Analytics

AMP Ping Up Joomla Website

21 May 2021
Dwayne Grimes
No comments
Categories: Analytics, Joomla Component, Search Console, Uncategorized, Web Rankings, WebmasterTools

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) make your website more digestible for Google and has been adopted over the past 5 years by the other search engines. Google currently being the most utilized search engine, and the focus of this article. The goal for AMP is to make the content delivered more quickly for mobile users by condensing and indexing the pages. WordPress adopted this as a part of their core installation, and in testing we discovered Joomla is Rich Results Ready as well. Here is some of the things we have done to improve a Joomla site to be AMPping itself up to be searched.

A great place to start is to use Google as an AMP Tester. Use the link below to access Google’s AMP tester.

https://search.google.com/test/amp

There is also Google’s Rich Results Tester which can be accessed here.

https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

The hard part about these tests are they do not work on your “home” page. There is also Google Structured Data which is the actually the important part of the indexing; however, the page will benefit by being AMP ready. The combination will get your page mobile ready for search engines, with very specified content details you want indexed. We start with the Google Structured Data (GSD) on the services pages. The first thing we did was install a free plugin by Tassos Marinos which you can download in the Joomla Extension Directory (JED) or directly from his site.

https://www.tassos.gr/joomla-extensions/google-structured-data-markup

Install the component like a normal Joomla component. Then enable the plug-ins. There will 3 of them.

Then go to Components >> Google Structured Data >> Dashboard.

Click on the “Items” tab on the left, and “Article” will be the main item to deal with.

Once in “Article” item we set it to pull the “Browser Page Title” vs the “Title” because of the way we have the SEO set up. Make sure to complete as much of these sections as you can. Save your changes.

Then go back to the “Configuration” tab. Fill out as much as you can. Once you are done and satisfied you can go to the “Advanced” tab and turn on the minify of the output.

Before you minify the output look at the source code and make sure the content you want in the GSD is correct. We had an issue with “description” not showing up. We had to reinstall the plugin.

We had also installed a free AMP plugin, but it didn’t help. Just using the GSD plugin from Tassos was enough to make the site Rich Result Ready. Make sure to follow the instructions and view the source of the page to make sure the Structured Data looks the way you want it to before you request Google to index your pages. If you don’t it could be weeks before Google crawls the site and indexes it properly.

Lets us know if this helped you…

Site Not Ranked in Google, But No. 1 in Bing

28 January 2020
Dwayne Grimes
No comments
Categories: Analytics, Domain Name, Google, Search Console, SEO, WebmasterTools

After finishing a new WordPress site we watched Google to see where the site was going to rank, but didn’t get the results we were looking for. We had the Yoast SEO plug-in installed and followed their recommendations in setting it up. The site was showing up on page 4 yet Google highlighted several matching words. More than the listing ranked higher.

We were confused as to why the other sites were ranking higher considering our site had more relevant links. If we add “va” for Virginia to our search the site was number 1 in Google.

The following articles were good starting points

https://moz.com/community/q/can-t-rank-well-on-google-but-on-page-1-for-bing-and-yahoo

https://moz.com/community/q/not-indexed-in-google-indexed-in-bing

The site was a Property in our Google Webmastertools / Search Console, and the Sitemap was in there. We saw a suggestion from someone else who said to add the sitemap in a line in your Robots.txt file. We did this through the Yoast plug-in in the back end of the site. We added the following line.

“Sitemap: https://www.thesitesdomain.com”

While in the Search Console we realized the Property was set up for HTTP. When we tried to do a URL Inspection we got an error that the property domain didn’t match. We went back and added the property again and we we saw the following image we realized we had trouble setting up the site with Google’s new domain verification and selected the old method of “URL Prefix“.

We added our domain to the “Domain” section and Google automatically updated our original property to be set up under the new “Domain” method. When we inspected the URL everything worked perfectly. Now to finish inspecting and requesting a URL crawl for the other pages.

The link below was a reminder to me that there were issues when were setting up this site in Google Search Console.

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/68435/moving-from-http-to-https-in-google-search-console

Let us know if this helped you.

Using Redirects In Joomla

22 May 2019
Dwayne Grimes
No comments
Categories: Analytics, Google, Joomla, Joomla Component, SEO

When launching our new website we tried to keep the URLs of the web pages the same as they were in the past. This didn’t quite work out like planned. The old site was using an underscore for dividing words in the URL, and the new one was using dashes. This caused indexed pages to produce a 404 page not found error. We decided to use redirects until the new pages got indexed.

The process is pretty straight forward.

  • Go to Components >> Redirects
  • Click on “New”
  • Enter the “Expired URL”. Our example “managed_it_services.html”
  • Enter the “New URL”. Our example “services/it-support-services.html”
  • Save

We went back to Google Analytics. In the Search Console >> Landing Pages section. We clicked on the icon to launch the page.

This however took us to our 404 page we have set up in the site. It seemed like the redirect didn’t work. When we got back to the Redirects section in Joomla was saw the “Redirects” plugin wasn’t enabled.

Once we enabled this the redirects happened right-a-way. The best part of enabling the URL Redirects plugin is it allowed us to record the URLs that someone went to. We could then create a redirect for that URL that we may not have listed otherwise.

Let us know if this helped you.

Scheduling Google Analytics Reports

8 January 2019
Dwayne Grimes
No comments
Categories: Analytics, Google

In January we set up Google Analytics to send reports to some customers automatically. This year when we were setting this up the Analytics Dashboard has changed and it took us a minute to locate what we were looking for. Here are the steps.

  • Log into your account and go to the account you need to send the reports from.
  • Go to one of the “Reports” on the left side such as “Audience” or “Acquisition“.
  • In the upper-right you will see the icon to “Export“. From here it is like it was before.

Let us know if this helped you…


Check Website To See If It Is Optimized

30 March 2018
Dwayne Grimes
No comments
Categories: Analytics, Google, Page Speed

There are so many tools out there to evaluate your website, but somehow when it comes from Google it is the one I trust the most. Google has been writing the book on page ranking for years, so I am putting my faith in their tool to be a good one.

I ran an test on my new site as comparison to the old site and this tool made me feel really good about the work I was doing. I was so happy about it I decided to make this post. Here is a link to Google’s tool.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Let us know if this helped you…

 

Using RegEx to Get IP in Google Analytics

13 July 2017
Dwayne Grimes
No comments
Categories: Analytics, Google

For privacy reasons Google doesn’t just offer up the IP addresses of your traffic, but there are ways to get it. I have set up a filter in my Analytics account to accomplish this.

Here is an article that helped me figure this out.

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/12/10/basic-google-analytics-filters/#Include%20Internal%20IP

Here is the page that helped me determine the regular expression needed to include the IP address information.

http://www.regular-expressions.info/ip.html

Let us know if this helps you….

 

Translate »