11 Joomla SEO Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Ranking

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joomla seo

So you finished building your website or blog with Joomla’s free content management system (CMS). Joomla made it simple with its easy-to-use designs and layouts.

You’re raring to go with banners, RSS feeds, contact forms and exciting content. Your Joomla pages are just ready to welcome your visitors. So, how do you get them to find your website?

This is where search engine optimization comes in. You have to make your site searchable. The way you do that is by using Joomla SEO strategies that rank your pages with search engines.

Do you know how to optimize your Joomla website for SEO?

Read more to find out 11 Joomla open source tips to improve your SEO and increase your website ranking.

Joomla SEO Tips

Choosing Joomla gives you a head start with SEO. This open source CMS features excellent support for search engine optimization. Joomla is loaded with SEO goodies, which streamlines your optimization efforts.

So, let’s get started.

1. SEO URLs

If you look at the administrator control panel, you’ll see a few Joomla settings that need tweaking for the best organic search results.

Look at the configurations panel for the SEO Setting section. The first thing to do is to adjust these settings for SEO.

Find the option for Search Engine Friendly URLs. You want to enable this. It changes the URL name into a cleaner address. Instead of a long number in the URL, it shows the menu item.

2. SEF URLs

Also in the Search Engine Friendly URLs located in Global Configuration, enable the option for Use URL Rewriting.

This removes the confusing URL ending, /index.php/ and changes it into a user-friendly name. For this to work, you have to rename htaccess.txt, which you’ll find in the next step.

3. Rename htaccess.txt

It’s always a good idea to rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess when your first setup SEO. You also need to rename this to use URL rewriting.

You can find htaccess.txt in the root directory when you connect to your server. Joomla automatically installs it.

Open htaccess.txt and then save it to your website’s home directory with the new name, .htaccess. Also, uncheck the “Hide filenames that begin with a period” option.

4. Fix the Images Rule

For some reason, Joomla tells Google not to index your images folder. As far as SEO goes, this can decrease traffic to your site.

You always want to make sure you optimize your images for Google, so changing this default setting is important. If you don’t make this change, none of the search engines will index your images.

You do this by removing /images/ from your robots.txt file.

5. Update Meta Descriptions and Keywords

Meta descriptions have a huge impact on your page rankings. These descriptions are what search engines use to rate the relevance of your content for the search query its processing.

So if you use targeted keywords in your descriptions, search engines will rank your pages higher.

Using relevant Meta descriptions on all your landing pages will let more users find your content.

Write your descriptions with Meta keywords in mind. Your keyword should include three to five words, known as long tail keywords.

Also, make sure your Joomla Robots setting located under the Meta keywords is set to “Index, Follow.”

6. Find GZip in Server Settings

Go into the system settings and navigate to Global Configuration. Once you’re there, open the Server section. Go to Server Settings.

Now, look for GZip Page Compression and enable it. This will speed up the time it takes for your pages to load.

Visitors to your site want pages that load in only a few seconds. If it takes longer than that, they’ll leave your site and find your competitors pages.

7. System Cache

This is another URL tweak for making your pages load faster. Navigate to Joomla Extension. Then click on Plugin Manager. From there, click the System-Cache option.

Set your browser cache to “yes” and enable this Joomla SEO plugin. Using this setting along with GZip will optimize your pages for Google indexing.

8. Take Advantage of Sitemaps

This sitemap generator works flawlessly with Joomla. It generates SML and HTML sitemaps for your site.

You need a sitemap so search engine crawlers and users can find your content. Joomla has lightweight plugins available for creating sitemaps, such as JSitemap and OSMap. Once you’ve created your sitemap, you want to submit it to Google with Webmaster tools.

9. Include Internal and External Linking

Fully functional SEO Joomla optimization includes internal and external links. When you create content for your website and blogs, link the relevant content together. This not only optimized it for SEO, but it also makes your content easier for users to share.

External linking is also important. Try to get incoming links from authoritative sources in your industry for the best ranking. Search engines rank links according to their trustworthiness, anchor text, popularity, and domain.

10. Include SEO Joomla Extension

Using SEO Joomla extensions is an easy way to get your SEO up and running. Here are a few free Joomla extensions you can try:

Sh404sef
SEO Boss

The tools included in these Joomla extensions takes a lot of the confusion out of Joomla SEO settings.

11. Optimize Images for Speed

To get the most out of SEO for Joomla, optimize your images for speed. Many sites publish large images of 350kb. These take a long time to load while your visitors sit there watching the hourglass.

You don’t need large images to make your website look great. Images of 25kb look fine on websites, and they load a lot quicker.

When you have large images, go to Google’s Page Speed tool. This free tool can optimize your images for fast loading.

SEO Joomla Wrap Up

Following these 11 SEO Joomla tips will help your pages rank higher with search engines. These are just the beginning of your SEO journey with Joomla.

Keeping your website optimized is an ongoing process. Google is always changing search methods so you have to change with them.

Read more CMS guides and tips for making your websites more efficient and SEO friendly.