would hurt the ranking.  The bots are trained to ignore it.  The keywords in the content itself is going to be the most critical I think.

It will.  The more HTML there is, the more diluted the content is.  Many SEO sources stress code-to-content ratio, and it's one of the big benefits of CSS w/ regards to SEO.  Bots love accesibility and a low content-to-code ratio usually provides just that.

I have found using Saka's SEF Advance extremely useful for SEO on Joomla and Mambo sites. Firstly do you have a Google page rank yet? If not  wait a few months, however you still should be able to rank with a 0/10 PR. I've had no.1 and 2 rankings for sites with millions (In one case 15 million) of competing pages.
A few things that you should be aiming for.
1. Keywords and phrases in your URL
2. Keywords and Phrases in your Page title
3. Keywords and phrases in

tags as close to the top of the page as possible.
4. Anchor text! Make sure you are linking using your keywords and phrases in your anchor text to other pages within your site.
5. Alt tags - Use them for links and for images with your keywords.
6. Make sure your page title is appearing before the sitename on your page as this will increase clicks when you are ranked.
7. The description tags are important for some se as this is what they will diosplay in the SERP.
8. Make sure your keywords are at the top of the article and as close as possible to your

tags.
9. Make sure that your template is setup so that the bots are reading your rich content before your menu linkls
10. Install TFSforJoomla and have a look at what the bots are looking at.
11. Produce a Google sitemap
12. Ignore all of the above and hire me ;-)

That should do you for starters.

You can find out more about this stuff on my SEO Vlog Or my SEO Newsletters

As an aside I find that these changes work much quicker in MSN and Yahoo than they do in Google, but if you follow them Google will rank you unless you are up against sites with a much higher PR than you. That is when you need to get other sites linking to with keyword anchor text.
All the best
Jim

I've heard the site name / page title thing before in other cms's, how do you switch these round i Joomla?
I turned off the gloabal meta descriptions as I found that these were added to the titles & descriptions in content and as my home page is static content anyway I use those but if I turn off the site name I'm left with  - page title, I haven't figured out how to remove the dash bit yet.

I am working on getting the meta tag issue sorted out.

My site ty2u.com is ranked up there for free joomla templates in google and some other things too.

Ranked high in yahoo, msn, etc. as well.

I use 404sef on my site but I am hoping opensef will be nice and have needed features that are lacking in 404sef.

I am going to start a project on the forge for the meta manager as i got the go ahead from the author.  It will allow you to control all your keywords, descriptions, titles, etc. from one central location.  It will be awesome!!!

It currently installs fine in Joomla but does not operate properly and the author says it will take too much time to fix so I am going to fix it eventhough I dont really know how to code much.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Ryan

I think that this is the right time to open a new forum exclusively for Joomla and SEO...

I think that is good idea 

There are plenty of sites dealing with SEO if you just Google.  Joomla! in itself does not affect SEO - if you know what you are doing with optimizing sites for search engines you can do it just as easily with Joomla! as you can with any other site.
There are some little tweaks that can be done (like hiding page titles and using header tags) but pretty much all the needs to be done within Joomla! has already been discussed on this thread.  For more detailed information then its just a matter of finding good sites about SEO. 

I'm with you Elpie.

I've got 4 sites that come up in the top 5 in Google and Yahoo and until recently 2 of them did not have sef urls either.

I figure that complaining about SEF / SEO is a red herring. 

Line 408 in includes/joomla.php


You'll want:

Sweet!

That reverses the order of the page title, with the site title so it is Page Title - Site Title

I also see the other part on line 440.

Currently it is

Change to


This will change the order of the keywords and description so it will be Page Meta, Global Meta for both.

If you want to take out the Global Meta on those pages though, which may be a good idea for some, it should be just

Keep in mind that any update to Joomla! will put replace the hack. For anyone wanting to remove global meta tags it is much simpler to just not enter any in configuration.php

For the most part invalid=overuse, in my experience. Obviously missing a closing tag won't hurt, but the people who are only missing that aren't worried enough about it to check and are generally missing many things which will hurt in the end.

My main keyword has almost 1.8 million results on Google and we are currently holding 3 of the top 4 spots, 2 of the spots using Mambo. I wouldn't worry about the ability of Joomla/Mambo to handle SEO.

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,12880.0.html

I think I have an article #1 if you search for "Joomla SEO"

What about if we want, for some reason (any reason)  to create an strategy for SEO, and we decide as a company to experiment with the titles and metas (inverting order betwen global and item, to hide them etc.). I would be better for me, a Joomla user and padawan (notice the star wars word) to have more control, flexibility in this matter... let's forget at this moment if this feature is good or not for SEO, just focus on the ability of Joomla to control as many aspects as we want from our content. That's why I think Joomla must include this option, that's why Joomla it's a CMS, Is'n it?

Not complaining about SEO in Joomla just want to learn more about it

I think a forum for SEO in Joomla would be an excellent idea because some aspects of it would be specific to Joomla especially when it comes to the various SEF components and also other aspects like duplicated urls and menu structure are also specific.

It would be handy to have one forum to ask questions and get advice in rather than searching through all the different ones. I'm also interested to know if there is any comparison between Joomla sites using SEF and not using it.

Another thing I read regarding SEO & dynamic sites was to do with session id's and turning them off but as a newbie to all this I haven't got a clue how to do that.

SEO for Joomla Mk1=write quality content with logical headers.
SEO for Joomla Mk2=Throw in some links, both external and internal
SEO for Joomla Mk1=Get text links with keywords in anchor text

There isn't much different about Joomla SEO compared to any other site. Just turn on the built in SEF and your good.