Joomla specific SEO
Thursday, 19 March 2009 23:20
So you have finally got your site just right and you have added some great content and now all you need is an audience. What is your next step? One of the great advantages of using the Joomla CMS is that the developers understand the importance of being search engine friendly and have added several options to help you, both on the global level and article-specific.
Search Engine Friendly URLS
One of the first things you should do in the deployment of your website is to change the SEO settings in your global configuration. By default, all Joomla URL's reference the same web page (index.php) and use a string of code to determine which menus and articles to render on the page. A typical Joomla URL might look something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36&Itemid=72
Search engine robots don't really know what to do with the string of information beyond the question mark and hence, end up referencing the same page (index.php) and in turn, generating poor ranking for your site.
To overcome this unfortunate side effect of the Joomla CMS, you need to change a couple settings in your global configuration. Go to your administration area and under Site>Global Configuration you will see a box titled "SEO Settings". By default the "Search Engine Friendly URL's" is set to "No" and you want to change that to "Yes". This will make the URL for your site look like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/about-us
Now you have a URL that search engine robots can understand and differentiate from the home page or any other page on your site. Doing this alone however, may cause your site to not work properly: your front page may load fine but any links you click will return the proper URL, but the page can either be void of any template and images, or it can return a "page not found" error. Not to worry, that usually means that your server is using Apache technology and we have to do a tad more work.
Under "Search Engine Friendly URL's" is another option called "Use Apache mod_rewrite". Set this to "Yes" but note that there is a yellow caution triangle next to it. If you hover your cursor over the triangle it will tell you what needs to be done, but here is a more detailed explanation:
You have to go to the root of your server using your favorite FTP client and find the file named "htaccess.txt.". Simply rename the file ".htaccess" and do not forget the period before the file name. This may make it look like the file has disappeared because, in fact you have changed it's visibility setting to "no" by putting the period in front. Now Joomla will return URL's that look like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/about-us
Your pages come up with easy-to-index URL's and the robots now have a chance to properly index your site. If, at this point you are still getting error pages beyond the front page, you may have to wait for your host's htaccess refresh. If you host with Rocket88Web or Godaddy, that refresh will happen every hour on the hour.
Global Configuration a great place to start SEO on your Joomla site and it should really be done before you submit your site to search engines because if they have already come and indexed your site, the URL's they have indexed no longer exist. If you are converting an existing static website to a Joomla CMS and your pages are already indexed and ranked with search engines I recommend installing one of the available extensions such as OpenSEF instead of the built-in one, as other extensions will allow you to manually define the SEF URL's and match your original ones.
Adding Metadata Globally
Metadata is information about information. It is the invisible text about your site that Users rarely see, but it is read by and essential to the Search Engine robots. Metadata is categorized as "description" and "keywords".
It can be argued that keywords, once the driving force in SEO, have little to no bearing in search engine rank since they had gotten so utterly abused by spammers, but I believe they still play an integral part in your strategy. You can read more about keywords and descriptions in the SEO section of this website, but this article addresses simply how to add them to your joomla deployment.
Global Metadata configuration is set on the Global Configuration page under the "site" tab. Here you configure the description and keywords that will appear on pages that do not contain articles. Carefully setting this metadata is important as it will be the information provided about the home page.
Metadata on an Article level
In Joomla, you can add metadata to an article by adding it to the "Metadata Information" properties available to you in the edit section of each article. The critical piece of information for an article is the description as robots will mine it for keywords that relate to the subject of the page as well as the site. It is also used as the descriptive text you see in search engine results.
You can also add directives for the robots (index, noindex, follow and nofollow) which we will cover in another article, as well as the authors name.
Performing the simple tasks outlined above and being proactive about the metadata you add to articles will help to optimize your Joomla CMS for better search engine ranking, but it is by no means the end of things you can do. Page titles, breadcrumbs and sitemaps are all essential tools in helping the robots to index and rank your site, and we will cover each of these in future articles.
Of course, this can all be meaningless if your site does not have quality information that people want. If people crave what you've got, you will have other sites linking to you, and this could be the single most effective ingredient in getting great ranking in searches.
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