You may disregard this article if starting a website on Joomla solely for your personal needs and are not interested in making it visible to the whole Web community. Oh, you are still reading – in this case, you definitely decided to make Google fall in love with your website and show it up on the desired 1st page of the search results.
Search Engine Optimization is no easy task, but with time and perseverance you’ll pursue your goal. Here are the first simple, but really indispensable steps from iJoomla.com which will take your Joomla site closer to top rankings in Google.
1. Your Site Name should be your site’s name.
There can be a temptation to cram as many keywords as possible into the “Site Name” field. It doesn’t help and when users register at your site, they get an email saying “Welcome to Widgets, Buy Widgets, Cheap Widgets, Bargain Widgets!” You don’t want that.
2. Turn off your PDF links.
When we analyze Joomla! Sites, we often find PDFs ranking higher than the original pages. Because PDF pages have no menu links, they’re a dead-end. Users can’t move from the PDF to the rest of your site. So turn off those links.
3. Don’t waste your site’s link juice with lots of social bookmarking links.
Lets face it, very few pages have a chance to hit the Digg home page or do well on Reddit, so only place those buttons on your best articles. Your visitors appreciate clean, uncluttered pages — and so do search engines.
4. Redirect the www and non-www versions of your site to the same place.
All you need to do is add this little piece of code to your .htaccess file.
5. Turn on your cache.
Search in Google and you’ll see a size for each site. Smaller, faster sites are more popular with visitors and with Google. One easy way to make your site act small and load faster is to turn on your cache in Global Configuration.
6. Enter a full description for all your sections and categories.
These pages are great for organizing your site… and for improving Page Rank. If you organize your sections and categories carefully, your site becomes very easy for both people and search-engine spiders to navigate.
7. Less is often more
Having thousands of Joomla! pages indexed in Google isn’t always a good thing, especially if those pages don’t bring value. Some components, for example, can produce lots of extra pages that are completely worthless. One easy way to check if your site is putting garbage on Google is to search for site:mydomain.com. If you find pages that don’t have good content, you might want to remove them.
8. Empty your global configuration metadata.
I’m sure you’re all big fans of Joomla!, but I’m equally sure that “Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system” doesn’t describe your site. Take it out.
Now you know what to start with for great Joomla SEO. This platform has great possibilities for creating a website that will rock the Net.
If you’re considering migration to Joomla from your current CMS platform or in case your Joomla 1.5 or 2.5 requires an update, check out aisite online tool, which can handle your Joomla content migration or update easily and totally automatedly letting you focus on promoting your online project.
