5 Quick and Easy SEO Tips for Joomla 1.5

Friday, 08 August 2008 17:22

Not ranking well in Google? Search Engine Optimization built-in to Joomla 1.5 is much better than it was for 1.0. Here are 5 quick and dirty seo tips for Joomla that should help you climb the ranks.

Turn on Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF)

Google likes it when your URLs describe the content Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF for short) turn Joomla's urls (like the ones that end in "index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=624&Itemid=135") into something that's not only human readable, but can (and should!) contain relevant keywords. To do this, visit Global Configuration and enable SEF. If you are using the Apache web server (generally that means your web server is Linux or Unix based rather than Microsoft based), click "Use Apache mod_rewrite." This will remove the "index.php" from your URL (the more you can do to remove non-relevant characters from your URL, the better).

Write great titles (and use the Alias wisely)

Google also loves good page titles. Joomla 1.5 makes good use of the titles of your articles by turning them into the titles on your pages. So make sure yours are chock-full of keywords.

"But my title is way too long now!"

Solve this problem by making good use of the Alias field. After you write an article, save it, then click the title to edit it. Notice that the alias is the same as the title, but with dashes in between each word. What you can do is make your alias longer, and keep your title shorter. Joomla will use your alias as the URL (helps for #1), and use it as the page title!

Use a plugin to get your site name in the Title

Joomla 1.5 removes a features that was in 1.0--the Site Name is no longer in the title! It's often a good idea to keep your Site Name in the title as it will help your branding.

Luckily this is easily fixed with a simple plugin. The one I recommend is Website Name. It's very simple to use. Install it using Extensions -> Install/Uninstall, and visit the Plugin Manager. Click on it to set some options. You can set:

The position of the Site Name - Before of after the article title (there's disagreement in the SEO community about which is better, so choose what you think looks best)
The character to separate the Site Name from the title - I like the | (pipe)

Set it to be enabled and you're done. You can see the results at the top of this page.

Another option is Title Manager. It seems to do the same thing.

Increase your click-through rate with good meta descriptions

Google looks at meta descriptions—but not to calculate your ranking. It uses it to generate a description of your listing. Here's an example of my meta description.

You should write catchy meta descriptions that describe what your content is about in around 150 characters. You can do this in your article in the "Metadata Information" section.

Power users should look to the next step, or use something like Joomla SEF patch for even more control over their meta data. So far, using Joomla's built in tools are working well for me.

Use a SEO component

For those looking to become a power user and wield full control over titles, metadata, urls, and more, look at using an SEO component. You can find a list at the Joomla Extensions Directory. The heavyweight in this category is sh404SEF. Sort of a terrible name, but it delivers full editing of everything mentioned so far in one place, and lets you customize even more than I can imagine. Beware that it's not fully compatible with all extensions, so check first before installing it.

Resources

There are literally thousands of web pages about SEO—actually make that millions!—but the best resources that I've found are the following:

For a really great in depth look at search engine optimization, take a look at the SEOMoz Survey. Stephen Burge has a nice article on Joomla SEO up at Google Knol.