Learn how to maximize your Joomla website for better search engine rankings. Our SEO guide will teach you how to make the most of Joomla for SEO. Includes Meta Data, URL structure, page speed, and compression techniques.
Looking for how to make your Joomla website SEO friendly? You are in the right place.
Joomla does pretty well out of the box but there are several elements that can be improved. Often times site owners want to add many unneeded features

Standard SEO Best Practices

• Keep the number of images to a minimum
• Give your images a descriptive names
• do not place any content or text in images (remember the search engines can not read the images)
• each page should have 250 to 700 words of content
• keep the user experience as a top priority
• Use H1, H2, H3 tags

Meta Data

Meta (or Page) Title

This is the most important of the meta data elements. The page title appears at the very top of most browsers and is the blue link in Google search result pages.
Page titles are a balancing act between including your keywords and creating an interesting clickable title. Page Titles should be kept to around 60 characters.

Meta Description

The meta description is not visible to the user anywhere on your page, but the search engines do use it to index and rank pages. Google will often times use the meta description as the text on the search engine results page.

Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords have really been abused in the past by spammers as a result most search engines do not use them for ranking. There is some research to suggest that search engines will use keywords to sort pages but not rank them. The end result is that you do not need to spend much time on your meta keywords.
If do add keywords to a page:

• Keep the number of keywords less than seven
• Make sure the keywords exist in your content
• separate them with commas

SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs

Joomla by default doe not have very good urls they typically look like:

• index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=126&catid=1&id=58&lang=en&view=article

The next step up is to turn on the core Joomla SEF URLs:

• best-practices/joomla-seo-best-practices.html

If you need more control you can look at a 3rd part SEF extension.  Many times the urls will look very similar to the Joomla SEF URLs but if you need more control or have special circumstances a SEF extension is very helpful.

Joomla Speed & Performance

Making your site fast will help you in many ways:

• A better user experience, how long do you stay on a slow loading site?
• Improved conversions
• More love from Google.  Google has added site speed to their 200 or so page ranking factors.

Follow these suggestions to improve the speed of your site.

Select a good hosting company

A fast server and good hosting company is the foundation for a fast site. Without a fast reliable server all of your other efforts will disappear. Not sure which company to go with?  Check out our Joomla Hosting Editor top picks.  Want to make sure your hosting company is doing a good job?  Think about using an uptime monitor and read about the advantages of an uptime monitor.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a must-have skill for web developers, blogger, Web Content Editor, Writer. Every minute, there are hundreds of new sites created. So if you do not make your site appear on search engines, no body may know your site and it’ll be forgotten and useless. This is must be a disaster for kind of ecommerce, blog sites. So Joomla sites is not an exception. A site ranking must be thought out when you are planning to create a website.

1. H1 & Alt tags

If you've been around Joomla seo for a while - you will know the importance of the H1 tag. This is one of the most important on-page Joomla and can still be used to directly influence SEO. If you use the H1 correctly, you can have a very postive influence on your search engine rankings. Your page should have only one
As per google algorithm, google spider very much consider on h1 and alt tags for onsite seo, The alt text tags’ purpose is to be displayed when an image is unable to load. Search engines take the alt tag into consideration, so don't forget to add alt tag to your images html.

2. Create your title tags

Tittle is also a very important item for SEO, or could be the most important. Title tag should be unique for every page ( max 60 chars ). It is possible to override the title using the Page Display Options in the advanced options of menu-items. Using this feature, you will have full control about your menu item titles.Menus >> Menu name >> Menu item >> Page display tab

3. Use Meta Description

The meta description is used to describe short summary of a page. So that readers can decide whether the page is what they are looking for or looks interesting. Your meta description will have the most impact if it is 160 characters or less in length, including spaces and punctuation. Make them compelling, concise and informative.
When you're writing your meta description, keep in mind the following tips:

• Don’t abuse important keywords
• Do write high quality descriptions.
• Don't repeat information that is in the page title.
• Don't include your site name or URL. value.
• Don't repeat descriptions over multiple pages

4. Don’t do keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is now considered as a strictly black-hat SEO technique. It does tend to have some positive short-term effects, but it’s playing with fire and rarely is beneficial in the long run. Ideally, each page of your website will use three to five keyword phrases, specific to that page.

