Joomla has thousands of plugins, extentions,modules which helps to run a Joomla website easily. To optimize SEO for website in Joomla these are the best 5 plugins one can use:

# Joomap – One of the first and most important things you can do when building your site is to make sure to create a sitemap and submit it to all the major search engines. The extension shows all the menu structure, content categories and sections and can also create a Google Sitemap list.

# Joomla SEO/SEF Component - The Joomla SEO/SEF Component mainly makes your urls more search engine friendly. Instead of your urls being a mixture of numbers and letters, it allows for more understandable urls.

# SEOSimple - SEOSimple is one of the most used SEO extensions by Joomla users. On the front page, you can choose whether to use automated meta data based on what displays on the page or manually insert meta data. Other features include the ability to customize the meta data for each page.

# J!Redirect301 - This extension works just as it sounds. The plugin redirects your domains to one domain so that only one version of your site is indexed.

# JoomSEO - JoomSEO has a ton of different features, but most notably, it dynamically makes the content more search engine friendly.

Reputation Management theory is getting quite popular nowadays. We all know more or less the basics of that. But as far as managing Search Engines are concerned these are some few concepts.

#Brand value

#Contested name space

#Engagement

#Hostile entity

#Hostile environment

#Name space

#Result flipping

#Shared name space

Michael (Director of Search Strategies at Visible Technologies, Inc.) has a great post on that, you can read it HERE.

While setting Goal settings for Google Analytics we should be very clear on all the objectives we want to achieve for tracking. As analytics does not let us track more than four goals, we need to set a duplicate profile for every goal we need to track.

The important goals we must track are Track Comments, Social Bookmarking Actions,Catalogue Request,Newsletter Subscriptions, New Account Openings, File Download, Feed Subscriptions, Call Back Requests, Leads & Sales.

Read this great article for more on this

We all use some kind of analytics tools like Google Analytics, StatCounter or any kind of similar tools to measure page views, traffic sources, visitor locations & a whole bunch of information. But sometimes we need some more info than what these analytics provide. In these cases we can use visualization tools since they apply variety of methods to show you where users are clicking on the individual pages of your Web site to help you make design adjustments that emphasize the right links and content.

These are best Web Traffic Visualization Tools to redesign site layout for more traffic & better conversions.

clickdensity – Heat maps with real-time visitor data to help you optimize your link and ad placement and enhance your site’s stickiness.

nextSTAT – Complete analytics package that includes graphical visitor detail path reports.

ClickTale – Watch movies of what your visitors do while on your site, view heatmaps and every interaction that a visitor has on your site including hovers, hesitations, and even which form fields are causing visitors to leave.

ClickHeat – A free click heatmap generator.

ClickTracks – Enterprise analytics software, shows visitor navigation directly on your site’s pages.

Crazy Egg – Provides visual “Heat Maps” to show where your visitors are clicking.

Intellitracker – Enterprise web analytics software including recently released IntelliMaps feature for visualizing user activity.

It’s quite some time I am using Google Adwords for my own sites & client sites. Goofing up with billing is a common issue with Google but I have got into a habit of ignoring it.

But from yesterday what I am experiencing is quite a horror story with Google Adwords. My client’s ads have not been running on Google Adwords for more than a day now. This is because the Adwords system says that we have not made our payment. But the actual story is: In India, the Reserve Bank of India had introduced a rule that all credit card transactions made online need a PIN. We got that done, and Google sent us a form which was supposed to take care of all this from their end. We signed the form and sent it to Google Hyderabad, India. I checked out with some friends & they are also experiencing same kind of issues with Google.

On August 7, we got a message from Google that our Adwords payment could not be processed, and that our ads will be stopped if we do not make the payment quickly. We contacted our account representative regarding this, and he told us that it is a technical error and to be ignored. Yesterday, we got a message that our ads are not running. Adwords being a pretty sizable mode of traffic for us, we immediately mailed our account representative. But we got no reply from him for almost 6 hours. We decided to call up Google’s India offices so that we could have our ads running as soon as possible.

Google has 4 offices in India – Gurgaon, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. We called up each of them, only to be told that everyone had gone home (at 11 in the night, which is not so late if you are working in a company which intends to change the world). I then realized I was talking to the security guards at the offices who obviously had no idea of what their bosses had done wrong. They gave me an email address and asked me to direct my problems there. And an auto-responder got back to me: This email address is no longer in use. And it gave me no other way to get in touch with an executive.

So I decided to call up Google’s US offices. After 2 minutes of pressing numbers to get through to a support executive and then waiting for another 2 minutes for someone to pick up, I was finally asked to leave my message in the voice mailbox. Obviously, I was in no mood to leave a message and then wait for someone to call me back. So I mailed my account representative again. Five hours into the working hours of the next day (which happens to be today) and I got no reply from them. I again called up their India offices, this time during working hours only to be told that the only support that they offer is through email. So 24 hours have gone since our ads stopped running and there is no information that I have got from Google.

Things I got to know from the entire episode:

1. How can a company like Google not offer phone support for something that generates over 95% of all its revenues?

2. Google manages search for the entire world, but they can’t manage their internal communications itself.

3. Google knows that the world cannot do without it, or will take a very long time to get ungoogled. So…

I think Google takes customers for granted becoz  it has a monopoly in online advertising & turning out to be a bigger evil than Microsoft.

