Joomla!

3 - Search Engine Optimization

Getting top rankings for your Joomla! 3 website

By: Theo van der Zee @Theme_Partner

Table of contents
Introduction 3
No bullshit No extensions No guarantees 3 3 3

Global Configuration
Site Name Search Engine Friendly URLs Use URL rewriting Adds suffix to URL Unicode Aliases Include Site Name in Page Titles Site Meta Description Site Meta Keywords

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4 4 5 5 6 6 7 8

Robots 8 Content Rights Show Author Meta Tag Show Joomla! Version 8 9 9

Menu Manager
Menu Title

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Alias 10 Browser Page Title Page Heading 10 10

Article Manager
Meta description

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Title 11

What is PageRank? Additional Joomla! SEO tips

Remove /images/ from the robots.txt file Use alt tags Speed up your website

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Introduction
Getting a Joomla website to rank well in the search engines isnt rocket science. It does, however, require that you know which settings in the Joomla Administrator are relevant. It also means that youll have to spend some time tweaking these settings and learning how to adjust these settings, so that you can improve your rankings significantly.
This compact ebook will discuss the most important settings that are relevant for Joomla SEO, and gives you advice on what values are recommended. Three important notes to keep in mind before you dive in:

No bullshit
Despite our best efforts to base the information below on research findings instead of guesswork and personal experience, SEO still isnt (and probably never will be) an exact science. We therefore strongly encourage you to not just apply these tips blindly, but instead evaluate them in the light of your unique situation whenever possible.

No extensions
Many articles providing tips for Joomla SEO advise you to use extensions such as sh404SEF, JoomSEF or AceSEF. Each of these extensions offers a variety of possibilities for improving the SEO of your Joomla website. However, each of these extensions will also have to fetch data from your database and require additional code to be processed by your server. As such, these extensions will offer both a positive and a negative impact to your website. Therefore all tips below are based on functionalities present in the Joomla core.

No guarantees
It has already been mentioned that SEO isnt an exact science. Neither we, nor anybody else, can therefore guarantee that using any of these tips will increase your rankings. We do however, offer you a selection of best SEO practices according to industry leaders in both the Joomla sphere and the SEO sphere alike.

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Global Configuration
Site Name
This name will be visible in the tab of your browser that displays your website when youve enabled the setting Include Site Name in Page Titles. It will also be visible when your website is in offline mode. Considering that very little information other than the Site Name is present on the offline page, a proper Site Name is of high importance. Therefore you should make sure to at least include the name of your organization or brand in the Site Name.

Joomla! 3 in offline mode

Search Engine Friendly URLs

This setting converts default dynamic Joomla URLs such as http://www. example.org/index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=101 to static URLs such as http://www.example.org/index.php/page-title. Because the title of the page is now included in the URL, both humans and search engine robots will have an increased understanding of what this particular page is about. It also decreases the chance that problems will occur with the titles because special characters such as ? & = are being removed from the URL. An added benefit is that the keywords in the page title will be highlighted in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS) when a user is searching for these keywords.

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Use URL rewriting

For this setting to work its required that your Joomla website runs on Apache or IIS7 software. When enabled, the URL from the previous step http://www. example.org/index.php/page-title is now rewritten to the even cleaner URL http://www.example.org/page-title. This adaptation will make the URL look far more professional and makes it as short as possible. Visitors will now easily be able to see what the subject of this page is by looking at the page title list behind the domain name.

Joomla! 3 SEO settings

Adds suffix to URL

When you enable this setting, the URL from the previous step http://www. example.org/page-title will be rewritten to http://www.example.org/pagetitle.html. Even though the .html suffix has been used to indicate a static page (which supposedly gave that page a ranking benefit) in the past, that isnt the case anymore now. Considering how simple it is to add any suffix to a page, it is very likely that Google will attach no value to them anymore.

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Unicode Aliases
By enabling this option, the following URL will become valid: http://www. example.org/--. When this setting is disabled, the Greek characters would be converted to Latin ones. Our advice is to only enable this setting when your target audience is located exclusively within one country that uses a non-Western script.

Site Name in Page Titles example

Include Site Name in Page Titles

Research has shown that keywords that are at the front of your title tag carry higher value for the search engines than the ones at the back. Because the Site Name is the same for every page, it shouldnt take the highest value spot in the title. Its therefore our advice to set the Site Name to be included, but at the back of the Page Titles.

Site Meta Description for themepartner.com

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Joomla! 3 Metadata Settings

Site Meta Description

The Meta Description wont be shown on the website itself, but will be placed in the source code of the page instead. This description will become the snippet of text below the page title in the results page of a search engine. The Site Meta Description will only be shown when there is no other specific description, such as a description for a category or menu item present. Normally the Site Meta Description will be very generic in order to cover every possible page subject for which it might be displayed. Google on the other hand, is very capable to fetch and display a more relevant snippet of text from your page for those pages without a more specific meta description. We therefore advise you to keep the Site Meta Description field blank.

