A Complete Joomla SEO Guide

INTRODUCTION

Imagine you have world’s most famous product to sell, you chose joomla! CMS because you love it. You have paid a handsome amount to designer and developer for wonderfully crafting platform and showcasing your product in an aesthetic manner. The countdown timer of your website is taking its last breath and customers are excited using their credit card at the first the peep of your website.

Wait: if you have launched your Joomla website with basic installation, thousand of your customers might have to stare on the Search engine result page for a long while to find your website in first place. Fairly speaking Joomla! is not quite SEO friendly right out the box as WordPress. Don’t worry, In Joomla 3.3 update, Joomla! comes with extensive SEO friendly feature and option handles. Today my goal is to put light on the initiative to get your Joomla! websites into a position, where you will really satisfy when come to a SEO factors.

I think, I have missed something; Optimising for a website are related with too many factors of SEO, On-page factors and Off-page factors are popular among them. Will discuss some aspects of only on-page factors, perhaps in my subsequent articles i will cover off-page factors. let’s follow them.

• Make your website fast — speed matters
• Make URL’s human readable
• Microdata
• Sitemap

Choose a specialized web host Enable SEF URLs Use alt attribute Redirect URLs Leverage browser Cache

Loading speed is one of the crucial reason behind the high ranking website. Even Google consider page speed to be one of the 200 ranking factors that influence a website’s position on (SERP). You can maximize your site speed in various ways, Leveraging browser Cache is the most popular among of them.

I am not getting into too much details, You can easily instruct browsers to cache certain types of contents found on your website. And also tell them how long to cache them. My personal suggestion, put following code in the bottom of .htaccess file from Joomla root directory.

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 1 seconds” 
 ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 1 years”
 ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 months”
 ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 1 months”
 ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 1 months”
 ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 1 months”
 ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access plus 1 months”
 >ExpiresByType image/ico “access plus 1 months”

Note: Your server supports mod_expire features for Apache. For smart safety, Use If-statement is there, If your host doesn’t support it, your custom code is going to rule.

Create XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps are the easiest and quickest way to inform search engine about the pages, your website contains. Sitemap not only ensures better visibility of your pages for search engines, offer the opportunity to tell search engines bots instantly about any tweak on your website.

When you have done all steps of sitemap creation, submit your sitemap to search engine webmaster tool. Webmaster tools performed so many helpful task on behalf of your. Such as — regularly diagnosis your site health, send you mail with potential warnings and suggestion, including keep track on existence of web page and contents.

I personally found JSitemap, the best sitemap component for Joomla. JSitemap allows you to create a map of your Joomla website using the structure of menu system. And the generated sitemap from JSitemap is compatible with all major webmaster tool. Such as: Google webmaster tools>, Bing webmaster tools and so on

Previous Next Close