Can a Joomla template ruin a sites on-page seo?

[steve82]

Have been looking into a potential clients site that performs really badly, when I took a look in 'googlebot view' I see that every on page link appears-

[visit camp26.biz] clients link title as expected

insures against a negative affect. But having that as the first two words of every link title/anchor in the eyes of Google would seem to be something to be concerned about?

Have tried searching for answers to this online but template providers are so prevelant everywhere I can't find any decent information on this issue.

If anyone can throw some light on this for me it will be much appreciated : )

[PatioLifeStyle]

I would also suggest buying Artisteer, which is an inexpensive template creator that is not only amazingly simple, but fun to use as well. Then you can create your own themes for multiple platforms.

[PatioLifeStyle]

I would also suggest buying Artisteer, which is an inexpensive template creator that is not only amazingly simple, but fun to use as well.

[Aeronet]

This one works fine, thanks !

[steve82]

That's strange, I don't see any problem - I wonder if you found one of the other domains that hasn't been re-directed to the new site? relevanceweb dot com should work fine.

[Aeronet]

Hi Steve,

Nope, I didn't know them !

I tried to check their website but it was unavailable, I got the email from google's cache, I'll contact them today, thanks for the info.

[Aeronet]

Hi Steven,

Glad you could work it out

[SteveHoney65]

Just a further thought - I hadn't noticed until now you were based in France. Without sounding to 'spammy' I hope can I suggest you check out the company I worked for previously - Relevance Web Marketing (if you were not already aware of them). They are also based in France but English run, and do a lot of multi-lingual projects for clients. I know they are always interested in hearing from other companies with some 'overlap' in their business. Link building for French versions of sites has been a difficult in the past. I think it would be worth getting in contact with them to have a chat about where you could potentially help each other with future projects as am sure there are areas where you would compliment each other well.

Just an idea and I hope this isn't seen as trolling/spamming for business - I have no financial link to them and am only suggesting something which I believe could be beneficial to both parties.

[blacey]

Sadly even though there are good sites offering free or paid templates I find myself spending hours going through the template code and re-writing most of it because it lacks any real quality.

I'd just like to say that I don't buy themes a very often; I think in my whole web development career I've only bought 1 or 2 themes and that was simply to get used to how themes work using a new framework like Zend or Joomla 1.6.

Where possible I would always advocate writing your own themes, but I fully understand that not everyone can do this, that's why us website developers exist.

I would also say that comments or feedback from others who have used a theme can be misleading. If you don't understand code and you use the theme purely from a "what you see is what you get" perspective then chances are the theme will have a lot of good reviews but the code itself might be a dogs dinner.

I'd like to see more theme websites showing the structure of the theme files and maybe a sneak preview into 2 or 3 files that make up the theme so we get a feel for how well coded the template is, but the chances of that happening are pretty slim.

[steve82]

Hi Aeronet,

Just wanted to confirm to anyone else coming across this thread that this was exactly the issue and was simple to resolve in Joomla as described.

It took some time to get access to the site so was in the dark until I could confirm. Knowing this I looked at a few of the companies other sites and found similar issues in other free templates that had been used. From my limited experience it looks like sneaking links into image alts in j-query scrollers and slideshows is not un-common. Though not difficult to find and rectify if you are looking can easily sneak under the radar.

Thanks again for the help : )

[blacey]

Glad me and Aeronet could be of assistance. I'll keep checking in on this thread and help as and when I can.

Going back to Google Analytics Annotations, I find them super useful. For one site, their web host kept having downtime on their servers and this was a significant issue to track as it affected the visits to the site and therefore the averages.

If nothing else I can look back at the statistics in a year's time and be able to recall everything that happened in the site's history to date along with the actual statistics.

Here is a quick video about annotations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfPx4Sus_CY

I would suggest setting the annotations as private, so only you can see the notes.

[steve82]

Absolutely agree Ben, of course just because something doesn't carry the weight it did doesn't mean it should be ignored. I would say in a similar fashion to meta description while H2's and the like aren't big for ranking they exist originally to improve user experience - a well structured page is easy to navigate and works for users.

I like the outline view tactic, build it in a way that is good for the user and the engines are probably going to like it too. Never really looked into annotations in analytics but sounds like a good tip too.

And yes the cardinal sin on their sites is text as images. The very worst is the NAP (name, address, phone). I do a lot of work on local/maps seo and this is a shocker in terms of localised search, and now the with the 'Venice' update local is an ever bigger factor. If you've not read up on venice I recommend it.

Thanks again and as I've said in the response below I will report back once I've seen the back end with their developer.

[steve82]

Thanks again Aeronet : )

That really helps me - obviously image alts always need to be set to the best possible for SEO. As I say, I am just looking from the outside and haven't talked at all with the developer yet. But will be great to point out specifics to the website owner at the first proper meeting. Only thing I'm slightly confused by is the rest of the alt's are written in a way that suggests SEO was considered - I'm going to guess that the adding of the "visit camp26.biz" prefix is hidden in the Joomla interface and happens at publishing. I will hopefully be able to sit down with the developer and identify exactly what's happening. When I have an answer I will update here. Think this will make a nice little informative blog post in the future as I've found it's not a subject that there's readily available information on. Will be sure to mention you both and share for you to re-produce if I do.

