Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is often also the best method of site promotion. To determine how your page can achieve the highest ranking on the sweet-spot keywords, you will need to look at the HTML source code of the pages to see what the others are doing.

 Search on one of your keywords, and click on the top site for that search. Select the View Source command in your Web browser, and a window should be displayed showing the HTML of the page. When I executed the View Source command against this page, the source code appeared.

The native View Source command in Internet Explorer launches the HTML code in Notepad. You can find instructions for changing this selection on the Web (you have to edit the registry). Alternately, if you haven’t looked at the Mozilla Firefox browser already, it has an excellent HTML source parser built in. In Firefox, the View Source command opens a window that shows the HTML color formatted for easy reading. It makes examining HTML code painless.

Ajax (also known as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is the incredible conjunction of Web technologies allowing a site to provide interactivity that compares with many desktop applications. Ajax allows a Web application to provide updates and interactivity on a Web page without refreshing the entire Web page. That can make a site far more dynamic and responsive.

The problem with Ajax is that the Ajax system is literally invisible to search engines. Ajax technology relies on a browser to execute JavaScript code to retrieve additional information from the Web server and display it in the browser window — most often in a pop-up window. Search engine spiders will not execute any client-side code. That means that the content displayed by the Ajax technology is not seen by search engines.

Presently, there is no ideal way to adopt Ajax and yet continue to obtain good search engine placement. Web designers that adopt Ajax have the following options to ensure continued good placement:

The developers of Joomla are aware of the importance of good Web site ranking. They have provided a number of options for a Joomla site to make itself as SEF as possible. By spending a little time with configuration settings and a little due diligence when posting new content, you can use the Joomla features to increase the opportunities of your site and to obtain high placement on the search sites.

With the adjustment of only a few global options, Joomla implements the changes for all the rendered con- tent pages. As usual, implementing these features in Joomla requires only a few clicks in the Administrator interface.

By default, all Joomla URLs reference the same Web page (index.php) and use query string parameters to specify individual menus or articles to retrieve. For example, the URL to a standard Joomla article might look something like this:

http://www.example.com/index.php?Itemid=27&option=com_content

To a search engine, this URL is confusing. A search engine spider (the program that indexes a Web site) isn’t very good at discerning that the query string holds the ID reference to the article. In general, a query string is just as likely to hold site visitor parameters as references to particular content. Here is the URL with query string for a common Web site that includes a query string ID:

The World Wide Web has made text data available like never before. Almost all sites accessible through the Internet can be addressed by either a browser or a program that retrieves the plain-text version of the page containing HTML tags. This availability of raw data has caused a renaissance of programs called screen scrapers. Screen scrapers access data normally targeted at a screen (or browser window) and scrape the desired data from the screen for storage, or repackaging and display.

Brief History of Screen Scrapers
Between the 1970s era of widespread deployment of text-based mainframe/terminal applications and the twenty-first century browser era came the age of the graphical user interface (GUI). Ushered in by the success of the Macintosh, computer applications began to feature windows, drop-down menus, checkboxes, and other user-interface elements that made using programs much more flexible than their text-based predecessors.

The revolution in GUI adoption caused a problem for organizations that had invested tremendous amounts of time and money in mainframe-based text applications. In less than a decade, these text-based applications went from being cutting edge to antiquated. For productivity reasons, organizations had to rewrite these applications to take advantage of the new GUI paradigm. Even more daunting than the mountain of reprogramming was the conversion of data stored in these mostly custom systems. Few standard data formats existed when they were initially designed, so retrieving and converting the data posed tremendous difficulties.