9. Marketing and Caring for Your Joomla! Web Site

Once your Web site is created and online, the work doesn’t stop. It is important to note that being the administrator of a Web site means ongoing work to keep it updated, keep your content fresh, advertise and market it, and keep your visitors engaged. Depending on what type of site you have created, the workload may be more or less, but all Web site administrators need to take an active approach to maintaining their Web site. This chapter will explain some best practices and simple steps to keep up your Web site and to continue growing your visitor exposure and brand reach.

First Impressions Count: What Your Home Page Says about You

If you browse the Web randomly, you can see examples of all the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some home pages draw you into the site, and others make you wince. Here are some helpful tips on making sure your home page is a winner:

• Avoid splash pages. Splash or intro pages were really popular a few years ago. Usually it was just a page showing an image, Flash media, or video segment with a button or a link that said “Enter” or “Enter site” or “Skip intro.” Splash pages really do not offer anything of value to your site visitors. They force your visitors to make an unnecessary click just to get to the information for which they came to your site in the first place. They also add very little in terms of practical information and relevancy to search engines.

• Make your site navigation easy to locate and use. It can be tempting to be clever with navigation, but forcing users to play a game of hide-and-seek with your navigation will result in lost visitors.

• Blinking, flashing, scrolling, or animated items should be kept to a minimum and should be tastefully done. Items on your page that scroll, blink, flash, or are animated need special care. If items scroll, make sure the information that is scrolling is easily readable, and adjust scrolling speeds as needed. Blinking and flashing items are almost never good for any site; most people will be turned off by items that flicker or flash, and these actions can induce seizures in some people. W3Schools has more information on accessibility and the implications of blinking or flashing at www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20. Slide shows or animation should be of high quality, and the subject matter should be easily identifiable; and as with scrolling, whatever animation or slide-show speed is used should be adjusted so that visitors can understand the subject matter. Placing what is called “eye candy” on a site simply for artistic reasons, without its having a meaningful reason to be there, such as an actionable item or to impart site information, will distract from the content of your site. Content and information are the two main reasons why people will visit your site.

• Dynamic sites such as those created by CMSs like Joomla! give you the flexibility to showcase new content in compartmentalized areas on the home page, such as a list of latest news or updated content and products. This is a great opportunity to guide your visitors into your site and direct them to the actions or interactions in which you want them to take part.

• If your site generates revenue with any sort of advertising such as banners, affiliate links, or referrer pay per click, to be effective it needs to be tastefully done (see the earlier comment on blinking and flashing). Experiment with ad placements on your home page to see how your visitors’ click patterns work. Ads need to be highly visible but should not interfere with the information you are trying to impart to your visitors, and in no way should you attempt to trick your visitors into clicking your ads by disguising them as your site content. Doing that will irritate your visitors and in some instances get you banned from participating in the revenue programs.

• Don’t automatically play video or audio. (Also see the previous comments on splash pages.) There are a number of reasons not to use automatically playing audio or video. You have no idea how loud visitors’ speakers are, their bandwidth limitations, or the speed of their connections. Sounds can be assaultive and intrusive. Another factor is that you don’t know where your visitors are when they are browsing your site. If they are at work, the audio can be disruptive to their workplace. You are wasting your bandwidth and also your visitors’ bandwidth allotment on their ISP service when you automatically stream audio or video. Automatic streaming on your home page can be especially annoying and frustrating to your visitors, who don’t want to watch or hear the same thing over and over again every time they visit your page. The best thing to do is to give an incentive for people to choose to watch the video or listen to the audio; be creative, and give them a reason to click. The absolute worst thing to do is to give visitors no way to stop or pause automatic audio or video. That will pretty much guarantee that a significant portion of your visitors will never return to your site.

• Have a search module on your home page and on every page in a consistent location. Users generally expect to find this on the top right of each page, so locate it there if possible.

Your home page is the introduction to your brand, your Web site, your work, or your product. It should exemplify exactly who you are and what you do. Depending on their purpose, some sites want the home page to show everything at a glance with details only one click away. Their intent isn’t necessarily to have visitors explore the site, but to get the information they need quickly and efficiently. On the opposite side of the spectrum, some sites use the home page to direct visitors to explore and interact, drawing them deeper into the site and the information it contains. You should consider where your planned site fits in this spectrum. Every site wants return visitors; you want your demographic to come back to your site, your work, or your product and become loyal to your brand.

