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".
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.
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.
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 ^(.*)$ https://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 (.*) https://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.
12. BONUS: SEO Components to Make Your Life Easier
I have found that with Joomla 2.5+, SEO is a lot easier to implement without the use of unnecessary 3rd party plugins. Just in case you would like additional control over your SEO settings, however, here are two of my favourite 3rd party SEO components for Joomla!:
- Sh404sef - This is a really great component for Joomla! that allows you to do a whole lot more than SEO and is also the one that I tend to find is a bit easier to configure.
-
Artio JoomSEF - JoomSEF is similar to sh404SEF, but also has a free version available which you can test with. It probably isn't quite as powerful as sh404sef does and, last time I tried it, it was a little tiresome to configure. That said, it's still a powerful component and allows you a lot more control over your SEO, if you feel you need it.
Taking the above steps into account, I have found that we are able to get our Joomla! sites into a position where their rankings aren’t hurt by on-site factors that haven't been dealt with correctly. There are always additional tweaks that you can make which may or may not help you, but this should be a great start for you, particularly if you are just starting out with Joomla!
I'm a strong believer that on-site optimization simply needs to be good/solid, without having to be exceptional. This is especially true when considering the recent algorithm changes and the mindset of Google trying to handle poorly optimized, but trusted, sites a bit better.
Have you got any other tips and tricks for optimizing a Joomla! website? Perhaps you've had a bad experience with Joomla? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks Mark. As a web agency, we develop all of our sites in Joomla as standard, so I know the perils of carrying out SEO within it.
A great mod that I use is 'Tag Meta' (https://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/meta-data/7124). It allows you to find any URL with the keyword that you have selected within it and then change the meta data, canonical link, etc. This is incredibly handy when you have some dynamically generated content that you need to SEO. Check it out as it might help you out at some point!
Matt.
Thanks for reading and commenting Matt.
And thanks for the Tag Meta tip, will go check it out. :)
Thanks for a good blog post.
It is worth noting that Xmap doesn't generate a SEF URL by default, a tutorial on how to do this can be found at https://benath.me/d
Thanks for the comment and pointing out the Xmap tip!
Yes nice and informative post about joomla SEO. Thanks
Happy to help. :)
Ya really helpful post regarding on joomla... Thanks Mark!
+1 for Xmap. It's very useful solution. Have not known about it yet...Thank you, Mark.
Glad you found something of use in the post, Seot0p. Thanks for reading.
I love the sh404SEF component for Joomla. I use it on over 30 sites and is great for SEO
It is great indeed. Thanks for commenting!
Great write up! There is still a free Sh404sef version roaming around on the internet, but if you wish you could also choose the - I believe - 35 Dollar one. It's also fairly easy to set up a suffix for your titles in Joomla which saves you a lot of time.
Thanks for the comment. :)
I think it's probably worth the money just purchasing sh404sef, even if a free version is available. They definitely don't make it easy to find though.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Just a note: in joomla 2.5 and in 3.0 you have option to configure different titles and meta on all content, category and menu pages. All of these title-meta-seo extensions are useful to use in joomla 1.5 only and are needed only for "all others" pages in j3.0 and j2.5. Extension for one of all these cases is joomla seo pagination I recommend you to use url rewriting components like sh404 if you are in high competition niche - you will not link your wrong urls, but your competition can do this :)
Great article, I'm surprised you didn't make more of sh404 given that it has its own meta editor (so not entirely sure why you would use a separate one), plus lots of other features such as dealing with canonical URL's/duplicated content properly, www/non www redirect, upper/lower case redirects, creating short URL's and QR codes, and of course managing redirects including a 404 request manager which lets you keep track of pages which are causing errors and redirect them with a couple of clicks to the correct page (putting in place a proper redirect without any coding being required).
We've been using it since the first version and swear by it!
I mentioned in a reply further up, there is an extension which lets you add structured data - https://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/meta-data/20671 - which is well worth looking at, if you know about and want to use microdata.
Ruth
Thank you Ruth - I found this advice to be the most useful.
Mark you rock man! I am really more of an eCommerce Platform or WordPress proficient SEO and this helps to bridge the gap even more for Joomla! and the user friendliness. Only a shame that SEOBoss costs some money, all my Joomla! clients tend to be tight on marketing budgets.
Keep the Joomla! SEO tips coming, thanks again!
