24 July 2008

by Johan

Speaking at SEMforSMB

Last week I spoke at the SEMforSMB conference in Austin, Texas. The conference was primarily focussed on search engine optimization and marketing for small and mid size businesses.

I did two talks, one about ‘Building a business website in 3 minutes‘. I showed how easy it is to setup a Joomla! 1.5 site, install a template and a component. All in I think it even took less then three minutes.

SEMforSMB US 2008 – Building a website in 3 minutes

The second presentation was about how to search engine optimize your Joomla! 1.5 site. I co-presented this session together with Jay Moreno from redflamemedia. Jay specialises in Joomla! SEO and it was great to have an expert like him at my side to answers all the though questions.

While talking with people we learned that there still exist a lot of misconceptions about the fact that Joomla! has insufficent SEO features. At the conference I talked with many experts on issues like duplicate content, SEF URL’s etc. All of them agreed that Joomla! 1.5 is a very SEO friendly CMS.

Don’t believe me ? Well, let’s take the Nooku.org site as an example. Nooku.org is getting a SEO score of 97% at domaintools.com and a an nice 84% on websitegrader.com Nooku.org isn’t using any SEF or SEO plugins. Just a plain Joomla! 1.5 installation with Nooku installed. That’s it.

For those of you interested in reading up on our SEO talk, here are the slides :

SEMforSMB US 2008 – SEO for Joomla! 1.5

  • http://www.ircnews.co.uk X-Ception

    while whats readable is insightful and makes sense, it tends to lose its charm with the teeny tiny pictures – however I’m sure they we’re very self explanatory on a projection unit.

    I’ve never understood the constant complaints about Joomla and SEO compatibility i guess it depends on your stance on the issue and until the likes of Google, Live, Yahoo open up there source ( never ) there is no real definitive way to tell what really works other than ‘keeping everything in its place’

    Personally i have ran numerous CMS systems for periods of time with little SEO effort and little in terms of SE figures, however my little effort on Joomla ( 1.5 more so ) has boosted my own SE figures beyond my own expectations, I’m sure for those out there that wish to sit around and fiddle with J! till its highly optimized, then do it all again when something changes its worth it BUT! for the average joe bloggs – its quite functional as is providing you remember your meta tags and descriptions and follow the very BASIC outlines ( title lengths, amount of meta tags, meta description length and of course keyword -> content relevance.

    and as a last note, that cake looked great

  • http://www.ircnews.co.uk X-Ception

    woops, scratch that in regards to tiny images, isnt till your traverse to the direct link ( rather than embedded ) that you get a full screen option. My bad.

  • Anonymous

    I enjoyed your presentation on baking the SEO cake. You are the man! Thanks for the one-on-one sessions, I sure did learn a lot of what Joomla 1.5 has to offer. I was able to convince my boss to migrate to 1.5 and he agreed and its done! You sure are super duper smart.

    If you still need me to help your friend get a game devlopment career, let me know!

    I hope all is well.

  • http://johan.janssens.me Johan Janssens

    Was great meeting you too and thanks for the kind words ! Nice to hear you been able to get your boss excited about Joomla! 1.5.

    If you have any info about game development in the Austin Region just shoot me a personal mail and I’ll get it to the right people.

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