The other important part your home page plays is in search engine optimization (SEO). This page should contain key phrases that are relevant to your content and topic. If your site content has an important geographic context, such as offering a service in a particular area, you should highlight that service area in the text. It makes sense to target search users and visitors from that specific geographical area, and stating the area you serve will make it easier for people to find your site. Don’t forget to make the physical address clearly visible if your goal is for people to come to your location. Although keywords and key phrases are important, it is also important to make sure they are used in context, or in other words in actual human-readable and enjoyable content. Keyword stuffing (overly repeating keywords or phrases, content that is nonsensical, run-on sentences, lists of keywords, using keywords that have nothing to do with the site topic) is frowned upon by the major search engines and could harm your search engine rankings.

Search Engines, SEO, Getting Listed, and Staying There

Search engines, search engine optimization, how to get listed, how to get to the “top,” and how to stay there aren’t a mystical science or magic. What all this does involve is realistic expectations, following a few basic principles, and most of all making your Web site relevant to the people who visit it and who will search for it.

It is a good idea to hold off on making your entire site available to search engines before it is ready or before you have settled on the overall navigation and search-engine-friendly (SEF) URLs. One way to manage this is to make a single article for the home page of your site that gives a good summary of what the site is about. Keep the rest of your site hidden until it is ready by setting access to all content, menu items, and modules to Registered. Alternatively you can use Joomla!’s Site Offline feature, which is located in Global Configuration (see Figure 9.1). If you do this, make sure to change the text and image to give a customized presentation, including important basic information. Do not let the size of the box limit the amount of information you include; you can add as much as you want. You can use your own HTML to make an attractive layout. Avoid the temptation to have “under construction” pages, since that is what search engines will read, index, and show in search results for your site. That can appear very unprofessional.

Figure 9.1. Global Configuration Site Settings screen showing the Site Offline option. Customize this with your own text and image, including important information.

As discussed in Chapter 4, write a short paragraph summarizing the purpose of the site in the Site Meta Description box found in the Metadata Settings area of the Global Configuration Site tab. This is what most search engines will present to people looking at search results. In the Site Meta Keywords field, make a short, general list of relevant search terms that you think people will use to find your site. If your physical location is important (for example, if you have an actual store), include that in the keywords. Figure 9.2 shows the Global Configuration Site screen with the Metadata Settings options.

Figure 9.2. Global Configuration Site Settings screen showing the Metadata Settings section

Select Yes for Show Author Meta Tag. Both the description and the keyword information entered should be concise and to the point, using no more than 100 characters if possible. Stuffing either of these metadata options with excessive information, repetitive words, or incorrect information will not improve your search rankings. If your site is found to be using deceptive SEO practices, it could be removed and/or banned from inclusion.

Submitting to Search Engines

You don’t need to subscribe to a service or hire an SEO professional to submit your site to the major search engines/Web index directories—Google, Bing, and DMOZ (Open Directory Project). Although there are a lot of other search engines and directories out there, those are the top players. Most of the other search engines and directories get their information from those and/or get an amalgamation of information from those search engines or directories; for example, Yahoo! gets its search results from Bing.

Dmoz.org is the Open Directory Project where Webmasters, Web site owners, and administrators can submit their sites to the appropriate category of the directory. Each submission is reviewed by an actual human editor to assure that the entry is acceptable, that it is submitted in the right category, and that the details submitted are verified. Dmoz.org is regularly scanned and indexed by most of the other major search engines, meaning that in their judgment the information DMOZ offers is of high quality and reliable. Having a listing on Dmoz.org can be one way to try to get your new Web site picked up by the other search engines.

Google offers a variety of Webmaster tools to facilitate getting indexed and, more importantly, an easy way to submit not only your site but the pages your site contains. Using the extension Xmap, you can submit the site map it generates to your Google Webmaster Tools account, which submits all your pages at one time for indexing. Google Webmaster Tools also offers a number of other services that can help you diagnose search engine optimization issues within your site, such as broken links, duplicate titles or metadata, and whether any pages in your site are unreachable. Google actively expands the tools it offers. It is also good to have a Google Analytics account so that you can analyze the traffic that your site gets.

