Up and Running with Joomla, 2nd Edition

Introducing SEO

In today's online world, we would be remiss not to provide at least some information on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While there are many aspects to working with search engines, and far more than we can cover in this book, we can at least let you know the term/phrase SEO often is labeled to cover several core areas. These are:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): refers to optimizing a site for search engines and is reflective of the fact that a large amount of traffic either does or can originate from a search engine. Usually this refers to solid page meta data, descriptions, and structure, as well as linking, alt text for images, sitemaps, and keyword density among the most commonly implemented strategies.

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM): form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages. In short, when a site does not naturally (called "organic") show up near the top of search result pages, the alternative is to buy your way in through paid placement.

• Search Engine Friendly (SEF): refers to efforts placed around helping a site be more friendly for search engines, such as using readable URLs (e.g., http://www.example.com/sports/baseball.html versus http://www.example.com/page.php?899078uy8&id=90787), ensuring redirects for moved pages are correct (e.g., 301 versus 302), etc.

• Search Engine Results Page (SERP): the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The ...