Setting up a Joomla Blog is not that difficult, you just need to be aware of some things before your start to crate your articles.
First thing your need to do is to crate a section that will hold all the categories of the topics you want to blog about. In my case that is a section called Joomla Blog....pretty cool he?
After that, create the categories for you blog section.
Start out with the basic topics you want to write about. For me it starts witj Joomla Blog setup, Joomla Blog components and Joomla Blog templates.
After those are completed, create a sperate menu for your Blog to hold the categories. Create the links to the categories and choose the blog layout so that you can easily give an overview of your articles.
Start writing your articles, but make sure you use the "More" tag after your article introduction. If possible create some small images that your can use per topic that you can incorporate in your intro. The picture size is up to you, but I use a 100 x 100 pixels on this website.
1) Change the robots.txt to permit search engines to read the images folder
When you install Joomla, by default it will setup a robots.txt file. The Robots.txt file sits in the root directory of the server and instructs search engine robots which files and folders they have permission to access. The standard robots.txt file that Joomla comes with correctly instructs robots that they cannot access or index folders like the administrator or temporary folders, however it also instructs them they cannot index any content in the images folder.
Because the images folder is the default location for all images in Joomla, the result of the inclusion is that the majority of sites built in Joomla don’t have any of their images indexed!
To solve this issue, simply edit the robots.txt file and remove the following line:
Disallow: /images/
2) Change the default location for images
If you have added images to the articles you write within Joomla, you probably have noticed that the default location for images is www.website.com/images/stories/. Personally I don’t like this, and it is not best practice in terms of image optimisation.
When evaluating the relevance of content on a website, search engine algorithms examine the directory and file names of the content on a site and ascribe priority to pages that are closer to the site root. In other words, when possible, try and keep content closer to the site root.
I recommend changing the default location of images from images/stories to just images/. You can do this in the Joomla Administrator backend by selecting: Site > Global Configuration > System > Media Settings and then changing the directory in the “Path to Image Folder” box.
Once you have made the change, when you add images to articles, the images will be automatically uploaded into the root images/ folder.
3) Use images on relevant page and use keyword rich file names, alt tags and title tags
Once you have changed robots.txt and the default location for images, you can now start optimising the individual images on your site to ensure they are included in the search engine index.
To optimise the image for a certain keyword or key phrase, you should ensure:
The image is included on a page which is relevant to the image (e.g. a photo of someone playing Golf in Mauritius on a page about Golf in Mauritius)
The filename of the image is the keyword or key phrase you are targeting and words are separated with a hyphen, for example: golf-in-mauritius.jpg
The alt and title tag of the image should also contain the keyword or key phrase, for example, “Golf in Mauritius”
The location of the image file names should be keyword rich to improve the overall keyword relevancy. This can be accomplished by inserting keywords in the URL when Appropriate e.g. travelbison.com/images/mauritius/golf-in-mauritius.jpg
This is what an optimised image tag would look like:
<img src="http://travelbison.com/images/mauritius/golf-in-mauritius.jpg" height="200" width="500" alt="Golf in Mauritius" title="Playing Golf in Mauritius" />
It does not matter if the Alt and Title tags are not exactly the same but closely related keywords should be used. It is best practice to use hyphens in the filename to separate words.