Hey Frank,
Really glad you enjoyed the article, and thanks for the awesome comment. There is a free version of SEOBoss, but you would probably need the Pro version to do the really awesome stuff. Give it a try sometime though. :)
I build most sites using Joomla! and this post would have saved me months of not having to figure this stuff out on my own. However, I didn't even think about /images/ being in in the robots.txt. I use Sh404sef on every site. One thing that has really helped me improve my page speed score is a little plugin called jbetolo it has helped me improve my sites score by 20+ points by merging/compressing js and css as well as some other handy features. It does take some tweaking to make it work with other extensions/templates, but still well worth it in my opinion.
Hi Brett,
Glad you enjoyed the article, and thanks for the jbetolo tip. I'll definitely check it out!
I was thrown into a quiet a culture shock when i first helped a client that was using a Joomla site. Maybe I was just too comfortable working with wordpress and the ease of implementing SEO there. So many things I have to learn.. thanks Mark!
It is a bit of a change. In contrast, I started knew Joomla back to front before I started using Wordpress, so the transition was significantly easier. They are both really great systems though.
Glad you enjoyed the article!
100 Thumbs Up Article :) Thanks mark for sharing such a nice information to optimize Joomla based websites..
Glad you enjoyed it. :)
Great info Mark, Joomla is very powerful CMS, and has come along way, I remember the first few versions. The newer versions are much simpler, and user friendly, making it very easy for the end client to manage their site, and for SEOs to educate their clients on simple points to keep in mind when publishing new articles such as meta tags, alt text and so on, which can all be managed by the Joomla backend panel.
Thanks for the article. :)
I agree with you 100%, Wasim. Thanks for reading and commenting.
Great Post!
Ive used the sh404sef component for over a year now (on both joomla 1.5 and 2.5) and it saves me a lot of trouble, especially when it comes to duplicate content. Ive taken over a couple of sites built by other developers, and the duplicate content was a nightmare until installing sh404sef.
Of course if you can handle the SEO without using this, thats a bonus, as i find explaining sh404sef to clients can at times go a bit over their heads.
Will have to take a look into our server compatibility with Gzip i think!
Thanks Daniel! sh404sef can be a real time saver. I'm often too much of a purist and simply won't use it unless I absolutely need to.
It really is a great help with duplicate content and a host of other issues, though.
Good luck investigating Gzip. Glad you enjoyed the post. :)
I think i have tried every CMS there is on earth, and I just don't get what people find in joomla that's better than WP - speaking on both performance and security.
Can anyone enlighten me? :)
It's got to do with what you require, functionality-wise, for each project. There are certain complex systems that Joomla is simply better suited for.
If you are happy with Wordpress and it accomplishes everything you need it to, then there's no reason for you to change. :)
Great yet simple Joomla SEO tips. At SimplerWebs, we do not use Sh404SEF, or any other SEO componentbecause we believe in "less is more" motto, therefore, we avoid any unnecessary components, modules and plugins! We prefer to be in full control of our clients' SEO campaign. Please note that we are not saying you should not use any of your preferred SEO tool!
i'm of the same opinion about SEO, i feel like one extention update could ruin your rankings.
how do you get rid of the article id in the url though ?
I guess this is the most accurate, to the point and detailed information on Joomla SEO I have encountered till date. Joomla by born is a real pain in the (air), although there are small fixes and things that need to be taken care in order to stay away from the big problems but on a ground reality these important pointers are usually overlooked by developers and business owners..
Great stuff and very timely information in my case :)
Thanks for the really awesome comment! Glad you enjoyed it. :)
Great post Mark. Could you please share information on SEO process for Dot Net Nuke (DNN) platform websites.
Thanks, Chinna. Unfortunately I don't deal at all with any Windows-based systems, particularly Dot Net Nuke, so I can't help you there. :( Sorry!
Oh no issues Mark :) . I got lot of information from this post. Here we can find few similarities for DNN & Joomla such as /images/. in DNN websites also this tag will be there so we need to remove this to allow search engines to index the images folder. in the same way i will check for other factors.
Cheers...!
Thank you Mark for this! As a newbie to Joomla and also SEO it's really really helpful!:) Working my way through it and i've got to step 8 so far, but its not so clear when you give the code to redirect from non-www to www. Should we be putting in the full website url where you have put the www or do we need to leave the www out for one of them? Would the code looking like this be correct?RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\example.com RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] Thanks again!
