I was just about to do some SEO stuff on my site (I am becoming a dedicated blogger now), when I realized that I seriously don’t know what search engine optimization is. There is too much snake oil being sold out there in the name of the best SEO tactics. I have bought quite a number of SEO secrets e-books but it seems I never read them, don’t understand English, or just did not follow up on all those little SEO gems.

I tried to figure out how many of these SEO tips I could handle in a day and I discovered that God might have made a mistake coming up with 24 hours where I had to eat, sleep, go to work and do a little tweaking of my SEO. There is no time for this SEO thing.

Who honestly has enough time in a day to search for keywords, write for keywords, take care of keyword density , track the keyword performance, update keywords, check meta tags, put h3 headers etc. In fact I don’t even have enough space on this article to write about all the tips and tricks on SEO that are sold. Someone somewhere is trying to pull the wool over my head.

So I decided to spend 30 minutes and learn about SEO backwards. I went to a few top sites like daddy Google, CNN and Facebook and see what they do. Ah surprise surprise.

Google doesn’t even have a description of their site. Face book has a long description, no keywords . CNN has just a bunch of meta descriptions, a lot of keywords and a snap shot of the first paragraph. So why have I been wasting so much time on the Secret SEO Tactics that don’t exist?

Looking at my site’s meta was a shocker. I have been wasting time on things that don’t matter and leaving the most obvious things go to waste. My blog SEO was pathetic. It is no wonder that I seem to like Joomla more than WordPress. There are too many plugins for me to use on WordPress. However, I managed to shorten the list .

1. WordPress SEO tools

I don’t wish to spend too much time with WordPress but I just installed the WordPress all in one SEO plugin. Made a huge difference.

I know there’s more for WordPress but life is too short for me to learn everything in WordPress and Joomla too.

2. Joomla SEO Tools

There is a lot of confusion out there about Joomla SEO. It might not be the best looking SEO for a CMS but it is good enough. My experience has been to keep it short and simple. Adding unnecessary components just slows down your web site.

a) Joom SEO

The first thing I ever do on a Joomla site is install the Joom SEO plugin. There is no better SEO component or plugin for Joomla. It is free and it does it’s work to perfection. Each and every article on your site will look exactly like a CNN page. You can control the number of keywords, the position of your headers, the quantity of keywords in your key word structures.

For the new Joomla 1.5 series, I am not even using another component for SEO in Joomla. It is automated and you never have to read another SEO e-book again in your life.

b) Missing Metadata Module

For some sites, there are times you will forget to add meta data to your articles.

This module will help you find those pages on your Joomla site and you can also edit the meta data to suit your needs.You will need the missing metadata module especially if you are a Joomla developer.

c) Alias For PageTitle for Joomla

The alias for pagetitle plugin is for the purist in SEO tactics. I only use it on one site I really love as I hate manual labor. However, if you wish to change the page title from the article title to very targeted keywords, then this is your daddy. It’s easy to use and I can assure you, it works like a charm.

I don’t bother with other Joomla components as they are just a waste of time and will sooner or later conflict with your other Joomla components and life is too short for you to be worrying about SEO everyday.

That is all I do for SEO. The rest I think is just a waste of time and energy. However, if you ask me between Joomla and WordPress, I would have said 3 months ago that WordPress was better. However, times are changing very fast in Joomla .

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