What can i do to let google know we are a lifestyle magazine

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi my site http://www.in2town.co.uk/ is a lifestyle magazine and before we changed templates and changed the joomla language from 1.0 to 1.5 our lifestyle magazine was getting around 10,000 visitors a day and we were number one in google for the search term lifestyle magazine.

In the past few months we have been number five for the search term lifestyle magazine and now since yesterday we have dropped to ten.

I have a serious problem that being a online lifestyle magazine i do not have the luxury to have lots of text telling people it is a lifestyle magazine and google. What i mean is, if this was a website about benidorm then you would have an introduction about benidorm so google would understand what the site is about.

What i would like help on, is to get back to the top and know where i can put a nice introduction which does not look out of place and what i can do to get back to the top under the search term lifestyle magazine.

any help would be great

[RobertFisher]

On the picture of Demi Moore, you could have: Demi Moore, picture with article on breakup with Ashton Kucher. Is she seeing someone else?

That is fine. Just don't put a bunch of keywords in here.

Best

[RobertFisher]

Off the top of my head I cannot think of a plug in that will categorize a name like King Kong and allow you to have a small icon with more on King Kong. Then when you mouse over, there would be 4 or 5 links to recent articles, etc. That would be a good way to do what you are thinking of.

If you have the seomoz toolbar, use the links tool to find internal links. Open the page analyzer and look at the top right. You will see icons: first is magnifying glass then a highlighting pen. Click on the pen and you will see followed, no followed, internal and external. On any page, click on internal and see what shows up. That will help you. Then when done do same and click on no highlighting. All is gone.

Hope this helps,

[RobertFisher]

Diane, 
That is not a component we use, but I will try to be of assistance. I looked it up and read about it, but the info on SEO is entirely unclear on the demo. Have you looked at Global Configuration in your control panel? Could you send me a screen shot?

If you would prefer to PM me that is fine.

[RobertFisher]

anything with should be empty. You do not need keyword meta tags in SEO today. (See my note below regarding all the coding)

For your meta description I am not sure who is telling you how to do this, but it is simple with a CMS like Joomla. You should have a place to put the meta description in without any need for coding. If you will use your SEOmoz tool bar and click on analyze page (use Firefox as Chrome picks up the twitter button), you will see that for this page, the following meta description is being sent out (bold is mine):

**  Soap Gossip.  Coronation Street fans will be shocked after evil Frank is found not guilty of raping Carla. The evil factory boss has his...**

Instead simply have Soap Gossip: Coronation Street.....Note:  after Carla. You can put something that is a call to action instead of evil boss line.... eg. Carla. Read the latest here at in2Town.co.UK!

As to the second url for the Female First: You should do better than them; here is what I would do with their meta description:

Instead of: Katy Perry is being comforted by a hunky dancer following her split from Russell Brand.

I would have: Is Katy Perry being comforted by a certain hunky dancer?? Read about Katy after the split from Russell Brand.

Also, I failed to mention earlier that the favicon on your site is a joomla favicon. Download a favicon plug in and have one that works for your site. (A lot of people are using the Joomla one.....even Joomla

I will answer the others shortly.

Best

[ClaireH-184886]

question 5

Alt. Text is not a place to play games with hidden advertising. Use alt text to describe an image as if you were describing it to a person who cannot see it. You have roughly 35 images on page one. The alt. text is for vacations, plus size dresses, etc. of which none reflects any of the images. Don't play keyword and SEO games if you want to succeed today.

Thank you for this. i have never really understood the importance of alt text in the images. a lot of the times i have left it blank or just used the image name from my computer, so what i will do now is tackle this now i know it is important

[ClaireH-184886]

Question 4

Also, you have pages with literally hundreds of internal links which if of no use to you. You need to keep them under 100. You have listed every city or township in the UK in the footer and it looks spammy and does not serve a purpose in SEO.

I will need to look into this as the only internal links i should have is by trying to link pages together. so for example what i have read is to have linking going through your site so google and people can find things. I read a good article about <cite>en.wikipedia.org and how they use internal linking.</cite>

The article said they were a great example of how to link pages together and they only thing i have done at the moment is to try and link different sections, although i was hoping to spend a few weeks going through the site and linking articles. what i mean by this is, names in the articles i will be linking them to articles that the person appears in, unless you feel this is a bad idea.

[ClaireH-184886]

question three

Ok, sorry but part two is the duplicate content. I know that gossip mags pull from one another, but with the changes the last year at Google, you may need to stop if you want to rank. I took random pages and articles and found you and a lot of others using the same first sentence or first two sentences. If you want it to be fresher than the others and have the option to rank higher, you may want to invest in a good copy writer.

I write my own content, but a problem maybe that i promote it around the net, so for example  i use blogs etc to promote the first paragraph.

There should be none of my content where it is duplicate but if you can give me examples so i can look into then that would be great. 98% of the articles i write myself, we do from time to time have companies who like to send us articles which they claim are fresh and never been used.

again this help you are giving me is exactly what i need and i thank you for this

[ClaireH-184886]

Second question

When we set up sites with Joomla as CMS, we set the meta description only on the article (page) level. There are many SEO plugins for Joomla and depending on which you are using, there could be additional settings there. Make sure you have all for setting at page level.

Can you let me know how i do this. i am using the component sh404sef

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi robert, first of all i want to say a big wow and a big thank you, this is the advice and help i have been looking for, for such a long time. I want to break things up so i can understand them and tackle them and ask questions, if this is ok.