Hi Natty,
Sorry for the delayed reply. I'm glad the post has helped you somewhat. :)
As for your redirect code. You don't need to change the code whatsoever. For the non-www to www redirect, all you need is the code as I've pasted it:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
This basically tells it to add a www. onto anything that doesn't have it. :)
Hope that helps! Let me know if you're still struggling and I'll try to help you out.
All my sites are in Joomla! and I thought I had everything covered, but I guess I was wrong. The "leverage browser caching" is something I didn't know about, and makes a HUGE difference IMO. Great article!
Do you ever have troubles getting components to be SEO friendly? I'm having big issues using GCalendar right now. The URL length is really irritating me.
Hey there Jack,
Really glad I could help, in one area at least! :)
I've definitely had many troubles with certain extensions and SEF URLs. If you're using something like sh404sef or JoomSEF, they generally have the option to change what handles the URLs for any of your major components. It sometimes helps to fiddle a bit with that to see if you can reach a decent compromise. Some components just won't budge, though.
I've found that it's often worth going for a premium component with a bit of a reputation as those devs often release plugins for things like sh404sef, which makes your life significantly easier.
Sometimes you've just gotta bite the bullet and make do, unfortunately.
Great content Mark, your tips and suggestions are best to solve On site technical issues for joomla users. One of the most difficult thing is redirecting our site you have shared really good tips on it. Glad to know about JoomSEF and sh404SEF and how to deal with duplicate content. Now any updates will not affect our ranking because of poor on-site optimization.
Thanks for the great comment Sanket. Glad I could help!
Great tips Mark. I find TagMeta plugin for Joomla really useful for editing meta tags, title tags etc. It's simple, easy to use and you can use it for any full URL or reg ex match. You can also insert rel canonical tag as well - handy for some of those nasty components that produce duplicate URLs.
Someone above also mentioned Tag Meta. I have checked it out and it looks great! I'm going to test it out today.
Thanks for commenting. :)
Great tips Mark!! Personally not a big fan of Joomla but the /images/ in the robots.txt tip is an AWESOME tip! Many of these tips can be applied to any CMS system. I've recent been playing with the Fission Content Management System that a close friend built and I really like the SEO capabilities and functionality of it.
Thanks so much, Dubs. Glad you found the tips to be useful.
Great write up Mark. I actually found a lot of good advice in here that applies to any e-commerce platform. I actually think one of the sites for which I do SEO had "/images/" in the robots.txt file! Thanks for the tip and now it's fixed.
Glad I could help! It's taken many years of experience with Joomla! to compile this list. All the SEO people are too busy optimizing Wordpress. ;)
ha ha... funny you mention WordPress. Big fan of WP and that Fission CMS I mentioned below as well. It's difficult to believe that we ever maintained static websites without using a content management system.
Joomla has been killing me and my fellows when it comes to do the optimization part. Not even to mention the instability between Joomla and plugins. I've accomplished to code a few websites running Joomla but I rather use these days Wordpress instead for several reasons. However there are many other CMS that's even worse. And nice to see that Joomla has been releasing new stuff lately and I've not infact dealt anything with 2.5+
Though, nice guide Mark. It' covers pretty much all the important stuff. And thanks god for sh404sef.
Hey Carl,
Thanks for commenting. I definitely suggest you give Joomla 2.5+ a go. It's really a major step up from previous versions, particular now that the main extension developers have come to the party.
It'll never be as easy to optimize as a Wordpress website, but sometimes you just need a Joomla! site to do certain things. ;)
Cheers
Mark
Thanks for a great post on Joomla Mark! I've built a few Joomla-based sites in the past and have worked through most of the above on my own for optimization purposes. It would have been great to have had a post like this when I was doing that heh. The /images/ robots.txt tip is a good one. Took a while to figure that out originally. I'm going to have to check out SEO Boss. Anyways, thanks for the tips!
A pleasure, George. Glad you enjoyed it!
Mark, Some great tips here, I want to add my recommendation to installing sh404sef which ever version of Joomla that you are running,
This adds an option for 301 redirect www/non-www within the component and if you want to spend the time the social SEO configuration to add location tags and contact tags.
Some tips that I also need to investigate a little further.
Very pleased to see Joomla getting a mention.
Quite right, Thatch. Thanks for the comment.
Great article! As primarily a Joomla and Drupal shop with large e-commerce projects we are constantly working with dynamically generated content. I agree with Matthew above that Tag Meta is a great tool for SEO.
Thanks a bunch, Harry.
I'm definitely interested in Tag Meta. So let's use an example of a Virtuemart e-commerce project. Typically, what would you look to use Tag Meta to do for that online store?
