Adsense-SEO-Bear, A Free Template For Joomla 1.0+

Ok, Before we give you a link to the demo we're going to warn you - It's not pretty! We'd better also say that it is entirely experimental and is only available for Joomla 1.0+ currently.

A 1.5 version is pending interest from you.
 

Ok, so here's the demo site: Very Low Mortgage Rate

And if you want a little more flavor we have another demo: Herbs & Spices
 
Of course the download can be found in our Downloads Section

We'll start with a  short explanation for why it's not pretty. The value of this template is not in the look and feel but in the fact it is highly optimized for Adsense and for Search Engines.

Lets look at the Adsense first. The advertisement placements have carefully been selected based on large amounts of research into what ad positions achieve the highest Click Through Rates, or CTR. Additionally the colors of the ads have been left close to Google's default - a little known fact is that many Adsense publishers have experienced up to 3 times the Click Through Rate by changing their ads to the default color. Don't ask me why it works - the ads tend to look a bit unsightly, but they do stand out and click your users will!

Adsense click throughs have been shown to increase when ads are placed next to an image/images - apparently the image draws the users focus to that area of the page and the ads become more noticeable. Keeping this in mind we have allowed for a slideshow image area to the right of the first ad block.

There is no defining border or line between the internal right column and the main content - this is intentional as it is desirable to blend the ads in with the content as much as possible.

In terms of SEO this template is source ordered. This means that the order of the content in the HTML (or code view) is different from what you see on the page. On the page you will notice there is a slideshow and ad block at the top and the content is pushed right down the page. However! in the code view the content and its heading appears at the very top. This is considered extremly good for search engine optimization as many search engines are thought to give a higher weighting to content that appears nearer the top of the page.

If you use JoomSEO like we do then your Article Titles will be automatically converted to Heading 1 tags. With source ordering in action these H1 tags will appear as the very first content on the page - followed by the precious content item - all the other guff such as ads, menus, and other modules will appear further down the page. All this is achieved through the power of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which let you position content on a web page irrespective of where it is in the original source. Marvellous!  

Module Positions 

The diagram to the right indicates the available module positions.

We will now run through the additional modules used on the demo site and which position they are used in, including 3rd party extensions.

Main Menu - Published user1

Advert 1 - Adsense module 336x280px

User 3 -  Ajax Header Rotator   390x280px

Advert 2 - Adsense module 160x600px

Right - Nothing published

Advert 3 - Adsense module 728x90px

Advert 3 - Tags module

User 6 -  Search (Joomla default)

User 6 -  Who's Online (Joomla default)

User 6 - Mortgage Calculator

User 6 - Extended Menu

Plugins/Mambots

sh404SEF - Great Extension - URL rewriting 

JoomSEO - Great Extension - SEO

Ajax Vote

!JoomlaComment 

Xmap 

In closing I'd like to say that using the wonderful JoomlaPack to backup and restore I have been able to clone this site and all its extensions/structure and deploy on anoother domain in 20 mins - I'll write more about this soon.

Cheers

Big Bear