5. Optimize anchor text

Optimizing you anchor text is extremely important, especially for your on-site URL's. When building in internal link structure, this is the most important issue to look at. Your anchor text links should contain keywords that describe your article, not something vague such as, read more, click here, etc.
Some recommended Search Engine Optimization extensions are MijoSEF, sh404SEF, and JoomSEF.

6. www or non-www url’s

If you Joomla site is accessible either with or without a www-prefix is actually also a matter of duplicate URL's. Google ask you to choose one in Webmaster Tools, and it's also important to choose one in Joomla. You can go into Google Webmaster Tools and specify how you want Google to index your site, with or without www. Or you also can set up the redirect in your .htaccess file:
non-www to www redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

www to non-www redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

7. Internal and external link

Linking internally is as good as creating backlinks from external websites.
Creating incoming links from other domain is really hard work while for internal links you are able to do it easily – that’s your site. So if you have a page with content relevant to the article you’re writing no wait further link to it internally! - it will improve your rankings.
Linking externally, you might need to usethe rel="nofollow" tag in your links. Too many external links from a page can be bad for SEO, so setting some of them to nofollow can be good.

<a rel="nofollow" href=http://differentdomain.com title=" Text"> Text</a>

8. Good site map to get Google indexed

One you created your site you should create a sitemap.xml file which contains the structure of your Joomla site’s URLs. This helps Google and other search engines to determine the structure of your website and how to reach all parts of it. The file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset   xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" etc. etc.>
     <url>
          <loc>http://joomlavi.com/</loc>
     </url>
     <url>
           <loc>http://joomlavi.com/another-page</loc>
     </url>
          ..................
</urlset>

9. Use Joomla SEO Extensions

The Joomla Extensions Directory - JED contains a lot of Joomla extensions and plugins for SEO. Using SEO extensions is a useful way to make sure your Joomla website is optimized for search engines. Below are some other widely recommended Joomla SEO plugins:

SH404SEF

SH404SEF is probably the most pupolar SEO extension for Joomla. It has been around for a long time and supported for all Joomla versions. The main features are rewriting URL, avoiding duplicate content and 301-redirect.

X-Map

This is a free and most extension for sitemap extensions on JED. Xmap creates a sitemap based on the menu structure of your Joomla website. Xmap allows you to create a map of your site using the structure of your menus.

SEO-Generator

This native Joomla 1.5 - 3.x plugin automatically generates keywords and description for each article by pulling text from the title and/or the content to help with SEO. It also gives you the ability to set different title configurations, robots meta tags and Google webmaster verification keys.

Header Tags

The Header Tags plugin gives you more control over the heading tags (h1-h6) in your website. The plugin searches for existing heading tags within the selected content area and handles them according to your specifications. So if want all the H4 tags in your site to be changed to H3

SEO Simple

This Joomla (1.5/1.6/1.7/2.5/3) plugin simply takes the starting chunk of text from the page’s content and applies that as the value for the meta description tag in the page’s head. Search engines often use a Web page’s meta description in the SERPs, and as such it is important that these meta descriptions have relevant text related to the page’s content.

Easy Frontend SEO

EFSEO is also a free SEO extension for Joomla. you can control all important metadata manually and automatically.

10. Avoid duplicate URL’s

Any kind of duplicate content in your site could harm search engine rankings. The main reason for duplicates to appear is the wrong structure of the website . First, you need to think over the structure and identify main categories and subcategories.. If you create multiple categories in advance this can prevent duplicate pages from appearing in future. There are many way of getting rid of duplicate URL’s like using 301 redirects, setting up rules in .htaccess, setting up robots.txt, use SEO extension mentioned above, google webmaster tool.