Is there any real benefit in adding the meta title tag and title tag, as is the case with seoboss? Reason I ask is I use sh404 for all my meta management and only makes the change on a title level. Think this is a better option than adding yet another component that may slow/complicate the site as a whole.
Your thoughts?
Very useful and thought provoking article.
Hi Mark, I'm using this blog many times optimising Joomla websites, many thanks.
Today I red an interesting blog about adjusting your .htaccess file with only Etag optimization. Powers up a standard Joomla 3 websites pagespeed from 51 to 88! See https://magazine.joomla.org/issues/Issue-June-2012/item/787-htaccess-File-That-FREAKIN-Works
Very good article, I have been looking for more information on this topic and in this blog I have been able to find the most relevant information. Thank you very much
Hi Mark. Am just wondering. My root folder has a .htaccess as hidden as htaccess.txt. if i change the htaccess.txt to .htaccess will their be conflicts. I use the original .htaccess to redirect error pages to customized pages. Thanks.
Good post, there are many people who wish learn optimizing joomla website
Hi,
Thank you, but i have some problem,when i installed the Xamp in my site ,the Seomoz give me error from it !!!
It tell me ,you have very much link in your page !!!
please help me
Regards
Ms.Behnoush
Hi,
I saw that you were talking about the problem with the h1 headings in Joomla!. The fact that some pages appear without an h1 really is a pity because the headings and especially the h1 and h2 tags are important for the SEO. I work at the Aimy Extensions Team and we have developed a plugin called Aimy H1 Heading to solve this problem without any template overrides. If there is a page without an h1 this extension takes the first h2 and turns it into an h1.
I hope this information helps you improving your SEO.
Hi!
Thank you Mark for this post!
I am pleased that our extension is useful.
We are interested in making SEO Boss more comfortable and functional.
We look forward to any suggestions to improve the system's functionality.
Best regards, Alex
Very nice article. Jomla actually requires more handling for SEO but it's mor powerful than Wordpress I think. As SEO, there are steps for perforance and speed.
Thanks so much for this informative guide. It's been exceptionally useful for us. Adittedly, I prefer Wordpress as its just so SEO friendly, but we have clients who have existing Joomla sites so we work with it. As others have mentioned, the "remove images" from robots.txt file is a great thing to implement!
Very good article Mark, especially considering it was written a couple of years ago. Most of your tips still hold true. I used to be a SH404sef user but development seemed to be abandoned at one point so I gave up on it. The latest default core sef within Joomla 2.5.x is very workable with a little effort and I like that I'm not adding yet another plugin and component to load up. I haven't migrated to Joomla 3.x yet.
Well right now I see that joomla is weaker than wordpress its like Apple VS Samsung for mobile. :) Even for seo wordpress is build better and have more quallity plugins. Anyway - nice article I got one blog with joomla and it was helpful :)
Great post. XMAP is a good component. Using GZip Compression, Leverage Browser Caching and JCH-Optimize plugin are good ways to speed up my Joomla site. I accelerate my site to 230% (page load time reduces from 5.71 second to 2.48 second). My method has shared with: https://vandon.com.vn/joomla/18363-guide-you-to-optimize-to-speed-up-your-joomla-website-quickly-and-efficaciously. Hope this helps for someone!
Thanks for the nice article. My site www.buckeyesound.com was missing many things. I have applied your tips.
Thanks again,
Farhana
Hi, I have Open Graph plugin installed on my website and it works well if i havent SEO optimized my website but after I SEO optimized my website the plugin don't work anymore. I have followed your " SEO Your Joomla! Website in 11 Super Easy Steps". What SEO settings have interefered with the Plugin? Thanks
I am little bit confused, whether I read a terrible article or guiding article today.
I have "Zero" knowledge and experience on this "Joomla". From last 2 years my site suffered from "Word press- Blogspot and Laravel 5.2). My experience about these 3 platform is not "Sweet".
Most of time my site faced " Image optimization" "Page load speed" and "onpage SEO" error problems. Word press went in hell with its plugins- which worked for "redirects" rather than help to my site. On Laravel 5.2 - image optimization problem.
Now my developer advised and stated to create new site on "Joomla", about which I am "Zero" knowledge.
Can you tell me, may I stop my developer to using "Joomla"?
I would like to add Kantipath News is a News portal, which uploads 50-60 news contents each day in various categories and 100+ image files. We use Native language and English both.