Bing has a submission page that you fill out located at www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx. Once there, you answer the security question to show that you are human and then submit your Web site URL (www.YOURSITE.com); the MSNbot will then index your home page and follow any links that may be located on your home page to other pages on your site.

Once you have submitted your site, you can use tools like Majestic SEO or the Google Chrome SEO extension to track how your site is indexed and how many pages of your site have been indexed. Both of those tools also offer quite a few more SEO tools and information that you can use to grow your ranking and optimize your site.

Getting your site indexed is only the first hurdle, and sometimes that can take anywhere from 48 hours to six months or longer. There are no guarantees that submitting your site will result in its being indexed quickly. Here are some steps you can take to help your site be indexed:

• Use reputable directories that specialize in the same topic as you do, and submit your site to be listed in them. The aim is to get quality linking to your site while targeting your specific audience to generate traffic to your site and to have the various search engines find it.

• Take part in forums and blogs that specialize in the same topic as you do. Follow any rules the sites may have about linking to your site or about self-promotion. Making your brand and your site more relevant with quality linking and interaction in your target sector will help to build your credibility and visibility.

• Join trade organizations, business bureaus, Chambers of Commerce, and local business associations. Most offer listing and linking opportunities that are high quality and relevant.

• Don’t spam links to your site all over the place or use linking schemes or list with junk “link farm” listing sites. Actions such as these will only reduce your relevancy and credibility. Search engines can and do penalize sites for these actions. Nobody likes a spammer.

• Use your friends and business associates to try to generate reciprocal linking. This linking should be done in a relevant way, such as someone recommending your services or people mentioning the information your site offers in the context of their own content, such as in a blog.

Most of all, it is important to be patient. Thousands of sites are submitted every day.

Search Engine Optimization

A number of search engine optimization extensions can help make your Joomla! site more search engine friendly. One of the more popular extensions is SEOSimple by Dao by Design. This extension plugin works by using the first chunk of text in an article or page as the metadata for the description of the page. This helps sites avoid duplicate meta tags on all their pages such as the main meta keywords and description that are present in the Global Configuration of Joomla! Depending on how your content is written, this can be useful to search engines but also to people who are searching for your site, because it will help them understand what the page link in the search results is about. Search engine results pages typically show the meta description information as the short introductory text of the individual search engine results. SEOSimple also allows you to customize your page titles in various configurations, which can be very advantageous to your search engine relevancy. Having relevant, individual page titles for all your pages is good for your visitors and for search engines.

Tags are another way to add keywords and phrases to article content, and some extensions even allow you to use them as a navigational tool, helping you organize your site content, which enables your visitors to find like content throughout your site. These extensions generally allow you to assign specific tags to articles and other items on your site and then display them in content or in modules. For example, a module might display all items with a selected tag, or they might display a tag cloud that highlights the most commonly used tags on your site. There is a lot of discussion regarding how URLs are formed and how creating URLs may create “duplicate content,” which is defined as content that is exactly the same but accessed through a different URL. The major search engines are well aware of how dynamic sites generate URLs and how different URLs may be generated depending on the click path that people have taken to get to the content, and they do not penalize such unintentional duplication of content. However, if you have taken the time to organize your site in a certain way, you want users to use the URL you intended, not ones that are created by Joomla! based on the user’s click path. If other sites link to the same page on your site but with different URLs, your page will not get as good a “page rank” as it would if all the links were to one URL, since page rank is based on the number of links to a URL. One way to combat this “duplicate content” is to take total control over the URLs in your site by using an SEF option such as sh404SEF.

Keeping your content fresh and new is an excellent way to ensure that your site stays relevant for your topic and demographic.

Using Navigation

Site navigation includes all the links that a user can use to move from page to page in your Web site. Navigation should be easy to understand and apparent to the visitor without being overwhelming. Nothing can be more confusing to a site visitor than having to search for the navigation links of a site, having links whose purposes are not clearly identifiable, or having an overwhelming number of menu navigation links. Useful and effective sites have consistent and helpful navigation as a central element of their design. Navigation should make it easy and pleasant for your users to find the information they came to your site to find. Thinking about site navigation should be central to your thinking about the structure and design of your site from the beginning. As your site develops, the demands on its navigation will grow, so it is important that this be designed in a thoughtful way.

