Search Engine Optimisation - Getting higher on Google.

See Also - SEO for Joomla - How to change page titles, headings, metadata etc in Joomla.

Understanding the basics of SEO outlined below will see most people through to getting the best result they can get with limited resources.

You will find some videos in the Joomla Tutorial pages that cover the practical basics of getting the words you want to get found for into important positions for search engines such as your Page Titles and HTML Headings on your pages, but before you jump in it pays to understand some of the basic strategies of search engine optimisation.

1. Once a page is "Highly Relevant" to a given search, extra efforts to cram keywords into every possible position and metatag offer little, if any additional benefit, and if overdone, can even get your site penalised for "keyword stuffing". Basically once the keyword "density" of a certain term reaches the point of looking unnatural to Google, (compared to what is normal for your topic), then Google may actually penalise you for keyword stuffing.

You should make sure that your desired  keywords appear in...

• The Page Title (especially at the start of the title, and especially in your home page's page title),
• Plus in a prominent H1 heading at the top of the page, and use subheadings logically to break up text. Avoid excessive heading use beyond what makes sense from a user experience point of view (eg writing a whole page of text inside a H1 heading would look like 'search engine spam' to Google).
• At least once but idealy a number of times in the body text and
• Ideally in links pointing to the page. (eg in menu links or linked words on other pages - but especially on other sites linking to your site, but they're still helpful if links between pages on your own site contain keywords you want to rank well for.

If these conditions are met, (or even just most of them) then Google will already see that page as  "Highly Relevant" to that term, and extra efforts to include the words in lots more places like alt tags on images, metakeywords, metadescriptions, url paths and extra places in the body text, while helpful to a degree, will ultimately produce diminishing returns (and eventually negative returns if you take it so far that Google penalises you for keyword stuffing.

For a second opinion on this point, just take a look at the top ranking sites on Google for just about any search. In fact most sites that rank well on Google are there because of their link profile (see below) and have quite modest keywords densities and positioning compared with highly "optimised" sites. In fact, many sites appear in the top few results despite breaking almost every "rule" in the book for "on-page" content optimisation, so just getting the fundamentals right is the main goal.

1b. An exception to this, is that you can use every possible position to expand the variety of words around a certain topic that you might want to rank for. Once again, don't go nuts, as unnatural groupings of keywords that don't follow typical patterns of English usage for your topic may still trigger certain penalties on Google, but to a large extent, if you want to cram keywords into every possible location, then use it to expand the variety of different keywords, rather than repeating the same ones to the point where your site looks like "search engine spam" to Google.

2. Know what to optimise for.
Use free tools such as this one or the keyword tool in Google Adwords to find out what products or services your customers search for most often. Don't just optimise for what is popular. Concentrate also on those search terms (keywords) that are most likely to turn into sales, and terms that you have a realistic chance of ranking well for.

Sometimes it makes more sense to optimise for a niche where you have less competition, than to try and rank top of google for popular generic terms (like "jobs" or "real estate" where competitors might be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on public relations and other efforts designed to build a very high profile of inbound links. Sometimes your competitors might have a profile of inbound links that dwarfs what most small businesses can hope to achieve by thousands of times. No amount of "on page" optimisation is going to get you first on Google if your competitors for that phrase have a link profile thousands of times better. (see below).

3 Links Links Links.

Google counts links (from other websites pointing to your website) as votes for your site. More importantly, if a site links to yours, then the value of the vote they are casting for your site is determined by the value of all the votes of the links pointing to their site. Read this again, then twice more for good measure, as it is one of the most important aspects of SEO for Google.

For example, a link from the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald's could easily be worth as much as 100,000 times the value of a link from a small website with few or any "backlinks" of their own.

This is why it's not as easy as people might think to game the system. Getting low quality links is easy, but often conveys little if any benefit. Getting a prominnet link from quality, high ranking sites is anything but easy.

As with all things Google, don't overdo anything that is artificial. Google is very good at telling natural patterns of link acquisition from bogus ones, and a rapid acquisition of low quality "free for all" links is unlikely to help, and may even get your site penalised. There are many many ways Google can tell quality links for poor ones, but sticking to quality is the best and safest strategy in the long run.

The best links are those that come from pages where there is at least some meaningful relevance between the content on the two pages. E.g. it would be perfectly natural for a site about travel, to link to a site about campervans, but it would be unlikely for a cake shop website to link to a site about auto-repairs. A percentage of seemingly irrelevant links is quite natural and not a problem, but if most of your links are low quality links coming from sites with no relevance to your own, then Google will either discount the links or worse, view them as link spam.

The following are all good strategies

• Public relations, 
• Writing articles for other websites (that include a backlink to your site) or for sites such as www.PRweb.com or www.ezinearticles.com, or writing guest posts and articles for relevant sites,
• Joining trade associations that link to their members, 
• Link baiting, and
• Submitting to QUALITY directories (eg www.dmoz.org, maps.google.com, www.hotfrog.com.au etc), especially industry directories who only link to reputable sites themselves, 
• Writing testimonials for suppliers that include a backlink to your site.
• Sponsoring clubs or organisations who link to their sponsors, 

It is far more important to put effort into this type of link building and developing more useful, interesting and link worthy content, than to obsess over keyword densities of your site compared to your competitors or worrying that you haven't put keywords into every possible url path or image alt tag, since Google cares far more about putting sites that are deemed as "important" & "relevant" at the top of the results, than simply prioritising sites that are highly "optimised".

It's easy get caught up in content optimisation details because these factors are easier to control, compared to trying to get high ranking, relevant sites to link to you, and it is precisely for this reason that Google prioritises the latter because it is a far better measure of whether a site will be useful to the searcher than some crude measure of keyword positioning or density.