Is there any solution for "Image Optimization" "On page SEO" for News sites?
Please not Our server is Inmotionhosting, VPS and Apache server.
For solving joomla pagination duplicate titles in blog install this plugin: https://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/title-management/27673
Thanks for the post. But i noticed many of the plugins links that you posted are no longer exist and the plugin is NOT even found in the official Joomla plugin page. It seems like many good plugin authors are moving out from Joomla.
Moz Analytics is showing Joomla 3 tag pages as Duplicate Page Content?
example URL: www.domain.com/tag/tagID-tagname
I already added "tag" as a URL parameter with Crawl=No URLs.
Is there anything else I should do?
And also:
1. Remove "/media/" from your Robots.txt file
2. Using canonical plugin
3. Enable joomla cache speed up website speed
Thanks Mark. for sharing such a great article. Its help me lot.
I have probably read this post more than 50 times in last six months. When I started my site https://lokkatha.com two years ago, i even did not have a clue about joomla and it took me a long time to do mistakes and correct things through do-it-yourself method. I even did not have an idea about the vocabulary; SEO, SEF ... and so on. There were issues with site speed, site urls and it really was a lot of headache. Two years later when I see that I have now built more than 7 well functioning sites with Joomla, I must give credit to this post by Mark Atkinson that I have bookmarked for further uses. There will be a time when a novice like me will also write something on SEO. This article by yours Mark, will be the starting point for my readers. Thanks!
Great post Mark, I like your ideas and these are more useful for a website to make its Joomla website more SEO friendly. There are so many people who think that it will not work for them but by reading this post everyone can get the best idea and how making your Joomla website SEO friendly that results you high organic user base.
Hi Mathew,
Thanks for sharing such a extensive information in so easy manner. This is one of the best tutorial I have ever read about optimizing a Joomla website.
Normally people write about SEO but only for WordPress, and don't think for the Joomla users. You fill this gap.
Thanks, Great article. I wonder if the meta tag/description management components are absolutely necessary or do they just make the meta tag/description process easier for us? Once I installed such a component and I saw some meta descriptions and keywords shown in the component while they were too much messy and different from what I had inserted into Joomla itself.
Excellent post - thank you!
I mostly do WordPress development, but I also manage a Joomla site for my day job. It drives me nuts how difficult it can be to apply even the most basic SEO techniques on the Joomla site. These tips are really helpful.
Thanks Rob, really glad you enjoyed it!
I manage a few big e-commerce sites based on Joomla. Trying optimizing those! ;)
Never found it an issue with sh404sef and 2.5.x with better url re-writing. / urls arent any less useful than .html. Except Virtuemart2 wont work with sh404sef since VM2 but it has better seo optimization in that version anyway. sh and 1.5 worked better together.
Basic SEO isnt a big problem on out of the box Joomla I have found. Might get tricky when you have older components or non updated installed that cause trouble........not that session or id based urls or need hold anyone back..........amazon used them for years.
Personally, off topic but best thing we ever done was xml feed google merchant from virtuemart...so much free traffic
I'm definitely more of a WordPress guy but this is going to be great when I start dabbling in Joomla. Also, never found a good resource on Browser Caching before, 2-in-1 post for me, great job.
Awesome! Really glad you found it useful, Ryan. If you're going to start dabbling in Joomla, Joomla 3 should definitely peak your interest. :)
Great article! And very timely, as I've just run into an issue w/ Joomla that's a bit confusing. I didn't see anything in the article or the comments, but have you experienced an issue in which Joomla is automatically putting in hidden text in a div tag on article/video pages? This is my first experience working w/ Joomla, and I've no clue why this is happening. The <div> tag is actually called "hide text for social." Huh? If you've any experience and/or advice, I'd be in your service, sir. Thank you!
Hi Cristopher, thanks for reading and commenting.
What you're describing definitely doesn't sound like something that Joomla! would do natively.I'd bet that it's either one of the components/plugins that you've installed, or the template you're using that's added that in.
If you can provide a bit more information about the nature of the site, what template you're using and what sort of components/plugins you've installed, I might be able to assist a little better. Perhaps this might even be a question for the Q&A section? If I can't help you, perhaps somebody else can. :)
Thanks for responding. The site, which I just started working on, is an information resource containing articles, videos, and other resources. The hidden text appears on the actual resource pages, so if you click through from a top-level page to the full copy, the hidden text is the teaser that was on the previous page (if that makes sense). I'm glad to know it's not native; I'll have to find out what plug-ins they've loaded and educate myself. I appreciate your help and the article, which I'm sure I'll return to again and again. Cheers, Mark!
