SEO In Joomla - Patrick Jackson (JoomlaDay Sydney 2009)

Joomla SEF & SEO
A bunch of stuff that’s good to do!
Patrick Jackson KPS
www.kpsystems.com.au

web: sydney.joomladay.org.au | email: admin@joomladay.org.au

Joomla SEO

• Are You Up To Date?
• Turn On SEF URLS
• Use Aliases
• Enter Meta Data
• 3rd Party Components
• Xmap
• Trickery!!!

joomla seo techniques – patrick jackson web: sydney.joomladay.org.au | email: admin@joomladay.org.au

Are you up to date?

• A few assumptions I’m going to make…
• Your Joomla Site is up to date
– Version 1.5.14 currently
– Sam Moffat’s JUpdateMan
• You can access your files on your server
– FTP, cPanel File Manager, eXtplorer, NinjaXplorer
• You’ve got sufficient access privileges on your
site to access the backend and Global
Configuration


SEO Techniques

SEOMoz.org – Search Ranking Factors
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors


The Basics

Turning on SEF in Joomla
• Joomla! Out of the box has dynamic URLs like
index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=5&id=10
• For J1.5, you can quickly make your URLS more Search
Engine Friendly
• J1.5 creates a SEF URL from the alias tags
• This creates a URL like 1-about-joomla.html

• You turn on Joomla SEF URLs in Global Configuration
• You can improve the default further by using .htaccess


Changing the SEF URL

• So once you have your SEF URLs turned on, Joomla is
generating them based on the Alias Tag

• When you create a menu item or article, if you leave the
alias blank, Joomla will automatically populate it based on
the Title of the item.
• For standard Joomla SEF, this all happens dynamically.


The Basics

Aliases
• The alias tags in Joomla are the key to good SEF URLS
• Joomla will automatically generate them from the
article title, menu name or other component features
such as Contact’s Name for com_contact
• Auto Generated ones can be lengthy if your title’s long
• By customising your Alias tags, you’ll end up with
cleaner and often shorter URLS.
• You can also focus keywords into URLS by customising
your alias tags – but don’t go overboard!
• My strategy: make the URLs HUMAN friendly – and
then they’re also search engine friendly.


Metadata

• When Joomla is installed, your site is instantly displaying
metadata
• Metadata Description– Default Joomla description
• Metadata Keywords – Default list of Joomla keywords
• Change the default global values by going to Global
Configuration
• Make your metadata unique for each article
• Keep your keywords to around 10 – 15 maximum
• Make the description and keywords for an article relate
and target the article’s contents


3rd Party Extensions

• Components are still handy though for a few things
• sh404SEF & RSSEO let’s you improve your META tags,
tidy up the URL and have multiple alias URLS.
• Xmap & RSSEO creates a dynamic Google site map
• Several other extensions are available from
extensions.joomla.org
• Do your homework on them before you install them!


Components

• So you’ll then find that for a simple joomla site, you’ll
now have SEF URLs up and running!
• But not everything starts working straight away!
• Components will generate a SEF URL, but if the URL is
not based on a component that has a SEF extension, the
URL may not be as readable as it could be
• Virtuemart, Fireboard, Community Builder, SOBI, all have
SEF plugins to allow their URLs to be converted, and work
best with an additional 3rd Party Component
• sh404SEF Extensions on JED
• sh404SEF Extensions List
• Recently sh404SEF has switched to Commercial model.

XMap

• XMap lets you dynamically generate a sitemap for your
site and display it, but also a Google Sitemap that you
can submit using Google Webmaster Tools
• Submitting it to Google will then tell Google what to come
and look at on your site, and will improve your site’s
performance
• It’s pretty much install and off you go, and has a range of
plugins to map component content.
• Google likes a sitemap with Priorities to have a page that
it can focus it’s search on… priority = 1
• Xmap by default only applies priority to an entire menu
• So you’ll normally get an error on Google Webmaster
Tools alerting you to the priority issue. Not critical, but
easy to fix!

XMap Menu Trick

• The trick… create a hidden menu
with just an alias to the site’s
default menu item.
• Add this to Xmap configuration,
and set it’s priority to 1.
• Hide it from your general site
map, as it’s a duplicate link to
your home page


Non-www to www

• Joomla or non-joomla site, people should be able to reach
your site via either www.mysite.com or mysite.com
• Accessing both is fine, but Google used to treat them as 2
sites, so if you are interested in pagerank, it could have
been effected.
• On your site, you can add a few simple lines to your
.htaccess file that will intercept the non-www and send it
off to the www
• RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
• Also use Google Webmaster Tools and set your preferred
domain
• More info on the concept is at Compass Designs

Warning: Black Hat

• Some extensions include backlinks to other sites, or other
black hat SEO techniques!
• This can infringe on Google’s policies, and may lead to your
site being blocked in Google’s search results.
• The example below is how Artio JoomSEF inserts backlinks
into the Joomla Generator Tag.


• Sitelinks

• Questions & Answers


Patrick Jackson
Twitter @partic

www.kpsystems.com.au


SEO In Joomla - Patrick Jackson (JoomlaDay Sydney 2009)

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