11. Avoid 404-errors

Google recommends building a nice custom 404 page for your case with the quote “A good custom 404 page will help people find the information they're looking for, as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further."
When someone to click on a link to your website and get a 404 error. Make sure that people can never end up with a meaningless 404 Page not found error message. Especially the default Joomla page for this is very ugly. As it will also completely different from the rest of your site, people will think the site is broken and leave it. If this happens often it can negatively affect your SEO rankings. The best way is to create a custom 404-page for your template. All our Joomla Templates have custom 404-page to make to they are good for SEO

12. Avoid Flash

If you're serious about SEO, just don't use any content that is invisible to search engines. So, basically just avoid Flash because of the following reasons:

• Flash is bad for SEO.
• Flash requires lots of bandwidth.
• Flash bad impact for user experience.
• Flash is not accessible.
• Many Mobile Devices Do Not Support Flash

13. 301 – redirect for old URL’s

As explained above, you should avoid 404 errors as much as possible. When you are migrating from an old site to a new one, or entirely renew your site. Your URL's will change. Also the Google index will take a period of time to update new URL, and it will keep on sending users from the search results to your old URL's. If you don’t do this, it will badly impact your search rankings! You have to determine what your old URL's are, redirect them to the new ones. You can custom redirects by using SEO extension like SH404SEF , or Shin .htaccess with following structure:

• RewriteRule ^oldpage1$ "http://newsite.com/newpage1" [R=301,L]
• RewriteRule ^oldpage2$ "http://newsite.com/newpage2" [R=301,L]

14. Google webmaster tools

Google's Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort. Once you've created your SiteMap, you will be able to submit it to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools gives the advanced search expert with following key features:

• show all sorts of errors with a site
• Set Site Defaults
• Analyze Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
• Top Search Queries
• Manage Sitelinks
• Enhance 404 Error Pages

15. Optimize your Robots.txt file to allow images to be indexed

The robots.txt file's purpose is to inform the search engines bots/crawlers/spiders about the files you don't want them to index. Beside content, html structure… you can use images to make your website SEO friendly by removing the Disallow on the images folder in the robots files.
Open your robots.txt file (in the root folder of your Joomla! website) and remove the images line so that now search engines are not denied from indexing your images.
Beside allowing your Robots.txt file for images, you also need to optimize image for site speed improvement. This will help a little for SEO

1. Overview

Error Reporting is a useful Joomla function to troubleshoot PHP errors on your Joomla site. This function provides some clues about what and where the PHP problems are.

2. When to turn it on?

Got blank/ white screen in your Joomla site frontend? Well, that calls for turning on the error reporting feature. You may also want to disable the URL rewriting (htaccess method) using Apache mod_rewrite under the SEO settings for differential diagnosis of the issue as url rewriting with htaccess file in non-supported server (mod_rewrite not active) also renders blank pages.

3. How to proceed

In your Admin Panel, navigate through Global Configuration >> Server tab >> Error Reporting.
There are several options for you to choose, namely:

• System Default : Joomla will inherit error reporting defaults set in the server (usually in php.ini file).
• None : Choose this option to switch off the Error Reporting so that no notification will be shown. However, when any 3rd party extension overrides Joomla error reporting with their own settings, notifications may still appear.
• Simple : Overrides server settings to give a basic report with warnings only about the fatal errors.
• Maximum (Recommended) : Overrides server settings to gives full report with all the errors, warnings, notices, deprecated functions call, strict standards on the website.
  

Tip : You can enable the Error Reporting with the configuration.php file. Edit the file and add one of the following numeric values for $error_reporting, which equals to the PHP’s error constants:

-1 = 0 : No error reporting.
30711 = E_ALL & ~(E_NOTICE|E_WARNING) : All errors reporting. No warnings or notices.
30711 = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE : All errors and warnings reporting. No notices.
30719 = E_ALL : All errors, warnings and notices reporting.
32767 = E_ALL | E_STRICT : All errors, warnings, notices and strict standards reporting.

4. Recommendations

For developers error reporting gives them a headstart and they know what they have to fix and where. For regular users, it helps to provide more details to the developer instead of saying "I got blank / white page".
Error reporting should be disabled on an live site as the error reports would be visible to your users and information about your website may be revealed including the absolute path of your website.
Turn it on only when something goes wrong such as a blank page and/or you are debugging your Joomla website. Once the bugs are fixed, change the error reporting settings back to “None”. This is highly recommended for any Joomla website in term of security.

5. Live example

Let's see how an error would be reported when your Joomla Error Reporting is ON.