Nice info but a bit technical!! but really helpful.. will try to look into more detail
Hey there, if you're stuck, might I suggest posting the bits you're unsure about in the Q&A section, where I (and others) will be more than willing to help make things easier for you to understand. :)
When I moved from static HTML design to CMS, I started with Joomla!. It was a big headache to make it SEO friendly, so I decided to move to Wordpress. Never looked back since then, and I don't think I would go back to Joomla. But this info will come in handy in case I'm faced with a project that's already running on Joomla. Thanks!
Hi Rob,
Thanks for commenting. I use both systems and, while Wordpress is definitely miles better in the SEO department, Joomla! is still a great CMS for certain projects. It's a case of establishing what the website needs to do and then deciding on the CMS. Sometimes it's worth it to run with an SEO headache when Joomla! has extensions that provide the functionality you need and Wordpress doesn't.
Glad you found the info useful, though.
Thanks Mark, that's very interesting. Can you give me an example of a functionality that you could accomplish with Joomla, that Wordpress would not support?
Hi Mark,
I too am pretty interested in hearing about things you've been able to do with Joomla that WP cannot. Thanks in advance.
Great post man. From an 'ease of use' perspective, I lean towards Wordpress as a lot of clients would get frustrated editing articles from the Joomla interface. Nice tips though.
Thanks bud. From a client perspective, we also lean towards Wordpress, so completely understandable. :)
i prefer create my own sitemap.xml than using xmap
or you can use xml-sitemap.com
Why do you prefer a separately generated sitemap? What doesn't Xmap do well for you?
Great little tutorial indeed. I would have added a few extra points such as:
1. a php hack to add the rel="author" tag to the author's name in article view; 2. a similar php hack that adds microformats in the contact pages; 3. a caution to watch out for extensions that have hidden backlinks causing you to bleed PR
Hey Guillaume,
Glad you enjoyed the post. I love the additions you've mentioned as they are not things that I have personally tried. Have you written/seen any tutorials that cover adding those tweaks/hacks? I'd love to send them round the office and have everybody implement them into our processes.
That said, we hardly ever use the native Joomla! article system for authored content. We tend to prefer 3rd party components and have methods for adding in rel="author" tags with those components.
I'd love to hear more from you on those tweaks though.
Cheers Mark
Hi Mark
Thanks for your reply. I will write up a little something about these hacks and let you know. Perhaps that would be the occasion for me to try the seomoz blogging platform on this website (I am a newbie).
I would be interested to know what component are you using to implement that rel="author" thing? All those I have seem so far seem a bit heavy or clunky to me and I generally try to keep my system as light as possible, hence the tweaks on php.
All the best
G
What are you using to optimize your rich snippets? any suggestions?
Hi folks,
Just to chime in - there is an extension called J4Schema which does this automagically for you, and also puts a nice little button on the JCE Editor for in-line addition of microdata according to schema.org markup. The pro version isn't too expensive and I highly recommend it, it's saved me hours and hours of work and it gives instant benefits.
https://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/meta-data/20671
Ruth
Hi Mark,
Excellent post. I learned more about SEO reading this article than browsing through the web trying to understand how it works. I'm fairly new to Joomla, and happy using it. This will definitely help lots in the future.
I have two questions for you:
1. What do you refer to by "native Joomla! article system for authored content" ? In other words, which 3rd party component do you use?
2. Most of the content in Joomla resides in a MySQL database, so how does Google or other search engines manage to have access to that content?
Thanks again!
Hi there,
I'm really glad you enjoyed the post.
To answer your questions:
1. When I refer to the native Joomla article system, I'm not referring to any 3rd party component. I'm simply talking about the article/category system that comes with Joomla.
2. Search engines will crawl your content just as users might view it. By the very nature of a dynamic website (any CMS like Joomla or Wordpress) content is pulled from the database and displayed in HTML format. Google only views the HTML format of your content (by crawling through links on your site, while the system generates new pages for the Googlebot, just as it would for a user) so there is no need for it to access your database.
I hope all that makes sense?
Thanks mark for nice tips to optimize joomal site. This tips helps the person who not using joomal. Thanks once again.
Awesome. Most of them are pretty good SEO tips in general. :) Glad you enjoyed it.
