Joomla being SEO Friendly

Joomla is an excellent CMS, but when it comes to search engine optimization, you need some time to tweak it the way it needs to be. I have spent lots of time doing it and would like to save your time. So I compiled a little tutorial for Joomla SEO

How to make Joomla truly SE friendly?

This is not an exact tutorial, so you are doing it at your own risk. I am just posting what has worked for me and what not.

1. Think about SEO from install on

Firstly you will need to install some extensions, to prepare Joomla to be serving URLs the right way. We will use SEF patch, openSEF and Joomap.
Important: Do it immediately after installing a fresh copy of Joomla.

2. Install Joomla SEF patch

This will patch Joomla core and enable you to add keywords and description in every menu and content item of your site. It will also make titles show the correct way. That’s what Google and other SE want! File is located in our Webmaster Center. Instructions and Homepage. (Takes you to Joomla At Work)

3. Install openSEF component and make it work

1. Enable it. Site > Configuration

 

 Go to SEO and Click Yes for Search Friendly URLs.

    2. Change .htaccess from integrated SEO to 3rd party SEO

    3. Install openSEF. Go to Installers > Components

Select your file from hard disk, Upload and Install.

For troubleshooting go to this forum.

4. Configure OpenSEF with these instructions.

OpenSEF will basically rewrite your internal Joomla like urls to external that are SE and User Friendly.
Here is a video how to configure openSEF.
IMPORTANT: Once you launch your site, DO NOT CHANGE your content item names and category names, because your URLs will also change. And this breaches Google’s guidelines and WILL, I repeat WILL hurt your rankings.

So make sure once you set your urls and content to leave it that way for good.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT THING: If you will be using components, check if there are OpenSEF extensions for these components. This will make these components SE friendly too. Check this great forum about this matter. I use Docman and it has been producing me lots of junk urls. Installed extension and now works GREAT!

5. Install Joomap

Joomap is a next step to Joomla SEO. It will create a sitemap for your site and a XML sitemap that will feed Google spider. It automatically creates XML file every time a new item is added.

1. Download it from our Webmaster Center .
2. Enable it by creating a menu item which points to this component.
3. Configure it by going to Components> Joomap

Configure which menus you want to include in the sitemap.

4. Configure the way it will display information; you can even exclude items or categories.
   
   

5. And the important thing: Submit your XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps. You will find your sitemap address in Back-end Administrator in Joomap settings. Once you enter it into Google, it will automatically pick up changes.

Be careful: set your live path in configuration.php in joomla with www before your domain. Also make it the same for Google Sitemaps. They have to be the same or Google will show errors in your sitemap.

6. Joomla Seo and Content:

Make sure to delete all unused content items and menu items by default Joomla installation. Clean it so you won’t have problems later.
Each URL needs to have proper Meta tags for Joomla seo (keywords, description), title and consistent use of H1 and keywords in text. Thanks to SEF patch, you can now manually configure each page Meta tags.

7. OpenSEF Friendly URL tweaking:

Once you click on all your links site wide, OpenSef will compile a list of Search Friendly URLs. Because of Joomla Nature - it produces several duplicate ids and id items, you will have to manually set only one URL to be used, and set others off. Don’t delete them, just turn all cases with the same external URLS off, just leave one to be used. I don’t know why, but sometimes it worked only if i selected case with id and itemed in the name of internal url, instead of those having only id in the name of internal URL.
Here is a video how to manage URLs with openSEF .

Conclusion

Joomla CAN is SEO friendly. That is what worked for me. If you have any suggestions or comments let me know.

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Joomla SEO Tips For Beginners

Joomla is not the default search engine. You need a little work on improving this. The most important thing is observed when starting work at the site of Joomla SEO is the address of each page. The URL of the page generated by Joomla is not search engines. Always search parameters that do not provide lots of information for search engines to index and classify these pages correctly. By optimizing the page for search engines, one of the things you should pay much more attention is the URL of the page you want to optimize. It should be informative and well filled significant extension of keywords, and preferably. "HTML."