• Open your_site_root/components/com_content/content.php and remove “;” from line no. 11.
• Check your front-end. As your Error Reporting is set as "None", it must be just a blank page.
• Now proceed to turn the Error Reporting to "Maximum" and you can see the exact error.
  

6. Joomla extension for Error Reporting

You may find some more useful Joomla extensions for error reporting in our Joomla! Extension Directory. Easy Error Reporting would be a handy choice as you can enable the error reports for specific user groups only.

7. Further reading

• Sever Settings Group - Joomla! Docs
• error_reporting - PHP.net
• How to turn your error reporting to Maximum - OSTraining

SEO Your Joomla! Website in 11 Super Easy Steps

So you've chosen Joomla! as your CMS of choice. You've bought, or designed and developed a beautiful template and added all your creatively crafted content to your new Joomla! website and you are now ready to start open your website up to that hungry horde of customers hurling their credit cards at you.

One problem: If you've started with a base Joomla! installation, odds are that those thousands of people itching to get their hands on your products probably aren't even going to be able to find your website in the first place. In contrast to Wordpress (which is what you could consider Joomla!'s primary competitor) Joomla! Is simply not quite as search engine friendly right out the box. In fact, I have found that you actually need to go through a number of steps (11, to be precise) in order to get a Joomla! website into a position where it really performs satisfactorily when it comes to on-site SEO factors.

Having developed a number of Joomla! websites over the years, I would like to share with you the exact guidelines that I give to the junior web designers at Red Giant Design Studio to make sure that our websites compete admirably in the rankings.
Without further ado, let's get stuck into the meat of this tutorial.

1. Make Sure You're on the Right Type of Server

This is the first step for a reason. It's important.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are using an IIS (Windows) server to host your Joomla! website, you are going to get so frustrated that your Mac may end up at the bottom of a swimming pool. (This may or may not have happened)

The reason I say this is that URL rewriting just never seems to gel well with any rewrite module that IIS can use. Rewrite modules are also a nightmare to get set up if you are using a shared hosting account. I've also, on occasion, had issues with the installation and configuration of Joomla! on an IIS server.
For practicality and succinctness's sake, I would simply recommend that you save yourself endless headaches and get your Joomla! site set up on an Apache server with mod_rewrite installed. Your nerves and the SEO components you're going to install will thank you.

2. Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess

Because you are going to want to enable URL rewriting to make those URLs a whole lot more attractive than they start out, you are going to need to rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess - which is the version used by Joomla! and mod_rewrite.

3. Enable SEF URLs and URL Rewriting

In your Joomla! Global Configuration, set the "Search Engine Friendly URLs" and "Use URL Rewriting" options to "Yes".
Joomla! SEF Settings
Search Engine Friendly URLs is the setting that removes all the dynamically generated gobbledygook from your URL and replaces it with the alias of the menu item that you're using on the page.
URL Rewriting is the setting that removes the /index.php/ from the URL. For this to be enabled must have mod_rewrite enabled and must have a .htaccess file.
The balance of the settings are really left more up to your discretion. I tend to prefer leaving the other three off. You may like to turn on the option to include your Site Name in your page titles, particularly if the site has a lot of content. Personally, I like to micro-manage everything and craft each title separately in most instances.

4. Remove "/images/" from your Robots.txt file

This is something about Joomla! that has always left me bewildered. In the automatically generated robots.txt file that is created on installation, Joomla! includes a disallow rule for the images directory, instructing the search engines not to search or index your images folder.
As you may well know, images can generate a sizable chunk of your traffic from Google and the search engines if you have them correctly optimized.
Because all the image optimisation in the world won't help you if you are telling Google not to bother with your images directory, I highly recommend that you remove the following line from your robots.txt file:
/images/

5. Install JCE Editor

Not only is JCE Editor free, but it provides a whole bunch of really cool features which will help you put together and maintain your site.
My favourite two things about JCE are the fact that you can instruct it not to strip code that you add through the editor and the fact that it provides a great interface through which you can add images, coupled with Alt tags and image dimensions.
It's a really good component for Joomla! and I highly recommend you use it.
JCE Editor Logo

6. Use Alt Tags and Image Dimensions

This tip is really not specific to Joomla! but it is important nevertheless. The JCE editor allows you add the Alternate Text to describe your image as well as add the dimensions right within the image upload tool.
In case you weren't aware, adding image dimensions to your images allows the "space" to load before the actual image does. This should help improve your load times a bit.
 The only drawback to SEO Boss is that it may not gel well with all of your installed components, in which case you'll need to go and manually edit those through the relevant component's own interface. For everything else, however, it's great.