Really really great info Mark, but i am using wordpress. But i really like and love Joomla tips because it's very simple to use. Thanks for sharing great info.
Only a pleasure. Glad I could help.
Nice Post... Glad to see a list glad to say thats all done already for the past year and my site is ranking well
Good to hear! Thanks for the comment. :)
Thanks! I'm mostly a Wordpress guy myself so I love any Joomla tips! :)
Glad I could help Matt. :)
Hi Mark,
I tried working with Joomla a while ago. I was wondering, is there any particular reason that you would choose Joomla over Wordpress? How good is the network of 3rd party Joomla developers?
Hi Phil,
Really, it all depends on what the site needs to do. To be honest, I've been using Wordpress a lot lately, but there are certain things that a Joomla! site is just really good at. (Usually bigger, more advanced sites).
The developer community is great. It really is. There are so many really awesome components available.
The decision between Wordpress and Joomla, for me, is determined by assessing the functionality required for the project, and then researching the available extensions available for each system.
I actually just wrote a 6 part series over at Sitepoint.com in which I compared Joomla! and Wordpress. You can find the first post here: https://www.sitepoint.com/wordpress-v-joomla-introduction-and-content-structures/
Thanks for reading and commenting. :)
Yes, if you want to get hacked alot use Wordpress! ....and if you use 3rd party plugins with WP, even more likely.
Hey Mark, Thanks dear very nice post.
Glad you liked it. :)
As freelancer i almost only use Joomla! CMS for clients. Some basic defaults wich comes out of normal installation are indeed a bit weird. But beyond those funny stuff its an great system and im happy to have read this article and knowing im on the right track :).
Cheers!
Glad to hear it, afoekema! Joomla! is really a cool system once you work out the funny bits. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for sharing this. We got quite a number of requests to help small businesses with their SEO activities – and things have been even increasing after the recent Google updates. So now more than ever it will be important to look into SEO and everything there is to it.
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Quite right, John!
Totally agree with you, Joomla is one of the best CMS choice for web development and easy to upload or modify content also it is helpful to SEO.
Spot on, Bharat. :) We use Joomla! often, but we also use Wordpress equally as much. Thanks for commenting!
Thanks for the great article Mark! As a tip I would add to check if the h1 and h2 headers are nicely spread across the pages. Usually a site I set up with Joomla ends up with only h2 headers which is not the way it's supposed to be. There's a soft template hack to get this right though.
One question on the duplicate content.
I use Lipperhey.com to analyze the pages. Works great. I can recommend it as a SEO tool. Only on a site which is a bit more than just some static pages, Lipperhey goes crazy with the internal structure/duplicate content. Even finds things like www.(domain).com/category-1/post-1/category-1/post-1/category-1/post-1 and keeps extending that right unto the 250 pages limit
Now.. your great tip on the Screaming Frog gave me a change to cross check with another crawl. Also SeoMoz's crawler gave a doublecheck, none of these bots see this duplicate content.
Should I dismiss Liperhey's result and go ahead with the other ones, or should I indeed worry about this?
What do you think?
Hey Jelte, thanks for reading and commenting.
The tip about H1 and H2 spread is definitely a good one. I guess we don't come across this very much because we code our own templates for Joomla.
Regarding Lipperhey - I've never actually used it, so I can't comment too much. It does sound like it's being a little strange though. I would really just recommend using Screaming Frog in conjunction with SEOMoz's crawl data. You can't go wrong.
Again, I must stress that you are consistent with your internal linking strategies. These crawlers shouldn't be able to find strange duplicate content if there isn't anything linking to it.
I hope that helps?
Cheers Mark
Hi Mark, thanks for replying!
Found a solution for the duplicate content. If a spider still uses the base href tag (in the header of every Joomla site), the one supplied by Joomla is actually structurally wrong! In most instances it can be removed safely though. So it's a tip for html purists and duplicate content haters. I put together a how-to so I wouldn't clog up this comment space. How to remove Joomla base href tag
Thanks for your awesome tips!
Thanks, Jelte. Glad that solved your problem. And thanks for the little guide!
Glad to hear some SEO techniques to optimize your joomla webs :)..
Awesome, Sheldon!
This is a really good post. I switched from Joomla to WP exclusively about a year ago, but I remember with Joomla, SEO was really frustrating. Good job, and if I ever take on a Joomla client again, i'll definitely be using this as a reference.
Really glad you found the post to be useful, Zach. Thanks for reading!
Not sure if this comment has been made yet as I did not take the time to read all 112 but anyway...