First of all the following which you have said:

Beyond that update, you should know that each article (page) needs its own meta description. This is NOT a place for saying lifestyle magazine over and over and should be limited to about 155 characters. When creating a new page, you want to insure a quality meta description is there: Think what would you want to read on the SERPs that would make you want to go to this page? If I look at yours, where it is not Joomla, it appears someone is trying to say Lifestyle Magazine over and over which is not a good meta description. NOTE: The meta description does not influence SEO with the exception of any influence that CTR has. CTR - click through rate -  is influenced by the meta description. Look at what some of your top competitors have and you will see why someone would click on them.

I am going through the site:www.in2town.co.uk and tackling anything that does not give out the right description. i was not aware of this so many thanks.

With reference to the meta tags and description, what i have been using is sh404sef to give the page meta tags and user friendly url's, do you feel that i should be going through all my content and add the meta tags myself or just the meta description?

here is the line for my meta description under my source code for the following page http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/coronation-street-update/coronation-street-evil-frank-found-not-guilty-of-rape

<title>Coronation Street Evil Frank Found Not Guilty Of Rape</title>

so i am not sure if you feel i need to alter this. here is the same from female first which is a very good site

there page is http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/celebrity/Katy+Perry-226057.html

<title>Katy Perry comforted by dancer - Female First</title><meta<br>name="description" content="Katy Perry is being comforted by a hunky dancer following her split from Russell Brand." >

any advice and comments on this would be great.</meta<br>

[RobertFisher]

Diane,

I am going to try and help and hopefully some other mozzers will join in as there is a bit you need to deal with. First and foremost is that Joomla is a CMS that often causes problems with Meta Descriptions. Probably the most overused duplicate meta description on the web today is Joomla! - the dynamic portal engine and content management system. If you do a site:in2town.co.uk and look at the pages that are returned, you are going to immediately see two big issues in terms of those who are searching for lifestyle or gossip info: The Joomla! issue and the famous "lorem ipsum" issue. These are the pages where you have a page that has no content that should not be showing up and, unfortunately, are.

Since these are structural we will deal with them first: For the Joomla meta description: It is likely that you are set with the meta description being set globally (site wide) and in the article. If so, and if you do not set it in the article you will get the Joomla! meta description. I thought there was an issue with version 1.5 and found something on this: http://antezeta.com/news/joomla-seo-useless-meta-tags (look at mets descript.) If you update to version 1.6 this may help you.

Beyond that update, you should know that each article (page) needs its own meta description. This is NOT a place for saying lifestyle magazine over and over and should be limited to about 155 characters. When creating a new page, you want to insure a quality meta description is there: Think what would you want to read on the SERPs that would make you want to go to this page? If I look at yours, where it is not Joomla, it appears someone is trying to say Lifestyle Magazine over and over which is not a good meta description. NOTE: The meta description does not influence SEO with the exception of any influence that CTR has. CTR - click through rate -  is influenced by the meta description. Look at what some of your top competitors have and you will see why someone would click on them.

When we set up sites with Joomla as CMS, we set the meta description only on the article (page) level. There are many SEO plugins for Joomla and depending on which you are using, there could be additional settings there. Make sure you have all for setting at page level.

The meta description is what a searcher sees when they put in the term lifestyle magazine. As it is yours is not good and you are at number 10 currently on Google.co.uk on non personalized search. Your click through rate may be part of the reason why.

For the Lorem Ipsum, have your webmaster remove the template pages that are empty or sample pages. Have him do a site:url to find them.

Ok, sorry but part two is the duplicate content. I know that gossip mags pull from one another, but with the changes the last year at Google, you may need to stop if you want to rank. I took random pages and articles and found you and a lot of others using the same first sentence or first two sentences. If you want it to be fresher than the others and have the option to rank higher, you may want to invest in a good copy writer.

Also, you have pages with literally hundreds of internal links which if of no use to you. You need to keep them under 100. You have listed every city or township in the UK in the footer and it looks spammy and does not serve a purpose in SEO.

Alt. Text is not a place to play games with hidden advertising. Use alt text to describe an image as if you were describing it to a person who cannot see it. You have roughly 35 images on page one. The alt. text is for vacations, plus size dresses, etc. of which none reflects any of the images. Don't play keyword and SEO games if you want to succeed today.

Lastly, some of the best advice ever given (look at what the Oracles and Gurus, etc. say) on this site is about the quality of the content on a site/page. Why be just any lifestyle magazine? Be THE lifestyle magazine by not following the crowd. Develop your own content, minimize the ads but make a profit. Make it so advertisers want to buy from you because you have the most traffic, because you have the cleanest lifestyle mag with the best content.

I did not mean to devote this much time, but it is an interesting study in what is happening today with the changes at Google. Status Quo is no longer working.

I sincerely wish you the very best and hope you rank number one on page one forever.

Edit: added lorem ipsum advice.

[ClaireH-184886]

hi i have a site map in all of these. the site is updated many times a day, so my problem is do i put an introduction on the site and if so where. i do not want the site to look bad just so i can get back at the top of google

[viniyog]

Hi Diane,

Why don't you submit xml site map of you site in Google Webmaster tool & Bing Webmaster tool.

That way you site will start getting indexed and you can  get to know other stuff like crawl errors as well.

Hope this will be useful !

Cheers

Ankit