A question (or 2) for the experts...

[Ray Stewart]

I have been watching with interest how my two main websites have been performing in google. My little blog, with it's page rank of 0/10 continually pops up very high in searches and has decent traffic to it but the main site with it's (much larger!) page rank of 1/10 doesn't feature much in searches but is still getting a fair bit of traffic.

I don't really like the joomla look of the main site but it is simple to update and refresh. Is that important to google & co?

My question really is, would I be better converting the main site into a wordpress one like the blog? would it help it perform better in google & co?

Would I be better to combine the two somehow to economize on effort?

I have always thought the way my wordpress blog and the joomla site name the pages when written was helpful to the search engines. Is this true? or would I be better using just numbers for posts like lots of blogs seem to instead?

Is this the kind of stuff an SEO expert helps with - never having known one, or asked one, until now? I have just relied on reading bits and pieces on things like this and not got very far

[Ray Stewart]

No views??

[Paul Norman]

Hi Ray..this is a big question, and would require some research into the coding of the two sites, as well as the content.

Joomla, whilst an excellent cost effective tool, tends not to write the best code in the world, but then neither do its competitors. That will slow the Google spiders down a bit, but that is not the whole story.

Content is the big thing here, and external links. But especially content.

[binarywebs]

The most important aspect of search engine optimisation is keyword research. If you are not targeting the right keywords you will either get no traffic or get the wrong type of traffic. Also important are lots of links (with keywords in anchor text) and a good amount of keyword specific content. Usually about 300 - 500 words per page with your keyword being mentioned between 3% and 5% of the time.

Use this link to find a long list of relevant keywords (can't post links yet so just search for this tool);
Free Keyword Suggestion Tool From Wordtracker

And the google keyword tool is good for finding out a rough idea of each keywords search traffic;
Google keyword tool

Also install google Analytics as this is very useful.

Joomla and wordpress both have the ability to do well in search engines, search their forums for SEO to find out how to tailor them specifically. Stay with the names in url instead of numbers.

Also keep you blog and website separate (on different servers if possible) and market them separately giving links from your blog to your main website. I wouldn't link from your main website back to your blog though as this may devalue the links from the blog slightly (just my opinion though).

[briask]

Content, lots of content, relevant content. Get that part right first. This includes keyword analysis to make sure your site ranks for all the right words and phrases.

The actual CMS, Google doesn't care about it, what it wants is easy to follow links to your site and within your site and good content to service its search queries. Joomla, Drupal, EE etc all do a good job of serving up your site to your audience.

[chillfire]

Hi,

my 2 pence (as a CMS developer/seo guy), one thing that I have noticed with google (and other SE's) is that although the CMS you use doesn't have much affect there are things that it does that can do.

- Speed of rendering, the page has to be delivered to the spider quickly, remember web spiders dont 'see' the images so ignore them (thats a usability issue), but some CMS, build their pages slowly, or the databse they connect to is slow etc etc. I have used this before and found it good to help tune my CMS's in the past Web Page Analyzer - free website optimization tool website speed test check website performance report from web site optimization

- Page Errors, this can really harm your site. Every CMS should display some kind of user message if an error occurs, but what if the error only happens when a spider hits the page? I would advise using google webmaster tools and Yahoo site explorer with your site, at tleast this way you can see any errors that the spiders are showing up.

- Fancy controls/Ajax etc, My CMS uses very little ajax to display content, and there are no fancy javascripted menus/controls anywehere to be seen, its all plain old HTML, rememebr the spiders on read text, so how it looks is irrelevant, the best looking site can get 0 search results. Ajax and javascript can is used incorrectly actually hide your content (if used well it can help your content too) from the spiders

- HTML structure, this is the biggest problem with any web page (not just CMS based ones), the page must follow the basic HTML structure. So Meta tags, CSS and javascript in the HEAD area (except google analytics move them to the bottom of the page), content in the BODY area, Header tags in the correct order on the page, H1 at the top, then H2 etc etc, use P tags for each section of relevant content, use UL/LI for lists, etc etc.
A spider will index the structured content faster if its in the right place.

Lots of info, I am sure some will disagree, however these are all things I have had to look into over the last 2 years of developing OCRE and the best bit is every site that uses it has been indexed by google pretty quickly and all have relatively good search results.

hope that helps
craig

[Paul Norman]

Craig you are right. In short, although the keyword and content posts are right to claim importance for those things, Google will be slowed down by poor code. So will other search engines.

I spend a lot of time on this bandwagon, and am completely relaxed that most people think otherwise. It gives me an unfair advantage.

So validate this comment, I took a simple expedient. I phoned my account manager at Google and checked.

Content, is king. But sloppy code, even slightly sloppy, can hide it a bit. And a bit can take away your competitive edge.

[chillfire]

cheers Paul, I had to find out some of that the hard way (I found calling a man at google helpful too ha ha).

yes its true that most web developers are completely oblivious to the some of the basics, thats not such a bad thing for me though.

It would be interesting to put the same page up in static HTML, Joomla, Drupal etc and see if there really is a difference.

[Paul Norman]

I actually really do find the people at google helpful.