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.

Currently, there has been some changes in the verification process in Webmaster Tools. One of the important change is that the blogs hosted on Blogger that haven’t been verified yet has to use meta tag verification method instead of the “one-click” integrated from the Blogger dashboard. The webmaster team is working ona automated verification approach for the Blogger hosted blogs in coming days, but till that time you need to follow the below given steps to verify Blogger blog:

In Webmaster Tools

# The first step is to click the “Add a site” button on the Webmaster Tools Home Page.

# Then enter the URL of the specific blog and click on the “continue” button to navigate to the Manage Verification page.

# You will then have to select the “Meta tag” verification method and then copy the meta tag.

In Blogger

Go to your blog and sign in.

Click the “Layout” link given on the blogger dashboard for the specific blog you want to verify.

Click “Edit HTML” link under “Layout” tab. This will enable you to edit the HTML for the blog’s template.

You will then have to paste the meta tag that was copied in the webmaster tools process immediately after the element within template HTML. And lastly, click on the “SAVE TEMPLATE” button.

In Webmaster Tools

Confirm the “Meta tag” is selected on the Manage Verification page and click on the “Verify” button.

Your blog is now verified sucessfully and you can start using the Webmaster Tools!

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

Most of the blogs nowdays built on wordpress and for better great search engine optimization (SEO), it is always advisable to use plugins for wordpress which are quite easy to install. These are some of the plugins to use, but there are lotsn lots more which can be used too!!

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular SEO plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title,meta tags, keywords, & to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in for any kind of SEO .  Though the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip off the “nofollow” command from the comments, and then you can also apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

SEO Friendly Images –This plugin is very useful for blogs with lots of pictures n graphics , it helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

Simple Tags – This plugin helps you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot of things.

SEO Title Tag – Tags ina blog are an important part of the site for making sure that search engines know where to place posts, and SEO Title Tag plugin focuses exactly on this.

Redirection – For any reason if you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, then you are at the risk of losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin helps you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you  have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

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.

Google Trends is another tool provided by Google other than popular ones like Adwords Keyword Tool or Word Tracker which can be used to research n compare search volume over a time extent. One can compare up to 5 keywords selecting different time frames and countries. This is a good way to check how a keyword is changing, like it’s on the rise, you may consider getting in on that keyword.

Google Trends Top 100 from Google updates every hour with the top 100 most popular searches over the last hour. It ranks them 1 to 100. When you click a link, it will take you to a page that shows a graph of the keyword, related blog posts, related news, related keywords, and the top SERP results. This is a great tool for people writing or blogging on current events and news.

Google trends can be cross compared with other tools to select & get a overall view on keywords & volume information.

Great pictures of the newly built Googleplex in New York. An insiders look to what it means to be googley ! Looks like a fun place to work. Some Inside Pics…

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