4. Recreation and experience: safely from A to B

On holiday, you want to relax, experience and get from A to B safely. The technical foundation of the website is what the car, the plane and travel apps are in your summerSEO roadmap. There is a lot to consider to ensure that your website meets the requirements of search engines and visitors.

Joomla is a powerful CMS with SEO power

A real secret weapon for getting safely from A to B, from your starting point to your summer SEO goal, is the CMS Joomla. Even the core version contains many different features and functions with which you can optimise the website technically and design it flawlessly at the same time. Joomla can also be extended with a series of extensions and plug-ins that further enhance the numerous possibilities already available. In technical jargon, these are called "OnPage factors". They are the counterpart to the "OffPage ranking factors". The former include all SEO factors directly on the website, while "OffPage" refers to measures away from it, but which do have an influence on your website.

Your summer SEO checklist for the technical requirements:

- Are all headings sensible and correctly labelled?
- Has the content been visually optimised and is media content integrated in a technically sensible way?
- Have you created a meta title and meta description that make sense from an SEO point of view?
- Does your URL speak?
- Do you use structured content, rich snippets, open graphs and the like?
- Does the technical framework result in a strong, error-free performance of the website?

It is best if your website meets all the technical requirements.

It's best if your website fulfils all these points and convinces across the board. Contrary to what some politicians think, the internet is no longer "new territory" for the majority of people. Technical sloppiness is not only punished by the Google algorithm, but also by the human user. Therefore: On your summerSEO holiday, you must move safely from A to B!

Format headings and set meta information

Your website has a heading that belongs as "H1". Further headings then follow the same pattern, especially the use of "H2" and "H3 headings" is important. Having keywords at least in some and the H1 is definitely not wrong. Make sure that the structure makes sense, because the algorithm can read that. H3 headings are always subheadings of H2 headings, which in turn are subheadings of the main H1 heading.

The meta information is not located directly in the text on your website, but at the top of the browser title (meta title) or as a small preview in the search results pages (meta description). Your main keyword should be found in both. Also, make sure that the length is correct. The meta title should have no more than 55 to 58 characters, the meta description around 120 to 175 characters. Both must also be meaningful, especially the meta description should tell the user in advance what to expect on the page.

Take a look at our summer SEO URL here: This is what we mean by "talking URL"!

Let URLs speak to your visitors! In Joomla, the "search engine friendly URL" function supports you in this. In practice, this means that you can tell from the URL where the visitor is at the moment. In a shop, for example, first the category, then possibly a sub-category and then the product name appears. Infinitely long URLs with criss-crossing characters and numbers, on the other hand, do not speak: they are to be avoided!

Optimise and structure your content

The first thing you do when you rent a car for your holidays is to adjust the seat and the rear-view mirror: So there's no reason not to do this for your website's summer SEO. Don't be afraid of pages that scroll - users have long been used to this, not least thanks to features such as infinite scrolling on mobile devices. Users should not have to make countless clicks to get to their destination.

Open Graph data, for example, ensures that the correct content is displayed when someone links to the page on social networks like Facebook. It doesn't matter if you're not active there yourself. Structured data, rich snippets and the like can increase the likelihood that your website will be delivered for certain search queries, for example when the user enters a specific question. Of course, this immediately increases the authority of the website and also delivers valuable traffic. Of course: Joomla also supports you here!

The next step in the summer SEO journey is to check in: after all, Google and Co. should know about you and your website.

Maybe you still have some questions about the technical SommerSEO? Maybe they are even these?

What are technical ranking factors?
This means, for example, a lean, tidy code, permanent accessibility, no 404 errors and fast loading times. The website, together with its caching, for example, must function perfectly and improve the user experience.
What does an optimal headline structure look like?
Only one html element should be used per sub-page to specify a heading. Each subpage should have an H1 heading that contains the most important keyword. Think of the main headline of your website as the title of a newspaper article. Would you use the same headline for several articles in the newspaper? No, the headline should be original, not too long and not too short, speak for itself and entice the reader to read on. Emotional headlines with a lot of expression have proved successful. Continue with , and so on for the rest of the headings. Since the html tags create a structure for your content, stick to the order too! Let's assume you are using a word processing programme such as Word to write a text. In your text, you would not insert a heading 3 before a heading 1. The same rules apply on the Internet.
What is the browser title and what should it look like?
The browser title is so called because the text you use for it appears as the page title in your application window.When you create a bookmark, the title is automatically used to describe the bookmark.Now pay attention: It is the headline of your search result entry.Therefore, the browser title must be appealing and original to entice the visitor to visit your page.Since Google only gives you a limited amount of space, the browser title should be between 55 and 58 characters long. A unique browser title is required for each page.
How should an optimal meta description be structured?
Meta descriptions are the blocks of text that appear below the browser title in search engine results. I often see site owners make the mistake of summarising here what the visitor can expect to find on the site.Attract the visitor to your site, assure them that they will find what they are looking for on your site, and invite them to take action.However, there is only a certain length of text available for this, which is currently 120 to 175 characters.Again, you should write a separate text for each site.By the way, meta keywords have not been used by search engines for over 15 years, so you don't have to specify them.
What is a talking URL?
In most content management systems, the alias of the menu item or article is used to generate the website address (url). The CMS Joomla automatically displays the alias names and thus "nice" addresses if the option "Search engine friendly URL" is activated in your configuration. A speaking URL pays off, because it remains in the memory of the website visitor and offers visible SEO advantages. A URL should be short and concise.
What is structured data?
Structured data and Open Graph tags of your website are not only accessible to search engines, but also to social media. Facebook, for example, extracts the cover image, title and description carefully created for Facebook from this specially tagged data. You are not present on Facebook at all? In that case, it makes no difference.When someone posts a link to your website on Facebook, the goal is to present relevant material, not just anything. That is the purpose of Open Graph data. Structured data works in a similar way by giving search engines concrete clues about what your content actually represents. Sometimes your hard work pays off and a photo, review or guide from your website appears directly in the search results.
What are important technical factors for my SommerSEO?
The most important technical component for the search engine optimisation of your website is its constant availability.For this purpose, you should choose a reliable web host with low website downtimes.Reliable web hosting also means that the website is hosted on a server with a fast response time.If the server does not respond quickly, even the best code is useless! From a technical point of view, however, the quality of your website's programming is particularly important.This includes correct caching and compression settings, correct htaccess file settings, submitting a sitemap to Google, efficient website programming and a website template with few scripts and style files.It is important that your website has a fast loading time and that it is responsive, i.e. it should adapt to different screen sizes.All SEO voodoo is pointless if the foundation is not right.To put it metaphorically: You're cycling up the hill in the heaviest gear and you're constantly on the verge of getting off. An on-page analysis can reveal the exact technical weaknesses of your site.
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