Use the first search engine friendly URLs, you can make your Joomla site web search engine friendly, you have several options. The first is to use standard Joomla SEF plugin. By default, this plugin is not enabled, then you must go to your global configuration page and activate it.

Arts catch the titles of pages for each page of your site more often I see sites in the default Joomla header that says "Start." This is the title of the homepage. Most beginners do not see and how to change the title a bit 'dark to begin with. As you know, the page title is one of the main reasons for the search engines view sites site ranking. So you must give place to place significant main keywords in it. If you want to change the title as follows:

a. Menu Manager and select the main menu.
B. a menu list, open it says "home"
C. Now, on the right side of the screen a number of parameters can be changed. Open "Parameters (System) field and change the cover, which tells the page and save desired.

Define the metadata for each page on your site meta-data can not be so precious in the eyes of search engines were used in a few years ago, but still works well for optimization. When the meta-data optimized website. You should place greater emphasis on description rather than keywords. Write a good description of your side, preferably to 160 characters. This description is what you will see the results of a search engine with the title of the page. And therefore it's very useful for connecting the results page stands out. Of course, if the search engines you can not find an adequate description meta tags, which try to extract the body text of the article page and use it as a description of the results page of search engines. But you have to decide to put in place, use the advantage of attracting more visitors from search engines.

The biggest problem I think many of Joomla powered using more meta description and keywords of each page of your site. This is wrong! It should provide a description and keywords of each page of your site. You can still use the global configuration defines the metadata for the entire site, but you must add metadata Each element adds to the main section of the page. You can add metadata to the article you wrote, looking at the right side of the article [edit] page to find sites that offer data and metadata.

Using page 404 pages most often you see a Joomla site with the standard 404-page with little information about the error and a link to the site. You must submit a 404-page, or by some sort of plugin or a manual configuration. Include useful resources on this page to the user's location to your website. Or include a search form that can be used by the user on the right track. You can also use phrases users search on the previous page and produce a page of search results as you. The point here is to prevent users from being frustrated by the average error page.

Insert H1 Tags in Joomla is a good idea to use H1 tags to your contractor under the article. Is of some importance to students to convince search engines that the page is currently in the keyword that you quote the title page. I know the pages that do well, no H1 tag, but who cares if you can get a little help from your SEO work for nothing or almost nothing. Go ahead and H1 tags for the title of your items.

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Take Advantage of Google's Site Speed Algorithm

The following are seven proven techniques well known websites use to boost their site speed.

1. Enable Gzip

Gzip is a open source compression algorithm that can used to compress your website's content before your server sends the data to a visitor's browser. This makes your servers' job easier and makes pages load faster for your users. You can learn how to enable Gzip here.

2. Minify Javascript/CSS

Minify is the process (and software) for removing unnecessary formatting characters from code. This makes your files smaller and your visitors happier. You can learn all about this process here.

3. Use a CDN

CDNs are systems of interconnected server resources that spread content and assets around the globe to shorten the distance between server and prospective user. They are commonly used by the Web's most popular websites. You can find a list of free CDNs here. Note: This is not a tip for beginners. Working with CDNs gets complicated very quickly.

4. Optimize Images

You can take advantage of the countless man hours that have been devoted to image compression and make your users happier by simply saving your images as the appropriate type. As a very general rule of thumb, I recommend saving photos as JPEGs and graphics as PNGs.

5. Use External Javascript/CSS

When a browser requests a website from a server it can only download a set number of files of the same type at any given point. While this isn't true of all file types, it is a good enough reason to host applicable files on alternative subdomains. This is only recommended for sites where the pros of speed will outweigh the SEO cons of creating a new subdomain.

6. Avoid Using Excess Redirects

While redirects can be extremely useful, it is important to know that implementing them does force your servers to do slightly more work per applicable request. Always avoid redirect strings (301 -> 301 -> 200 or even worse 301 -> 302 -> 200) and use these tools sparingly.

7. Use Fewer Files

The most straightforward way to speed up your website is to simply use fewer files. Less files means less data. My favorite method of doing this is utilizing CSS sprites. You can read how popular websites are using this trick.

Google SEO Algorithm

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