Joomla is currently the most widely used content management system (CMS) after WordPress. Consequently there are many people who prefer to get their business sites designed with Joomla. A search engine friendly Joomla website can be created with the help of a good quality Joomla template, sitemap, robots.txt, meta tags, great content and search engine friendly URLs. Joomla website developers and SEO specialists make use of catchy content, superior web design, well chosen Joomla templates and effective usage of targeted keywords to improve a site’s ranking.
Here are some of the most effective SEO techniques for websites created on the Joomla CMS platform.
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Use Joomla SEO Plugins
Making use of the Joomla plugins is a great way to ensure that the content is properly optimized for the search engines. SEO plugin extensions like SEO-Generator, SEOSimple etc. can aid in more ways than one to fulfill the site’s SEO requirements.
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Create URLs that are search engine friendly
Search engines constantly index readable URLs and rank them accordingly. For this reason, it is very important that the URL should be simple and include all the important keywords clearly.
e.g. Instead of using URLs like this:
https://whtl.co.in/index.php?option=com_view=item&id=156:seo-company-bangalore
You can change the URL to be more readable and include keywords, like:
https://whtl.co.in/services/seo-company-bangalore
You can also use an effective SEF component like sh404SEF that can present you with major SEO advantages over a core component. sh404SEF component not only allows you to come up with search engine friendly URLs but it also lets you monitor which of the requests are presenting with 404 errors. You can then make sure that all broken parts of your Joomla site are fixed immediately.
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Install a Joomla Sitemap Extension and then submit it for indexing to Webmaster Tools
Creating an HTML/XML Sitemap is one of the major aspects of SEO that can help Google to know about all the pages that needs to be crawled. OSMap is an excellent free Joomla extension that can be installed for creating website sitemaps. It contains numerous useful features and one of them can create a sitemap by using the menu structure. This sitemap can then be submitted to the Google webmaster tools for being indexed by Google.
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Refine your Meta Descriptions and Page Titles
Apart from performing the URL-related function, sh404SEF also enables a user to set an excellent meta description and page title that can in turn boost the page’s SEO ranking. To have the best results, you should come up with a good description for every page that makes perfect sense. The description and the title should not include more than 160 and 60 characters respectively as they are shown often in search engine result pages.
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Build a nice Custom 404 Page
Google strongly recommends having a well made custom 404 page as this will not only direct the visitors to the information that they are looking for but also encourage them to explore the other pages of that same site. A completely meaningless 404 page can serve as a major bad message and deter people from further visiting the site. This can eventually affect the SEO ranking of the site negatively. On the other hand, creating a custom 404 page with a chosen Joomla template can prove to be beneficial for SEO purposes.
In the end…
The above SEO tips list may not be comprehensive but it will serve as a good checklist whenever you want to optimize your Joomla website for SEO. And in the middle of all this, don’t forget the fact that the Content is the king for SEO always, so make sure you website delivers highly optimized and targeted content for your website visitors and search engines alike.
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