Joomla SEO (search engine optimisation) is an often overlooked part of the Joomla website development cycle. Joomla is widely recognised as the best open source, or otherwise, content management solution available, but it is weak on search engine optimisation. Although Joomla does install with a ‘search engine friendly URLs’ component, it is switched off by default and needs to be activated in the Global Configuration section of your websites administration area, or back end as it is often referred to.
Joomla’s SEF (search engine friendly) component is built into the Joomla core and provides the webmaster with a few options pertaining to its Joomla SEO settings. Open your Global Configuration section and you will see these SEO settings on the top right of your page. Start off by enabling the first three options, ‘Search Engine Friendly URLs’, ‘Use URL Rewrite’ and ‘Add Suffix to URL’. Personally I do not activate ‘Unicode Aliases’, nor do I ‘Include the Site Name in Page Titles’. Save these changes and FTP into the directory that contains your website files and rename the file ‘htaccess.txt’ to ‘.htaccess’, without the quotations.
Now that you have activated your core Joomla SEO, it is time to focus your efforts on creating great content. In your Joomla back end, browse to ‘Content’ and then ‘Article Manager’ and ‘Add a New Article’, be sure that all of your web content is unique and not copied and rehashed from another website in the same industry or market sector. The major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing, amongst others, frown upon this and will not refer browsers to websites that fall foul of this practise.
Joomla search engine optimization is integral to your website success in the search engines, our Joomla SEO packages will ensure your website receives a top ranking in the search engines.
