Optimize Joomla for Search Engines

The crucial thing for the success / failure of any website is surely the amount of traffic that search engines send to your website. So you must take all the necessary steps to ensure that your Joomla website has been fully optimized for search engines.

We've already discussed a few articles here where you can use a sitemap to ensure that all your content has been crawled by search engines, and we also have a section about generic tips to increase your website traffic. Of very good value with lots of good ideas on what you can to do increase your website traffic is the 101 ways to get more traffic article. In here we give quick points which give you good traffic. Some of them are quite simple, whilst others are a bit more complex to achive.

Joomla SEO

Search engine optimization for Joomla , as a minimum requires these steps:

Installation of a SEF (search engine friendly) component. This changes your website's pages addresses from www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_content to something like www.yoursite.com/your-friendly-address.html. Obviously, the your-friendly-address typically changes to the title of your article or anything of your choice. We recently have fell in love with sh404SEF . This easily and quickly allows you to create search engine friendly urls. It integrates tightly with a number of popular components such as Virtuemart and iJoomla. It also allows you to create a custom 404 page.
sh404SEF also allows you to activate meta management, which changes the title of each page rendered to one which is more optimized for search engines. Search engines prefer having the name of article title in the HTML <title> tag, and Joomla doesn't do this be default. sh404SEF allows you to this.
Insert HTML <h1> tags as your articles titles. This is another thing which search engines like, and another thing which sh404SEF can do by default. You should activate this too.
Create a sitemap, and submit the sitemap to Google Webmaster tools. We typically install a component which generates a sitemap and then submit the address which is given by the component to Google Webmaster tools. The good thing about this is that you can specify to Google how often your website is crawled to refresh the content. This is great for sites whose content is updated often.

Generic SEO

As always you need to ensure that you follow recommended standard search engine optimization techniques.

Content, content and lots more content

Ensure that you have A LOT of useful and original content. We can never stress this enough. Creating a few pages which never change is a sure way of your site dying a quick search engine death. Post good articles, often, without copying content from other sites. Keep on doing this, nurture your website, and take care of it, keep feeding it content until it grows and grows. Publish content which is timeless, so that you can keep it online forever, not content which expires (i.e. becomes irrelevant) quickly. Avoid unpublishing content as much as possible (unless it is truly irrelevant). Keep a blog , with stuff that you are doing, and stuff which you are learning. Don't be afraid of sharing your knowledge, your knowledge sharing will bring you traffic, traffic which you can then turn into money. Give out stuff for free, it's a great way of enticing people to your site.

Quality Incoming Links

The second crucial thing is getting good incoming links to your site. This is a direct consequence of having lots of good content. Unless, you have good content, you won't get good links. We recommend being patient, taking your time to create good content, spend a few good months developing content for your site. Once you have a good amount of articles, start working on getting quality incoming links. Work on getting links from highly popular, good sites. Its much better to get one link from a highly rated site, than a 1000 links from poorly rated sites. And what determines whether a site is highly rated or not? For Google it is the page rank. Enter the address of the website you want to check the rating for, and check. Pages, which have a page rank of less than 3 will not very good as incoming links. Pages which have a page rank of 5 or more, will be good. Pages which 8 or more will be excellent incoming links.

So work on getting good incoming links. Get in touch with webmasters, and discuss exchaning links. If you are still starting out, don't be afraid of paying for incoming links, but only from highly ranked websites. We avoid recommending SEO companies, because these give you good results until you pay. Once you stop paying, your page rank falls again. You need to ensure you have a long lasting incoming links, not temporary ones.

This has been a very quick overview of SEO. Each point mentioned here can be expanded very much, however this is just a quick roundup of what you need to.

As with most of our articles, we give you a highly recommended site which can give you much more in depth information on search engine optimization in genercal and Joomla SEO. Today, we are recommending alledia. This site is mostly dedicated to optimizing Joomla for search engines. It has a number of good ebooks, articles and generic good Joomla tips. We recommend taking a look and, if you are serious about optimizing Joomla, get their ebook. Another component which you should not miss is iJoomla SEO, it makes Joomla SEO easy!