Preventing Duplicate Content in Joomla! with Joomla’s Core SEF

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Kyle

I was recently going through the Joomla! forums: Joomla! SEO – Duplicate Content, and noticed that there’s some major confusion regarding how the Joomla! Core SEF works in terms of creating SEF URL’s and managing duplicate content.

In response to the problem, which originally was posted about back in 2008, but followed up on more recently (June 2011), I posted a response that apparently people liked and understood more than most people’s responses. From the response thus far, I was asked to provide a more detailed description of how to control duplicate content using Joomla! Core SEF.

I will first cover the concepts, and then move into the actual “How To’s”.

Concepts Clarified

Firstly, it needs to be known that the Joomla! Core SEF does not work on “Section / Category / Aricle” alias, or in the case of J! 1.6+, “Category / Category / Article” alias. Instead, Joomla! Core SEF actually is based on the Menu alias for the menus that you create within your Joomla! website.

Additionally, it doesn’t just focus on the “mainmenu” that is created in the site either, as you can name the menus whatever you wish.

If you have multiple menus:

And you create menu items within each separate menu to the same content, Joomla! will naturally create multiple pathways to that content, thereby creating your duplicate content issues. This is an issue with or without the Joomla! Core SEF turned on.

However, if you understand this concept and learn the proper configuration of your menus, you can easily keep your duplicate content to a minimum (it may not be entirely possible to avoid with the J! Core SEF, but I’ll cover that a bit later in this post).

Satisfying Solutions

First things first – you always want to try and create only one menu item for any piece of content, as this will be the easiest way to keep your duplicate content to a minimum.However, it’s typically unrealistic to think that any decently sized website will control all its content through only one menu. You may, based on your planned IA, find that multiple types of menus (top menu, side menu, footer menus), and multiple labels of those menus (about, history, home page, services, etc., etc.) are appropriate for usability purposes—and that’s just fine!So, how do we create multiple menus, with multiple menu items, all going to the same place and not create duplicate content?With the Menu Type “Alias”, of course!
A (relatively) quick video explaining the concept and process to resolve duplicate content in Joomla!:

In Summary:
Using Joomla! Core SEF is a great out-of-the-box solution and it works well. Typically the errors & issues, as with most things, will be created by the user, not the system. So make sure that you use the “Alias” menu type when setting up new menu buttons that go to the same page but from a different menu—always! Getting in the practice of this will make it so much easier when building new sites, or redoing your site in the future.

In the future, I will cover 3rd party SEF components, more specifically AceSEF & sh404SEF, which both have their pros and cons, and how they can be of help in terms of your URL rewriting & SEO metadata (title tags, meta data, rel=canonical, etc.)

Regal Creative is a web design & SEO firm in Milwaukee that develops heavily in Joomla!. If you are in need of content management capabilities with your website, are looking to build a website that has features such as a blog, calendar, business directory, membership / user management capabilities, photo galleries, news distribution, and more; get in contact with us to let us know; we’d love to submit a proposal for your project!

Get Some Link Love: 5 Quick Link Building Ideas to Help Your Website

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Kyle

In today’s search landscape, links account for approximately 70% of a website’s ability to rank within the search engines for any given keyword or phrase. This is extremely important to know and understand, as it will probably directly affect the SEO strategies and efforts you put forth for your company, whether you work internally or are hiring a SEO consultant.

And while it is all good and gravy to know that links will account for much of your ability to rank, link building can also be one of the most difficult tasks for SEO consultants and website owners alike.

For that reason, today I’m going to provide to you five quick link building ideas that you can act upon to jumpstart your efforts. Please note though, that these come without warranty for ease of implementation & effectiveness. They also may be difficult to apply, or may be non-applicable to you and your website based on the focus / industry of your website / business.

Okay, now for the good stuff:

Start a Blog
While this effort will really only be effective if you are a fairly good writer and can regularly maintain it, it is still one of the greatest link building tools available to you. With a blog, you can create a level of engagement that may not be possible through any other part of your website or business, and coupled with social media integration, this could be a very powerful marketing mechanism. Additionally, the consistent generation of new content through blog posts & blog post comments is like candy to Google. Do your keyword research, write beneficial content for your users and the links and subsequent rankings will follow.- Write a “101″, “5 ways to”, “10 best” type of blog post
- Create an extensive resource list for your visitors
- Flatter experts, industry leaders, etc. within your blog post (they may read it and link back to you in reference to the flattery)
- etc., etc., etc.
Create a Badge
While graphic-based badges are not necessarily the best option for providing the most link juice to your website (basic HTML anchor text is preferred), it is still a great and potentially engaging tool. Depending on your customers, clients, or site visitors, if developed well, this effort can gradually build your link profile and will typically be a link that will not be removed anytime soon.
Social Media Engagement
Okay, so you have a blog, you’ve been writing for a while and wait, you haven’t integrated into any social media channels? What are you thinking?! Social media is quickly becoming a powerful player, and it should not only be included in your marketing mix, but it should also interact with almost every other marketing tool in your bag.Put your blog posts on your Facebook pages’ wall, encourage your followers to retweet and share, tell your users to find you in Google and +1 the heck out of your listings (hopefully they’ll be able to find the post – tell them to copy and paste your Post title directly into Google search with quotes “This is the page title that I am wanting you to +1 the heck out of”), so on and so forth. While this may seem as a not so quick link building tactic, you can set up your blog & social media channels to all integrate with each other. It will reduce the amount of time you spend trying to get it out to the masses, and increase your ability to gain readership and links.
Build Relationships
The old process of finding websites, collecting contact information, and sending out an unsolicited email asking for a link because you think you’re worthy, just doesn’t really cut it anymore (still questioning whether it ever did to begin with). It’s extremely important in todays world to try to build relationships with those you are hoping to acquire a link from, and it kind of makes sense too.Think for a moment, would a random stranger give you $20 on the street just because you asked? The answer is, most likely not; this is the same for links as well. You need to learn the landscape you are in, learn about people’s personalities, what they like / dislike, and interact with them. As always, don’t come on too strong—just make it enough that you can build a steady, positive communication with them and then, in the end, use the tactic of choice to request the link.Opportunity will most likely try to sneak by you, so stay aware, be proactive, and be friendly.
Create Content That Helps People
Okay, so this may actually be more in line with #1 – “Start a Blog”, but honestly, content that is well written and helpful to people will garner more links, more easily, than any other strategy on this list.Even though knowledge is power and therefore money (because it seems in todays world, money drives power, at least in some circles, and so the logical deduction would be knolwedge = power = money), you can build a better reputation and a stronger link profile through offering your knowledge for free online.Take our blog, for example (Milwaukee Web Design & SEO Blog), we are offering our readers—clients, potential clients, web surfers, etc.— the opportunity to take advantage of our knowledge in our industry by reading our material, learning from it, and using it to further themselves in whichever way they can think of. This free knowledge is something we may typically bill for in a meeting, but we’re giving it away free! And what are you doing? Reading and consuming this knowledge, and hopefully, just maybe, using it to your advantage in the future (or realizing that we really know what we’re talking about, and therefore contact us to assist you in efforts related to our business).

Key Take Aways:

Build relationships with people online
Create free, helpful content that is related to your SEO goals in some form or fashion
Don’t be afraid to get creative (some caution is advised in how creative)

Hope you found some value in this post and enjoyed the read!

Regal Creative is a Milwaukee Web Design & Milwaukee SEO Company that works with clients to achieve an effective web presence through exemplary design, attain their business goals through detailed discovery, planning & execution, and improve their visibility within search engines through strategies and ideas, some of which are listed above.

To work with Regal Creative on your next web design / development project, or if you are looking to seriously improve upon your websites’ rank ability within search engines, then contact Regal Creative today!

SEO – Basics & Building Blocks (Part 1 of 4)

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Kyle

An Overview

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, has become one of those more commonly used, and somewhat coveted, phrases among individuals and companies alike.

In a nutshell, you could define SEO as the process of optimizing ones web site for both users (this should always be your focus) and search engines. The goal with SEO is ultimately to obtain higher rankings for search queries that your audience may be searching for in search engines.

While SEO is, in a sense, a smaller part of a larger picture (Internet Marketing), it is directly – and sometimes indirectly – connected to many other online marketing efforts, such as SEM / PPC and social media (a medium that is actually becoming tightly integrated with SEO processes & tactics – which we’ll discuss at another time).

A History

Back in the late 1990′s / early 2000′s, it was realized that “stuffing” your on-page content and code snippets called “meta tags” with the keywords you wanted to be found in the search engines for, positively affected their search engine rankings. This, naturally, was taken advantage of and the search engines quickly started modifying the way they ranked websites, making it more difficult to skew the results.

Today

There are now believed to be over 200 ranking signals that factor into how a website ranks. The majority of these factors involve the link profile of a website, which is comprised of what are called “inbound links” or “external links”. There are also on-site / on-page factors, and more recently, it appears as though the search engines are pulling data from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and using those as factors as well.

The SEO landscape is constantly changing, which means that you must continue your efforts in SEO constantly as well.

Regal Creative works with businesses and organizations to help improve their website visibility within search engines via customized SEO strategies. To work with Regal Creative on your Search Engine Optimization strategies, send us a Request for Quote!