This has been discussed many times in blogs, but as I was looking for image optimizaing for a blog so thought of sharing the ideas again.  If your site’s content is based on image search or your site has quite a number of images, you need to do follow some steps so that Google indexes your images in Google Image Search .

## Enable enhanced image search in google sitemasters tools. Find it under Diagnostics / Tools / Enhanced Image Search.

##Give names to images which makes sense. pic1.jpg is not the correct day. hotballons.jpg is way better.

##The alt tag should be used for a short description such as alt=”ballon” as Google uses it to index the images as well. It can be empty if the image is used purely for design purposes.

##Try to upload images as big as possible. Link big size images to the previews used on your site. The bigger the image the more priority is gets.

You can check which images are indexed on your site with this search: http://images.google.com/images?q=site:yoursitename.com

Finally you need to be little patient with this as it may take upto 6 months to index in google.

When you are running international campaigns on Googlle you need to know how the ads are appearing  in another country. For this we need to manually change the country code in the browser adding the GL location code of the country. But there’s a nice plugin called the Google Global Firefox extension.for FireFox that allows you to see how Google results pages (SERP) look in other countries. Check this out as it is really a nice plugin & you can also configure the countries as per

The term ‘linkbait’ is a process or tool for websites designed to “lure” or generate incoming links to a particular site. It is there for the purpose of attracting users to a particular site or post.

Link baiting also hels in search engines, as a lot of search engines look at how many websites link back to yours, their quality, and measure your site’s value through these links. One very good example of it is SEOMoz’s Web2.0 Awards, which got more than 100,000 links.

# Blogger  Andy Hagan’ s  guide Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and SMM is one of the most popular one.

# Wiep’s Guide Link Baiting: Which Hook Attracts the Right Fish? which tells you to apply what kind of link bait to apply.

# Patrick Altof’s Linkbaiting: Beginners Guide to Linkbait, is very popular as he managed 50000 links in just 11 months .

# Darren Rowse of Problogger.net also has a post on 20 Linkbaiting Techniques, which is meant to help you in your link baiting campaign which is a must read.

# Jim Karter’s 10 Tips for Link Baiting, is another link baiting guide which explains linkbaiting in easy ways.

# Jim Westergren also have a nice post at  Jim Westergren on Link Bait.

# SEJ’s Link Baiting & Effective Link Building, guide is also a must read for all.

# For niches like real estate business 21 Link Bait Ideas for Realtors, by Andy Beal is a must read.

# Todd Malicoat, one of the top SEOs in the industry has nice tips at The Link Baiting Playbook: Hooks Revisited, which is a must read for everyone.

# Also read John Chow’s guide  The Simple 3 Step Of Link Baiting, which is very simple to understand.

One of the better way of building backlinks to your website is by making press releases. It normally means writing text containing good keywords & making an announcement related to a website or the products your company sells. You submit your text to a press release site like and you get a whole page dedicated to your release with a link back to your site.
You can say submitting press releases in some ways similar to article writing.

The pros of press releases over article submissions are that it’s easy to write a press release than an article as you can simply write about events/news happening on a website or the launch of a new product. Another advantage is Press releases can often be shorter (300 words or so) compared to an article.

Submission to press release sites in most cases prove successful. Press releases will be linked from the press release site’s homepage and will be indexed very quickly. Often the homepage of these sites have high PR 6-7 – and your article will mostly do pretty well in SERPs for the day or so that the article remains linked on the homepage. It also helps in improving your media relations as you can send your press releases via email to the journalists and users i your market segment.

These are 2 popular distribution services for electronic press releases, but they are paid.

# PRWeb

# PRLeap

But there are also a lots of Free Release sites, You can check out the list of  some Free Press Release Sites .

These are list of the ways websites can link or refer your site apart from direct hrefs that may not be found by using usual link commands, but can be found by SE’s like Google. This can also effect in your SE rankings to some extent.

# another site links to your graphics ( img src=http://www.searchengineworld.com/gfx/logo.png )
# a site links to your javascript files
# a site links to your css files?
# rss feeds and other xml feeds that people can link to without notice or referrals necc being generated.
# links in email that some se’s can read (yahoo mail, hotmail, Gmail)
# links marked with noindex
# links marked with nofollow
# raw urls within javascript or js comments
# raw urls within css or in css comments
# urls within meta data of graphics and video files.
# urls within html comments.
# urls within the head section, meta data of a html page, or alternate html entities (alt, name, id, etc).
# links or pages that maybe surfed while visitor has page rank engaged on the toolbar.
# the target of a constructed, obfuscated, or encrypted js url (hidden until executed)
# links behind pay walls that Google can spider via webmaster tools
# Domains that have been 301?d with links.
# Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
# non href’ed url’s. (raw url on page http://www.techcrunch.com)
# Links in any documents other than web pages e.g. .doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.
# blocking a page in robots.txt should make it blocked from bots, but they still spider it.
# Domain registrations/Whois and DNS data
# Links in form data.
# Links in other Google produced software (gadgets, widgets)
# NonTraditional pages (irc, twitter, UseNet, Yahoo, or Google Groups.
# Google Adwords.