Do you have a website that's not performing well in results for search engines such as Google?

Perhaps when you search for terms covered by your website, you find other sites rank higher - even though several have poor or irrelevant content.

Using SEO in Hong Kong and worldwide

If search results are indeed disappointing, you could benefit from SEO - search engine optimisation. This includes on-page factors, such as use of keywords and phrases, as well as off-page factors such as links within sites and links from external sites. It's a boon to internet marketing, as it can help drive visitors to your site - and you can benefit from free traffic, with visitors potentially arriving from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

I'm based in Hong Kong, and have learned SEO through creating a range of websites; using clean, "white hat" techniques that are within Google guidelines. Now, I can share some of my skills with you.

Here's some brief advice on ensuring web pages rank well in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and even newcomer Gigablast. While I don't claim to be an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) hotshot, even some webmeisters can get a bit bamboozled at times, including by the mysterious Google Sandbox.

Firstly, here's a nugget I gleaned from a forum: the keys to optimising look likely to remain content and links.

Content is king, I've read. And while I've found pages that rank well even though they're nearly naked, this seems broadly true. Links to a site, and to specific pages, are important; so too is a site's internal link structure. Sort these, and you should have some chance of ranking okay, especially for non-too competitive keywords.

But there's far more to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - black hats, white hats, link farms, pagerank, and that sandbox. If I had it all figured, this page should be #1 in search engine results. It isn't; but I do have other pages that rank well. Here, I mainly cover techniques that work for me.

When it comes to making sites search engine friendly - ie Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so they are readily navigated and index by search engine spiders, and pages rank well in, say, Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, Joomla! has a few quirks that are maybe worth a little explanation: to me, rather suggest some of key folks behind Joomla are not really interested in creating websites.

Firstly, though, the essentials of optimising a Joomla! site for search engines are exactly as for all sites, and as I've briefly covered in Free advice on search engine optimization.

So, what are the quirks?