• Web Design

Ways to Make Your Joomla Website Search Engine Friendly

Undoubtedly, Joomla is a powerful content management system with number of in-built rich functionalities. There is myth in industry that from search engine point of view Joomla is not as good as WordPress or Drupal. In-fact all CMS’s including Joomla, Drupal, WordPress or any other can be good for SEO. Google doesn’t really consider how you build your website but looks for what ultimate HTML output is. If you follow best SEO practices for link building, content, and the interlinking of web pages, Joomla is great. If you are a Joomla Expert, you need to take care of SEO considerations while development of a website. Hereinafter you may find some tips to make your website SEO friendly.

Image Source: Photo by SEOPlanter

1. SEO Friendly URL:

First and most important thing you need to pay attention is to optimize your web page URLs. Your URLs must be keyword rich and informative. Joomla’s SEF extension is available to help you in getting right URL.

2. Unique Meta Data:

If you do not put Meta data to a page then details will be retrieved from Global Configuration. It might cause duplicity and not good for your website health. Besides, there is no sense of using same Meta data for different pages because every page is unique and has its own requirements. Joomla expert SEOs must need to use unique Meta Title and Description for each page.

3. Set Title as H1 Tag:

Using H1 tag as article title decorator is a nice idea from SEO point of view. Use your top priority keyword in H1 tag as it is a vital on-page ranking factor.

4. Customize 404 Error Page:

If you have website in Joomla then it might use default 404 error page. It is not recommended by SEO specialists to use default 404 page. Go for a customized 404 page with links to important pages of your website.

Image Source: Photo by SEOPlanter

5. Take Advantage of gZip Feature:

Joomla Developers can enable gZip feature to make their web pages compressed that reduces the page load time. As per SEO consideration your page load time should not be too much to rank well in Search Engine Result Pages.

6. Use of rel = “canonical” tag:

If the content of 2 or more URLs is similar or almost similar, it is advised by experts to use canonical tag in order to avoid duplicity issues.
Apart from it, Your Joomla front page URLs (namely http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/index.php) both exist and are accessible by search engine bots. There could be a possibility of canonical issue. To avoid the duplicity you either need to use rel = “canonical” tag or use 301 redirect.

7. Robot.txt

Although Joomla adds a robot.txt file by default to your website, yet you can add more URLs to it that you don’t want to be crawled by search engines.

Bear in mind that these tips focus on the onsite optimization aspects of Joomla. You will be also required to follow best off-page SEO practices to rank well in different search engines.

About the Author:

Tripathi Abhishek is Joomla Expert SEO at OpenSource Technologies. You can also visit his LinkedIn profile.