How to SEO your website in 1 easy step: Use Wordpress instead of joomla from the start!
Reasoning: 55% of all websites today are running on Wordpress. Money saved in other web development areas because of the availability of designers and developers for wordpress can be put toward continuous SEO efforts.
Don't get me wrong Joomla can be powerful and has many of the same qualities of wordpress but for me it still comes back to the available talent pool of experts in one particular platform over the other.
Thanks for reading and commenting. :)
While Wordpress is definitely better than Joomla, it still requires it's fair share of optimisation. Not nearly as much as Joomla, but still. While I use Wordpress for a majority of my websites, there are certain times when you just need Joomla for certain functionality.
Also, I wouldn't be fooled by the availability of developers/experts for either system. I believe that the numbers of really high quality experts for either system will be comparable. In my opinion, there is a lot of bloat in the numbers of Wordpress "experts" because the system is easy to use. Every Joe and his dog are calling themselves Wordpress experts these days, when that's really not the case.
Many people will likely disagree with my sentiments, but being someone who uses both systems extensively, this is the way I see it. :)
Hi Mark
It was really a nice post..However, I would also like to have your expert views on adding .config file to the server to restrict unwanted duplicate pages that will be generated using the CMS..
My major concern is for dynamic url's which are generated by adding articles on the website.
Kindly advise.
Thanks a ton!!
Hi Amitra,
To be honest, I don't have much experience with messing around in the .config file. I would have a look at using a component like Tag Meta to help manage all your duplicate content problems.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
- Mark
Hello Mark good article and thanks for the tip of the /images on robots.txt.
I have a question:
What tools do you use to find urls with duplicated content like for example the /index.php url which is the same with the home page and what is the best way to solve this.
thanks
You should get everything you need by checking out the Google webmaster tools duplicate URL report. Then, if you are on Joomla2.5, you can use the native redirect component (or a third party like ReDJ on older Joomla versions), or even slap a more general rule via htaccess.
Like Guillaume says, Webmaster Tools is great.
I also use Screaming Frog SEO Spider for all my on-page SEO auditing.
Just remember to be consistent with your linking. If you don't have links to /index.php then the search bots won't be able to find it and it won't be duplicate content. :)
Great article Mark. I appreciate the tip regarding the JCE editor as I had not taken advantage of it.
Do you have any experience with other optimizations related to cloud-based server such as Amazon or CDN usage?
Thanks for commenting Ryan. Unfortunately my experience with that sort of stuff is very limited, so I can't help you too much there. :(
Wow thanks so much Mark what a great article! We're actually about to make huge changes on our webshop and we go with Joomla. #4 about moving the "/images/" is a great tip and we're already on it on the existing platform!
Would it be okey to install Gzip and activate it on our existing platform when it's already running?
Really glad you found it to be useful!
I've never had a problem activating Gzip after development, in fact we always do it that way.
Incredible write up Mark on Joomla CMS Website Optimization! You just make it easy and quick optimization with proper steps including web server location. Thanks for sharing it with us, We wish some more optimization articles for other CMS platform's from your end. Waiting for further write ups on CMS's!
Thanks for the awesome comment Venkatesh.
I'll definitely be doing more articles soon. :)
Mark! be frankly wan tell you that your post has simple evaluation of SEO for Joomla CMS and all points are clear with their influence in SEO which i personally loved and that’s only the reason I want share your article with my social crowd.
I know so many people using Joomla that this is a great and timely post. This is a great guide for companies and designers out there who are trying to create sites for clients in Joomla, but who know very little about SEO. Thanks Mark. I am forwarding this on!
Thanks for the great comment! So glad it helps you and appreciate you forwarding it on. :)
Great post, Mark!
I almost always work with Joomla, and I've got to say that the SH404SEF component is probably the one of the useful components that I actively work with on a regular basis. Really streamlines and makes URL Redirects so much easier.
Quite right, Martin. Glad you enjoyed the post.
Great timing w/ this post. Helped me w/ my latest development project.
Great stuff! Glad I could help.
Thanks for sharing this post with us.It have got great ideas and for doing SEO it will be more affective.Thanks for giving this informative article.Iam looking forward for your new updates.
Nice post..thanks for sharing...
Joomla is almost same to wordpress but wordpress is best! :) (for me). Thanks Mark to share this information.
Yousuf
Bin Joomla, and move over to wordpress.
Hi Daniel.
Care to motivate your rather blunt suggestion? :)