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Site Meta Keywords

The leading spokesperson for Google, Matt Cutts, has indicated that meta keywords have no role in determining the position of a website in the search results. For this reason we advise you to leave this field blank.

We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search. -- Matt Cutts
Robots
These settings affect the way in which search engines are allowed to index and crawl the content on your website. Each of these settings has a distinct effect, and depending on your unique situation you should choose the appropriate setting. Only in very rare cases youll need to select another value than the default value Index, Follow. - Index, follow: The spider will index this page and crawl through the rest of the pages on your website. - No index, follow: The spider wont index this page, but will crawl through the rest of the pages on your website. - Index, no follow: The spider will index the current page and stops there. - No index, no follow: The spider wont add this page to the index and wont crawl any other pages on your website either.

Content Rights
These rights will only be shown in the source code. Given how little added value this notion has for both search engine robots and human visitors, our advice is to leave this input field blank. Instead, the content rights should be displayed visually on the website itself so that both search engines and humans can view them.

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Show Author Meta Tag

Just like the Content Rights mentioned above, the Author Meta Tag will only be shown in the source code. Therefore the same advice applies to this field, leave it blank and display the information on the website itself.

Show Joomla! Version

Displaying the generator meta tag has very little influence on SEO, other than the marginal difference in loading speed that it causes. However, displaying this information in the source code can cause serious security problems and is therefore strongly discouraged.

Menu Manager

Joomla 3 Menu Manager

Menu Title
This title will be displayed in the browser title bar (unless its overwritten). The Menu Title will also be shown as a blue link in the search results of Google. When a user searches for a keyword that is present in your Menu Title, that word will be displayed in bold in the search results. Because the Menu Title will be visible on your website, its advised to use this field organically and target it for human visitors instead of search engines.

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Alias
The Alias will be used in the URL when Search Engine Friendly URLs are enabled. Keep in mind that special characters (such as ! , ?) are removed and non-Latin characters normally are converted to Latin ones. To make Joomla regenerate the Alias, make this field blank before saving the item.

Browser Page Title

The value entered in this field will be shown in the browser title bar (instead of the menu title). Therefore you should make sure that the Browser Page Title contains important keywords (in an organic, non-spammy way!). Also, keep in mind that Google shows up to 70 characters from your title before cutting it off with an ellipsis.

Joomla 3 Browser Page Title and Page Heading

Page Heading
The Page Heading is normally shown within the H1 tag on your website (though this depends on the template that youre using). In contrast to what most people think, the page title is normally shown in H2 tags on the website. Even though the value of this heading for SEO has decreased over the last few years, its still advised to set your heading tags correctly. This will give a clear signal to both search engines and human visitors about the subject of the page.

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Article Manager
Title
Try to make the title of every page unique. This will allow Google to find out that there isnt any duplicate content on the website (after all, every title is unique). Furthermore, it will offer users the ability to check if they already have seen the content on a page.

Joomla 3 Article Title

Meta description
Creating unique and targeted meta descriptions for each article can be a very time consuming process, but offers interesting SEO opportunities. Research has shown that proper meta descriptions can increase the Click Through Rate (the percentage of people clicking on a given search result) positively.

Joomla 3 Article Meta Description

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What is PageRank?
Google itself states that Pagerank is a technology that measures the importance of a web page by (amongst other data) looking at how many other pages are linking to it. The technology was created by Larry Page (one of the founders of Google) in the late 90s. This is also how the technology got its name, rather than denoting the ranking of pages that most people think it was named after.

The green bar showing the PageRank of a page

In the past, PageRank was seen as one of the most important factors in deciding how well a website would rank for a given keyword. Consequently, updates in the publicly visible PageRank (called Google Dances) were followed with great interest by people involved in SEO. But, the Google search algorithm has been improved greatly upon over the last couple of years. For example, Google indicates that it now takes over 200 factors into account to determine the positions of a web page for a given search query. As such, the value of the green bar (how PageRank is visible in for example the Google Toolbar) has decreased significantly over the past few years. Our advice is therefore to attach little to no value to the PageRank of a certain page, and instead focus on measurable data such as the conversion rate or the amount of linking domains.

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Additional Joomla! SEO tips

Remove /images/ from the robots.txt file
The default robots.txt file that is shipped with Joomla blocks search engine robots from accessing the /images/ folder on your website. Images (when optimized properly) can have a significant impact on the amount of traffic that you get from search engines. Its therefore strongly advised to remove this line from your robots.txt file and thereby grant search engines access to the folder.

Use alt tags

By using alt tags on your images youre doing both human visitors and search engines a favor. Human visitors with impaired eyesight that are using a screen reader will have the alt tag read to them (after all, they cant see the image). Search engine robots cant see the image either, so they use the alt tag to get a better idea of what the image is showing.

Speed up your website

Both human visitors and search engines love fast websites. Therefore we advise you to enable caching and GZIP compression in the Global Configuration of your website. Also, you should also make sure to host your website on a fast web server and dont load any unnecessary scripts, stylesheets and images.

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