I have been doing quite a bit of experimenting as of late for some very specific keywords, and I’ve been having some success.  Because of that, and because I haven’t blogged in forever, I thought I would share some Joomla specific routes to better organic ranking.

1. Use JoomlaSEF from Artio: Before we go any farther, I need to let you know right now if you didn’t know, that Artio embeds some advertising for certain people in the Meta Generator tag on your site.  This is why they give it for free.  you can hack it, but it ain’t simple.  The string is not stored locally, and I have yet to find the call in the sef.php file.  Other than that: install it first, keep it updated, and make sure it’s working.
2.  Fill Out All The Meta Tags: Listen to me very carefully: no matter your SEO buddy tells you about how important H1 tags are, don’t forget that a page with pertinent meta keywords and descriptions is still going to rank better than one without it.  Fill out the article or content specific tags EVERY TIME ON EVERY ARICLE
3. Repeat the Keywords: If you’re writing an article about “baby dolls” then you need to mention “baby dolls” more than once in the piece.
4. Use Keywords in the IMG descriptions: Make sure that when you add a picture to a page that it has a description involving the primary focus of the page.
5. Turn Off Page Titles & Use < H1 > Tags: …and don’t be afraid of using real h2 and h3 tags for heading and subheadings.

Those are the bare minimum.  For more on Search Engine Optimization for Joomla please see SEOmoz