If you have been following along, the home page for your site contains many navigation elements. These include the following:

• Top menu

• Side menu

• “Read more” links

• Links inside of articles

• Links connected to the buttons in the Login module

• Breadcrumbs

• Search

All these links manage how your users move around your site. As you develop your site, you should always consider how the addition of new content or features should relate to your navigation. Figure 9.3 shows the front page of our site at this point with the Protostar template (the Banners and Login modules have been returned to position-7).

Figure 9.3. The home page of a Joomla! Web site contains many navigational elements.

The most important thing you can do when designing your navigation is to imagine yourself in the role of your users. If you have several different groups of users, you need to carry out this process for each of them. What do they want to find when they come to your site? What words do they use to describe those things? Ideally you will talk to users, but at a minimum try to imagine yourself as a member of each group. Web designers often talk about how many clicks on links it takes to get to a specific piece of information. The more clicks it takes to find something, the more likely it is that the user will abandon the task of looking without completing it. You want the number of clicks to be as small as possible. Visitors should stay on your site because they find useful and interesting content, not because they have to spend a lot of time looking for it.

You should follow a number of principles:

• Make sure that it is easy for people to get to the home page. The first link on your main navigation should be to the home page. If there is a logo on the top of the page, clicking it should send users to the home page.

• Provide “you are here” information for every page to help users know where they are. This doesn’t necessarily have to be “breadcrumbs,” which are a series of text links like the default Joomla! Breadcrumb module, although that provides a good baseline. Your visitors should always have some sort of cue as to the section or area of the site they are currently visiting.

• Remember that people entering your site via a search engine will often not be entering from the home page, especially if a large number of your site pages are indexed.

• Never use an image only as a link, with no text to indicate what it links to. No matter how obvious you think the image’s meaning is, it will not be obvious to some of your visitors (and will not be useful at all to blind guests).

• Don’t require users to use their mouse or keyboard to discover key information. Forcing the user to hover to get vital information can be frustrating to them. An example of this would be requiring hovering over part of the page such as an image to trigger navigational links.

• Use standard terms for items, not cute short forms, acronyms, or organizationally specific terms that are understood only by yourself or your team.

• Use meaningful terms in your text to convey your message.

In Joomla! the main navigation is usually controlled through menus and menu modules. The menu system is perhaps the most important part of your Joomla! site besides the actual content because it controls four elements:

• What template is used when a linked page is displayed

• What modules are displayed on the linked page

• How content is laid out

• The URL of the page, which relates to search engine results as described earlier in this section

• Additional metadata that you might want for a specific instance of a content item

In Chapter 5 we covered how to assign a template to a menu item and how to create menu items for content. In Chapter 6 we reviewed the other types of menu items available in the core. The menu items themselves along with the parameter options you select control how the article is laid out. The Menu Item Alias controls the search-engine-friendly URL for the page linked.

The Menu module, working in conjunction with the CSS and HTML in your template, controls the appearance of the menus on your site. Each time you create a new menu, you need to create a new corresponding Menu module. You may want multiple copies of some Menu modules, and you may want several separate menus.

The Menu module works like all other modules. It has some important options that can help you manage your site navigation effectively.

The first thing to note about menus is that they (like categories) use a branch structure. This allows you to make a structure for your menu that goes as deep as you want, although Figure 9.4 shows just two levels. You may wonder why you would want a deep menu since it would be really difficult for users to manage. There are several reasons.

Figure 9.4. Example of a multilevel menu from Joomla! Web default sample data as shown in the Menu Manager

One of the most important reasons is that this gives you control over the structure of your URLs. For example, if from the site front-end main menu you click Using Extensions, Smart Search you will get this URL:

mysite.com/using-extensions/smart-search.html.

This was automatically created by the nested menu structure for the menu shown in Figure 9.4. The URL itself provides navigational information, is “human readable,” and is helpful for search engines analyzing the information on your site. Each URL segment comes from the menu link aliases, which is why you should check the automatically created menu aliases to ensure that they are helpful.