Thank you both.

[blacey]

I always look at my pages in Outline View using the WAVE toolbar and I look at all my page headings and see if I can understand what the page (or article) is about based purely on the headings.

This forces me to make sure my headings are descriptive and targeted for the page/post being written.

I would say that singularly the

doesn't have as much weight as it used to but as we all know SEO is a combination of everything. Google may rank you down for links as images (as an example) but it may see you've made good use of headings so the penalty in terms on on-page SEO balances out. Now I'm not saying that things like this should be ignored, I'm saying that every potential issue on the site should be addressed to give you the best possible standing with the search engines.

In some cases there may be things you can't easily change, which sometimes is the case, so I would concentrate on fixing the issues you can and make improvements whereever possible.

I find that if I make any on-page changes that I make an Annotation within Google Analytics. This helps me keep track of changes and I can see from the stats if its had much of a difference.

Issues:

Straight away on the homepage I can see duplicate h1 tags, 'Party bag fillers' and 'birthday parties'.

The sidebar modules need to be converted to text, because they are all images at the moment. I would suggest something similar to the followng:

Ordering Securely Online

Some text here describing the section to the user.

[Aeronet]

Hi Steven,

The [Visit camp26.biz] is coming from the alternative text on the scroller images.

You must have the option to put the alternative text of your choice in the Joomla admin.

[steve82]

Thanks for that Ben, the site is definitely suffering from text as images, low content volume etc like you say, it's definitely a poor template. In my opinion headings, certainly below h1, don't have the effect they used to on seo but the structure of the template isn't great regardless and I had recognised a number of the other issues you cover.

I'm still trying to get a little more clarity on exactly why when I look at the 'bot view the [ visit camp26.biz] pre-fix appears on every link. You mention hidden links originating in the index.php code or a site-wide module - little over my head! Would you mind taking a really quick look at www.partyman.co.uk and see if you can spot either of those things or any really obvious nastys?

Appreciate your help, that's a really informative and in-depth response, thanks.

[blacey]

Hi Steven,

Good question. Templates for Joomla don't necessarily ruin your on-page SEO efforts but let me explain things a little.

The basic principle to good on-page optimisation (that I know of) is that you have 1 occurance of a

tag (this is the primary / page heading) and everything else within the page should be either a h2, h3 or a h4. Some themes/tempaltes I've seen have had a duplication on the h1 tag, that has been hard coded into the theme.The order in which the headings are shown is also important. The h1 tag must appear first, then you can have any number of h2 tags followed by h3's etc.

Don't use hidden text or hidden links:
Check that the theme isn't using any hidden links in the theme (either hard-coded into index.php or included in a site-wide module). You can use firebug (Firefox) or press F12 in Chrome to inspect elements of your page and see what's happening in the generated source.

Some themes I've seen have neglected to include the meta decsription tag in the head of the theme, so check that's included so you can add page descriptions inside Joomla. I wouldn't worry about meta keywords as Google doesn't use these for a ranking factor, but if memory serves me right Joomla will spit out an empty keywords tag if nothing is entered. If this is the case I would suggest maybe adding a few keywords in as other search engines may use this to rank the site (and if its there its often better to have something as opposed to nothing in my opinion).

You'll want to make sure your images from the Media Manager are including the alt text when shown inside your theme. This not only helps your on-page optimisation (slightly) but its also helpful to screen readers to describe the content to disabled users.

Make sure the theme isn't using images for links (Graphic links). You want as much text on the page as possible so search engines can use it. With the use of Google Fonts and the Cufon JavaScript library its possible to have nice fonts on your site in a user friendly manner and thus avoiding graphic links. Sometimes graphic links are acceptable but all your read more links should be text in the theme.

I would say that the rest of the on-page optimisation comes from the actual page content. I would suggest you optimise a page for two or three keywords per page and bold any keywords inside the content. Make sure you have keywords in your headings as well, as google loves heading/keyword combinations.

Also make sure you don't stuff your page title with keywords, having a few relevant keywords is good but make sure you stick to 70 characters for the title. Any more and google will append '...' to the end of the title in its Search engine results page.

One thing to bear in mind is that you're relying on the technical knowledge of the developer of the theme. I would recommend using the WAVE toolbar for Firefox as this will allow you to have an outline of the page (see heading structure) this will give you a good start to on-page optimisation from a heading point of view. I would suggest that any sidebar/module titles in Joomla are changed from either a

/

intomodule title. I say this because its not technically part of the page content, and you don't want Google to attribute module heading text to the keywords for every page. The same goes for footer widgets.

Hope this helps.

[Aeronet]

Try using a clean Joomla template, by using "free" templates like this one you are at risk of malicious code hidden in the template.

Here even if it's not a real link but just a text mention of a website, it's not something you should be finding on every link of the site, a mention in the footer or in the credits section is enough in most case.

Make sure you download the template from a safe website (the autor website or a well known templates website).