#59 - Ten Joomla Search Engine Optimization Tips

Search Engine Optimization, you must have heard the phrase a hundred million times, probably with some nice fees thrown for good measure, and lots of promises of heaps of traffic. There are some simple things which you can do to give your Joomla site a quick SEO boost. Read on for these tips, as suggested by the best Joomla SEO site ...

10) Speed

Its easy to weigh down your Joomla site with too many extensions thatload too many scripts and a template that contains enough files andimages to keep 100,000 different users happy. Keep your sitelight and fast. Find slow spots on your site and eliminate them. Install caching tools, to ensure your site is quick to load.

9) Metadata Titles

"Thetitle is vital, the description is useful, the keywords are useless".So the one metadata item you can't control and edit with Joomla is ...the title. That's what shows in the browser bar and in search engineresults. sh404SEF, comes to the rescue ... 

8) RSS Feeds

Joomla 1.5 is an improvement over 1.0 in this regard, but you're not able to customize your feeds or track subscribers. There are several good simple components out there to get you sorted.

7) H1 Tags

Nowadays these are more important for accessibility than SEO but its still worth implementing, since it shows that you take care of your site, and for that slight SEO improvement (Every little helps).  sh404SEF, again to the rescue ... 

6) 404 Error Page

With a custom 404 Error page you can track which broken links peopleare using to access your site and send them on their way with usefulinformation. Erm ... sh404SEF to the rescue ... 

5) Nofollow

Why would you want to rank for "Terms and Conditions", "Privacy Policy"and those other pages you have to include on your site. You don't andyou don't want to pass Page Rank to those pages. If you link to themusing rel="nofollow", search engines won't count your link.

4) Sitemap

Submitting a sitemap to Google and Yahoo won't help your ranking, but it will help your site get indexed more quickly. Xmap and the SEF Service Map are all good options.

3) Clear Global Configuration Metadata

Isn't metadata meant to describe what's on each page of your site? So,unless each page is the same, why do you have the same metadata on eachpage? More here.

2) Permalinks

This simply means "One page, One URL". Ensure that each page can be accessed by one url only, or you might get penalised for duplicate content.

1) 3rd Party Extensions

Not all third extensions are well optimized. Some can be devestating so choose carefully. Learn from the problems other people have faced:"when I activated the Events Calendar I did not configure it to "not"display months, weeks or days that did not have an event scheduled. TheGooglebot indexed empty calendar event pages out until the year 3,500(so basically I have over 80k duplicate pages)". Make sure you avoid those kind of problems.

The Easy Way Out 

As usual we like to follow up most of our tips with a recommendation for those who like to take the easy way out to optimizing their Joomla site  for search engines. iJoomla have a great SEO component, which now makes it easy to optimize your Joomla website without having to go through all the technical details. iJoomla SEO  speeds up your optimization and takes away all the complication of SEO. As with all iJoomla  products, this is another lovely and easy to use product. Give it a shot, we're sure you'll love it.