However, it remains the case that the Menu module is somewhat awkward because it has so many levels. It takes a lot of clicks for a user to get to a specific item. There are a number of ways Joomla! allows you to improve this. Notice that by default the Menu module displays only the menu items at that top level. When you click on one of those items, and the item has submenu items, the menu opens to display them, as shown in Figure 9.5.

Figure 9.5. Using Joomla! menu showing a child menu item that is revealed after clicking a parent menu item

The simplest change you can make is to display the Menu module with more than one level. If we go to the Using Joomla! Menu module and change the setting for Show Sub-menu Items to Yes (as shown in Figure 9.6), our menu will then look as in Figure 9.7.

Figure 9.6. Changing the submenu options to display submenu items and to always show two levels (the top level and one submenu)

Figure 9.7. The Using Joomla! menu with all submenu links displayed on all pages (not just when clicking the parent item)

Another way we can use the flexibility of menus is to take advantage of the Menu Item Alias link type. This kind of menu item is used to make a second menu item that points to the same location as an existing item. This is extremely useful because the alias link will have the same URL as the original link. Your ranking in search engines can be harmed by having multiple different URLs to the same exact content. You should always use alias links when having multiple links to the same content from different menus.

A final example of the flexibility of the Menu module is the use of a split menu. This technique allows you to take advantage of submenu structures in a more advanced way. With a split menu, the submenus are displayed as the top level in a new Menu module instead of being displayed in the original menu.

To set up a split menu you first make a copy of the original Main Menu module using the Copy button in the Module Manager. Edit the second module to change the name to Using Extensions and set the Start Level and End Level to 2. The second level is the level that includes only the list of specific extension links. Make sure the module is published and set it to display on all pages. Edit the Main Menu module so that both the Start Level and End Level are set to 1. In the Module Manager change the ordering of the modules so that the Using Extensions menu comes after the main menu.

If you visit the home page on the front end of the site, you will not see your new menu. However, once you click Using Extensions, the menu will appear and display only the list of links in the submenu, as shown in Figure 9.8.

Figure 9.8. The menu with the Using Extensions menu showing

Using a split menu can be extremely effective navigation. For example, you can have a top menu with main links and then side split menus that display only when specific top-level items are clicked. This is a common practice when you want to have different side menus in each section of your site. Another useful technique is not displaying the top-level menu at all once the split menu displays. You can do this by selecting which specific menu links a specific instance of the Menu module displays on when creating a menu link.

There are many options for enhanced menus available in the Joomla! Extensions Directory. Usability research has shown that many complex menus with excessive reliance on drop-downs and special effects can make your site more difficult for visitors, so use any special effects in moderation and for good reasons.

Engaging Your Visitors and Keeping Your Content Fresh

One of the best ways for any site to keep its target audience as repeat visitors is to keep the content on the site fresh and updated. Whether your site is strictly informational or meant to be a portal where visitors take part in action items on the site, without updated, fresh, new, and interesting content, eventually your audience will get bored and click away, or they will find the information they are seeking elsewhere. Here are a few suggestions to keep people coming back:

• Start a blog. This is a great way to add new content to a site that perhaps is mostly information or if you have a brochure-type site. Blogging about happenings in your industry, news, events, or happenings in your company can add a human touch to your site as well as keep people informed with up-to-date news and information. One basic good practice to follow is to set a schedule for blogging and keep to it.

• Add a news and press release section to your site, and offer it as a news feed. Find sites in your target topic that accept news feeds to aggregate. It can be a great way to drive traffic to your site.

• Add your Twitter and other social networking streams to your site. Create profiles for your Web site/business to further your exposure on social networking sites such as Facebook. There are numerous extensions available in the JED that let you do this easily, and we describe a simple do-it-yourself way to embed simple social media content in Chapter 12.

• Offer special deals, coupons, and discounts to your Web visitors. Make sure to keep any coupons or deals up-to-date. Nothing will annoy a Web visitor more than downloading a coupon or deal only to realize that it has already expired.

