Introduction - Mambo SEO

This article attempts to summarise the steps you should take if you run a Mambo 4.5 web site, in order to optimise your site for Search Engines.

We use this web site as an example of the optimisation  process, and will update this article with the results of our activities.

Why this site?

Practically speaking, it is the one we are working on, so we are not really in a position to choose another!

We do think though that it is a good example, our last web site statistics were that we were getting less than 0.5% of our traffic via Search Engines! In a world where 85% of traffic is meant to come via Search Engines, it is hard to be in a worse position that that.

If your site is so bad, what can you teach us?

That's a fair question, but the point is that our site "was" so bad, not that our site "is" bad.

We have spent a month studying the issues involved in optimising a site and applying them.

We have read articles like this one, delved into forums, studied everything google make public about their methods, tried various product trials.

Our conclusion is that there is no magic secret to optimisation that will guarantee your Search Engine position, but there are a large number of techniques to apply and pitfalls to avoid.

1) Content is King

Let's get the main point out of the way first. Search Engine Spiders may crawl along on 8 legs, but they aspire to humanity. They really want to see your web pages as a human and not Arachnid.

You must, absolutely must, have content that is attractive to human visitors. You must also have quite a lot of it. Each page on your web site assuming it gets indexed by a Search Engine Spider, is another chance for someone to see your site crop up in a set of search results.

Having got your content, we think there is much to be gained by boosting/multiplying the apparent content for the benefit of Search Engine Spiders.

marsjupiter used to have a lot of content for our non commercial distrbuted computing work, but really just the bare minimum for our commercial products. We have beefed up the commercial content and started added resources like this one! that are quite related to our commercial products. We have also used blogs and ordinary sections to maximise the appearance of content to search engine spiders.

2) Titles are tops

The title of your pages, between <title></title> in the page source and in the title bar of your browser is a fundamental factor in page ranking. Unfortunately with the default Mambo release, the title is static across all your pages. We think this is the most disastrous problem in the Mambo portal.

It is easily solved with dynamic page titles.

If you do nothing else, do this!

The marsjupiter site suffered this problem, we fixed it. At this point though our Search Results do not by and large show this. You have to be patient for the Search Engines to update.

3) Headers are Hip

Search Engine spiders also take note of <h1></h1> style headers on a page as indicative of main content. Normally you would not use <h1></h1> in Mambo as they will display cosmetically over large. But this does not need to be the case. This article explains further. 

We have done this tweak rather late in the day, but we are revising article to use <h1></h1> tags.

4) Meta Description and keyword tags

You can still find a lot of article and products on keyword optimisation, but the more dominating Search Engine Google, does not use keyword tags, and they have been so abused by spammers, the importance of them has decreased in general. But regardless of this, it cannot do much harm to consistently use them in your pages.

Description tags can tell a Search Engine what to display as a result for your page. Your chosen text must be better than something random from a search engine, probably the first pieces of text on the page. Google can intelligently choose which part of your page to display according to the search which may make the description tag redundant for google.

At marsjupiter we have tweaked our keywords, and tried to add separate keywords and descriptions for each page.