Search Engine Ranking

The better the search engine optimized template is the better is the chance for having a good ranking in the search engines. A website that allows the search engines to read it easily would find success much more easily. Google ranks a website in terms of the duration of stay by a visitor to that website. Thus one way to make the website attractive to visitors is to have templates that are search engine optimized.

Joomla Template Elements

Joomla templates are search engine optimized and are thus more search engine friendly. They offer better visitors appeal by easy customization. The CSS template template_css.css (named styles.css in joomla 1.5) that defines the CSS styles in template design though not mandatory is a must for search engine optimization. The main template elements of Joomla with built in CSS style options are validation for W3C CSS and W3C XHTML 1.0, RSS Feed icon, Font changes for different text sizes, font colors, link colors and behaviors and width and background of page. The mandatory joomla templates are index.php that as the main template file defines the joomla structure and templatedetails.xml that defines the template parameters like name, type, etc. Other templates are templates_thumbnail.png and images directory.

W3C Validation

W3C validation reduces the loading time of the website thereby causing faster loading of web pages. This ensures that the code can be read quicker by search spiders and they can more easily find out the actual content on the web page.

CSS

Content in the web page has to find a place as close to the beginning of the page’s XHTML code as possible for getting higher ranking in search engines. However often the important content in the middle or side column tends to get lost in the crowd of XHTML outputs that are many in joomla. Here the CSS ensures that such contents make appearance at any location in the source if they are included within the wrapper. These contents can be placed after the main content. For this purpose a header container can be made in joomla and placed after the main content for non-important contents in the website.

Contents

Joomla content has three components- sections, categories and articles. In a webpage the top level of the content is the section, the sublevel of the section is the category and the actual webpage content is the article.

Login Page

Content can be added after installing Joomla 1.5. This page needs login information.

General Section Page

The menu for creation of section is: Content-> Section Manager. The New button is located in joomla at the top right menu. The New button is to be clicked for adding a new section. The name of the section is given at the next screen. Other fields in this step are optional. The Save button at the top right menu is then to be clicked for saving whatever has been done till now.

General Category Page

The category then has to be added to the section. The menu for creation of category is: Content-> Category Manager. The new category is then added by clicking the New button. Then like the earlier section, the name of the category is specified. The Save button at the top right menu is then to be clicked for saving whatever has been done till now.

‘About Us’ Page

The menu for this first page ‘About Us’ is: Content-> Article Manager. The location of the menu is the admin panel at the top. After clicking the New button, the changes to be made are: Title: About Us, Section and Category: General, and ‘Yes’ to be selected for frontpage so that it comes as the site’s first page. The other options would be kept undisturbed with default values. To insert the company logo in the ‘About Us’ page, the Image icon at the Editor menu is clicked. After giving details about the logo image in the popup window, Insert is clicked. Some text about the company and the business dealt with are then added to create the first page before saving it.

‘Our Services’ Page

The menu for this page is also: Content-> Article Manager. After clicking the New button, the same General Section and General Category have to be set for this page with text added without images. The page is then saved after editing.