• Add a mailing list. A number of mailing lists work with Joomla! as well as third-party mailing list systems that you can integrate with your Joomla! site. Please don’t spam people. Use a legitimate mailing list of people who want to get your e-mails. It is extremely important that you keep your site from getting blacklisted as a spam site. As your mailing list grows, it becomes essential that you use mailing list applications that do effective throttling (limiting the number of e-mails sent out in one blast), both to avoid spam labeling and to ensure that you do not run into mail capacity limitations that your host may have in place. Your host should have a policy regarding e-mail that is sent through its servers as part of the terms of service. We recommend using an extension that will let you integrate a third-party mailing list service such as MailChimp if you plan on doing extensive mailings since these services will help you remain in compliance with all relevant regulations. We discuss options for this in Chapter 12.

• Add questionnaires, polls, or surveys to engage your audience, and report the results.

• Add commenting. Allow your visitors to comment on your content, blog, polls, and so on. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing. It is a good way to engage your visitors, but commenting systems do not monitor themselves, so you will have to monitor your site and monitor your visitors’ comments. Assess the time spent having to manage a commenting system versus the value of the comments to see whether it is an option that works for you. A number of comments extensions are available in the JED.

• Add a discussion forum. A forum can be a great way to interact with your visitors or customers and clientele. As with commenting, a forum does not monitor itself; you will have to spend time monitoring your forum and should carefully weigh the benefits versus the time spent on monitoring. Chapter 12 describes how to add a forum to your site.

All of these ideas can be integrated into your site to make it more active and attractive to visitors. What is not suggested is to do all of them at once. Find the avenue of engagement that suits your visitors and your brand and time limitations. It really is better to do one thing well than do five to ten things in a less than stellar manner.

Marketing Basics and Social Networking

Search engines are very useful for bringing people to your site, but there are many other ways to attract visitors. One of the basic steps of marketing your Web site is to reach out to people offline. There are lots of avenues to market your new Web site in the offline world, such as with direct mailing, real-life social gatherings, meetings, conferences and expositions, and the like. Using the resources in your community such as local papers, targeted mailings, and local organizations will help expand the reach of your Web site into your community. Real-life networking is just as important as online social networking to spread the word about your site. Join local business associations or groups, and attend their meetings to make contacts that can bring visitors to your Web site and business. In a world of in-boxes full of e-mails, taking the time to reach out offline and sometimes spending the funds to target your audience outside of the online world can give you the advantage of not being lost in the sea of e-mails that everyone receives. Placing a small advertisement in a magazine or periodical that relates to your target audience, sending a postcard, thank-you notes, coupons and discounts, or a flyer can turn into online visitors you may not have reached otherwise. This can be especially helpful to Web sites that have a specific geographical reach. Network through sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. New social networking sites are always appearing on the horizon, but be careful to not get social network burnout; concentrate your time on the social network that works best for you. It can be easy to get overwhelmed and overextended. The plus side of social networking is its ability to exponentially increase your Web site’s visibility as you reach out to people whom you know and they in turn expand that reach to people they know. The interconnectivity of people and interest groups makes it much easier to reach thousands of people at any given time.

The important part of social networking is the “social” part. It is about creating relationships with people and nurturing that relationship. You want to create fans and loyalty to your brand, which is usually accomplished by cultivating relationships with people who may be interested in what you are offering.

Conclusion

It is important to remember that a Web site is no different from any other part of owning a business or marketing a brand. It takes commitment and regular work to make it work for you. You take care regarding the security of your physical business location; your Web site needs the same care. Marketing and management don’t stop at the creation of the Web site itself; it is only the beginning of your online marketing strategy. Although for small businesses it can be relatively easy to manage the day-to-day workload of a Web site, sometimes it is necessary to hire professionals to help you. Professionals have emerged in the social networking and marketing field, as well as the SEO field, at an explosive rate. As with any new technology and the professionals who work in an emerging or always-changing field, getting references and samples of past work and understanding exactly what you are hiring the consultant to provide are priceless when it comes to your Web site. Hire a professional to monitor your site and keep it up-to-date if you do not have the time to commit. It is much less stressful to be proactive than reactive to a bad situation. The Joomla! Resources Directory provides the contact information for professionals who specialize in Joomla! sites and is an excellent reference tool.