joomla! 3 search engine optimization - theo van der zee

7/29/2019 Joomla! 3 Search Engine Optimization - Theo Van Der Zee

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Joomla! 3 - Searchengine optimizationgetting top rankingS for your

Joomla! 3 webSite

b: t v d z

@t_p


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Table of contents

Introduction 3

No bullshit 3

No extensions 3

No guarantees 3

Global Configuration 4

Site Name 4

Search Engine Friendly URLs 4

Use URL rewriting 5

Adds suffix to URL 5

Unicode Aliases 6

Include Site Name in Page Titles 6

Site Meta Description 7

Site Meta Keywords 8

Robots 8

Content Rights 8

Show Author Meta Tag 9Show Joomla! Version 9

Menu Manager 9

Menu Title 9

Alias 10

Browser Page Title 10

Page Heading 10

Article Manager 11

Title 11

Meta description 11

What is PageRank? 12

Additional Joomla! SEO tips 13

Remove /images/ from the robots.txt file 13

Use alt tags 13

Speed up your website 13


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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 signifi-

cantly.

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 tipsbelow 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.

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.

Joomla! 3 in offline mode


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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 eas-

ily be able to see what the subject of this page is by looking at the page title list

behind the domain name.

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/page-

title.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.

Joomla! 3 SEO settings


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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 charac-

ters 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.

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 Name in Page Titles example

Site Meta Description for themepartner.com


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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 snip-

pet 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 descrip-tion, 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.

Joomla! 3 Metadata Settings


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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 officialGoogle 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 appro-

priate 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

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 organi-

cally and target it for human visitors instead of search engines.

Joomla 3 Menu Manager


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Alias

The Alias will be used in the URL when Search Engine Friendly URLs are ena-

bled. 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 cut-

ting it off with an ellipsis.

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 whatmost 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.

Joomla 3 Browser Page Title and Page Heading


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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.

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 Title

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.

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 fol-

lowed with great interest by people involved in SEO. But, the Google search

algorithm has been improved greatly upon over the last couple of years. Forexample, 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.

The green bar showing the PageRank of a page


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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 searchengines 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 ad-

vise 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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