Joomla SEO Tutorial - Make your Joomla Site more SEO friendly

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Though me being a complete drupal user(all my sites have drupal), I can not ignore joomla which happens to be one of the(if not the) best Open Source CMS around. So I felt to do some searching and write an descriptive article on How to make your Joomla website search engine friendly.

This tutorial will give you some basic rules to make your Joomla website more SEO friendly. The suggestions in this article are based on practical experience and are really simple to understand and implement. But I know this is not the end. If you know of some more good method(s), please do share with us.

Here are the tips ::

Settings Of Title, Keywords, Metatags Of Joomla And SEO :-
The title of the Joomla site must be very specific and really relevant to the contents of the site. The title tag should be, ideally, 64-66 characters long. Separate your keywords with a comma (,) . Don’t use space for this purpose. Don’t repeat the keywords. The length of Meta Description should be in the range of 170-200 characters ideally and must contain your most important keywords which are also included in the title and keywords section. Your heading Tags (H1 , H2 etc ) should contain your important key words. The keywords should be randomly placed.
And Its good to use the Joomla’s built-in functions to make sure that your title, meta description and tags are relevant to the specific document.

These settings are really basic SEO techniques that can be applied on all the websites and also on the Joomla to improve the page ranking.

Lets move towards some special joomla plugins and modules that can make the Joomla more search engines friendly.

Joomla SEF Advance Module And SEO in Joomla :-
Some people may disagree with me on this point, but this is what I have learned. The use of dashes instead of underscores increases the SEO in joomla. For example “my-joomla-site” and “my_joomla_site” will produce different effects. Default SEF of Joomla is not providing the facility to control the use of underscores or dashes in urls.

Here is a third party component that give control on titles and use of dashed or underscores in the Urls.

SEF Advance joomla component (Joomla! 1.0 / Mambo 4.x). It enhaces the joomla’s basic functionality of friendly Urls generation and make it to a higher level. Ordinary joomla urls cannot tell much about the contents of the page.
E,g http://www.my_joomla_site.com/content/view/1/2/
This module will generate the urls in the following format:
http://www.my_joomla_site.com/section/category/item/

As you can see the URLs are made up of understandable keywords instead of numbers. So SEF Advance greatly enhances the search engine ranking of your joomla site.

OpenSEF Joomla Component And SEO :-
Another useful joomla component for increased SEO in joomla is OpenSEF Joomla Component.This can be downloaded From Here.This component Maps arbitary, user-selected URLs to Joomla contents and Components. It re-writes all URLs withink the site content with user-friendly and search engine friendly Urls. It give Unlimited number of alias URL mappings. Instead of re-writing URLs internally, this component has the ability to send n HTTP browser redirection. Install/Uninstall is very
easy and replacement of files manually is not required.

Joomla Meta tag Generator Component And SEO in Joomla:-
This component manage the metatags in joomla and automatically create metatag descriptions and keywords for the contents of your joomla website and hence increases the friendship of your joomla site with the search engines.

This component gives you a page where you can edit the meta tags of about 50 pages at one time and you can also choose the pages for which you want to create the keywords or descriptions. It also extract the keywords from the content or text of your webpage. Download this free Joomla metataggenerator to increase the SEO in Joomla from here : This component is very useful addon for SEO in your joomla site.

Joomla, Robot.txt , Sitmap.xml and SEO :-
Robots.txt is the file that instructs the search engine “Don’t crawl and index these pages” while Sitemap.xml tell “Which pages should be crawled”. Correct configuration of both these files will really improve the Search Engine Optimization process in Joomla.

Suppose your joomla website has installed the Open-Sef component which has the ability to create the Google Xml. Generate xml file and give it a name sitemap.xml . This file will have the google definition, so it is necessary to change it. Downloaded the sitemap.xml, change the protocol header to xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 . Now again upload and overwrite the original file. Now go to the Google’s webmaster area and resubmit to check for any errors. If it shows no error then it has worked.

As I stated in the beginning that this article is based on my experience with Joomla. You may disagree with some of my points or would like to add your own points, which are welcomed as always I am not a master of Joomla so would love to learn from more knowledgeable people.

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