7. Manage Your Meta Data

Although meta keywords tags are pretty much redundant these days, your meta descriptions and title tags are still rather important.
I came across a pretty useful component quite recently, called SEO Boss. The only feature of this that I actually use is the meta tag manager, but I have found this to be extremely useful.

To edit meta data for your Joomla! website normally, you need to navigate to each menu item/article and edit the descriptions and page titles manually. With SEO Boss, you'll find a single screen that lets you edit all of your meta data directly from that interface.
The only drawback to SEO Boss is that it may not gel well with all of your installed components, in which case you'll need to go and manually edit those through the relevant component's own interface. For everything else, however, it's great.

8. Choose www. or non-www. and Redirect

Joomla!, unlike Wordpress, doesn't automatically redirect your website to either the www. or non-www. version. This obviously poses a canonical problem, which you need to correct manually via your .htaccess file.
To redirect from non-www. to www. add the following code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
Alternatively, you can redirect to non-www. by adding this code instead:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.yourwebsitehere.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourwebsitehere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

9. Be Consistent When Linking Internally

When it comes to CMS websites (especially Joomla! ones) duplicate content can become a bit of a problem. The key to combating this is to ensure that you link consistently to internal content.
By this, I mean only creating links to either the www. or non-www. version that you chose above, only linking to pages using a trailing slash or no trailing slash, or pages with a suffix (.html) or no suffix. Only link to a single version of a page, ever.
Remember, it's not duplicate content if nothing is linking to it for Google to find it.
You can't really control the way others link to you, but you can set an example. If people are linking to you incorrectly, you can add further redirect rules to 301 redirect to the correct links.

10. Speed Up Your Website!

It has to be said that Joomla! doesn't do page speed very well straight out of the box. The good news is that you can speed things up significantly by doing three main things: Leveraging browser caching, enabling Gzip compression and compressing your images.
10.1. Leverage Browser Caching
Without getting into too much detail, you want to utilize browser caching to instruct your browsers to cache certain types of content found on your site, as well as tell them how long to cache them for. My suggestion is to simply add the following code to the bottom of your .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 1 months"

You can, of course, tweak the code if your content needs to be held in the cache for shorter/longer periods, or if you would prefer not to cache certain types of content.

10.2. Enable Gzip

A good way to improve load times is to use Gzip to compress your code. I tend to only do this once I've got my whole site set up, but it's generally a good idea to use it.
To enable Gzip via Joomla!, simply navigate to Global Configuration > Server and switch the option for Gzip compression to "Yes".
Note: This will only work if mod_gzip is installed on your server.
Depending on your host, you may also be able to enable server size compression through your hosting control panel. I recommend enquiring from your hosting provider how you can go about this.

10.3. Optimize Your Images

Image optimization is something that every web designer should ensure happens, regardless of whether you're using Joomla! or not. It's ridiculous how many times I've come across websites loading 350kb images that can easily be cut down to 25kb. If you're not an expert when it comes to Photoshop, you can download highly optimized versions of your images using Google's Page Speed tool.
Through the above methods and other really minor tweaks, we generally manage a Google Page Speed score of 95+ and I can honestly report I find that many of our Joomla! sites actually perform better than similar Wordpress sites that we've developed.

11. Install Xmap

Xmap is quite simply the best sitemap component that I've found for Joomla! thus far.
It seamlessly generates XML and HTML sitemaps for your website and there are many plugins available for popular Joomla! components such as Virtuemart and sh404sef.
Simply navigate to Xmap and create a new sitemap. Choose the menu items you want to include, set their priorities, click "Save" and voila! You can then create a menu item for your HTML sitemap and grab the link for your XML sitemap to add to Webmaster Tools.