Wrapping my head around SEO .. Joomla+Landing Pages

[jeremym]

I'm no Wizard. I'm no Warrior.

I'm a dude with two web sites, and two real products.

My forte is in these products, not SEO. But I'm a quick learner and think I'm catching up to ask the right questions.

If you google for my keyword, I come up "natural" is number 7 in Google.. with absolutely no SEO work done at all. I want to be number 2. I'll almost certainly NOT be #1.. so, #1 -3 would be awesome.

My frond-end site is Joomla, Vanilla Forum (soon to be vBulletin), and (soon to be WordPress). My back-end site is Infusionsoft. In order to see most of the content, you need to be logged in to the Joomla site (this is by design.)

I have *TONS* of content already. Between Joomla articles and the stuff in the forums, I should be ranking #1 - 3 for my niche.

Here's my short, shameful confession (which I already said): I don't know much about the SEO game. It's not what I do. So I got SEO for dummies and learned about (OMG!) sitemaps.

I also realize that I need to do something about having googlebot crawl my "private" webpages and get them indexed (however, without making them archivable / cachable.) ..

So..

Question 1:
What Joomla plug in is ideal for an automated, always up to date sitemap? (I found several plug-ins, but want opinions on what's working.)

Question 2:
Does anyone know, specifically, on Joomla.. to enable the Googlebot to crawl Private pages, index them but disallow google archiving? (Again, a Joomla plug in is what I'm after here.)

Question 3:
Let's say my niche was "cat training." (It's not.) So, I used Noble Samauri's free tool to get 101 keywords around "cat training." Excellent. Now what do I *DO* with these keywords? (Again, we're talking ONLY about SEO, not PPC.)
My GUESS would be to create "landing page bait" with these keywords in them to snag the search engines, and, hence, people to come over. That sounds like a lot of work. If I have the keywords, is there (you guessed it) a Joomla plug in to take the 101 Noble Samauri-generated keywords and auto-create landing pages and get those into the sitemap?

Question 4:
Based on what I've described here.. what else (simple, base hits-style stuff) should I be doing RIGHT NOW to increase rank? (Please don't suggest I make more "fake sites" and point them to the REAL site to boost rankings. No time... I want to ideally be "all natural" and Joomla-plug-in-automatic if possible.

Thanks in advance. Lots of questions here.. I'm looking forward to your assistance.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

I dumped Joomla on one of my sites because I couldn't get Google to stop crawling the comments that in turn resulted in constant 404 errors in Google Webmaster. This was a result of the way Joomla works.

Anyways I can not answer all your questions.

Take a look at JCrawler JCrawler - Joomla! Extensions Directory

I'm using it and my site is ranking very well. It may be a solution for part of your problem.

[indexphp]

Originally Posted by jeremym

Question 4:
Based on what I've described here.. what else (simple, base hits-style stuff) should I be doing RIGHT NOW to increase rank? (Please don't suggest I make more "fake sites" and point them to the REAL site to boost rankings. No time... I want to ideally be "all natural" and Joomla-plug-in-automatic if possible.

Build more links. Keep in mind though that ideally you want your links to grow over time. So 7 or 8 this month, 20 next month, 28 the month after, etc...

Build links to different pages on your site, not just the homepage. Do press releases, guest blog somewhere, exchange content with another site, submit articles, etc... the possibilities are endless.