Initial SEO settings for Joomla. General rules for SEO optimization on Joomla Plugin Nice text

Today, a lot depends on the correct internal optimization of a website, so you need to get the most out of this action and in the future you can count on the absence of PS filters and on the stability of promotion and earnings. Today I will briefly talk about main Joomla SEO plugins, with the help of which you can increase the behavioral factor and prevent the appearance of duplicate pages and Meta tags.

In general, there are a great many plugins for optimizing a site on Joomla, but I will talk about four of them, since they have been personally tested on version 1.5, are easy to install and configure, and work effectively without violating the requirements of search engines.

ERelated News plugin

This is a multifunctional Joomla component and it performs more than a dozen operations, so be sure to install and configure it if the ERelated News analogue does not already work. The component can:

1. Display “similar materials” blocks on the page, when you hover over the links of the cursor, a picture of the proposed material is shown,
2. Enable the display of tags at the bottom of the page when they are selected based on keywords (Figure 1),
3. Customize SEO to display the category, publication time, author, etc. in the block.

Using this plugin, you can increase the depth of page viewing and visitor visit time, which will increase the behavioral factor of the resource by improving navigation, while its settings are an order of magnitude higher in functionality than the built-in component of Joomla 1.5.

Nice text plugin

This component will help you change the font and layout of headings H1-H4 without fiddling with styles (Figure 2), and can also change the gradient of the heading and cast a shadow on it. Nice text is perfect for a beginner who doesn’t like to climb CSS tables too much; its only drawback is a small number of built-in fonts (18 pieces), but if desired, they can be added with the help of a programmer.

Shnodoubles plugin

This simple component from CMS fanatics will help you solve in a couple of minutes the problems that I once solved with the help of sh404sef and other crap for a week. The SEO plugin for Joomla Shnodoubles will help get rid of duplication of pages, when the same content is displayed in the results under different addresses. You can remove duplicate pages in Joomla 1.5 in a few clicks, since the component has minimalist settings and only offers to use a 301 redirect instead of a 404 error and specify an alias to which the component/content/article address will change.

The principle of operation of the plugin is as simple as a chicken egg - it redirects all duplicate pages to the main address, and by main it means the url that is in the navigation path. You won’t be able to open the page at another address, and duplication will be a thing of the past.

I wanted to write about SEO-Generator, but I remembered that I already wrote about it on the blog, so I won’t repeat myself, I’ll just say that this is also an excellent SEO plugin for Joomla and it will help defeat Meta duplicates and Title derivation for search engines.

First of all, let's note what you need to do in order to improve your website's SEO:

On the page:

1. Managing meta tags (such as title, description): keywords in elements that will be displayed in search results.
2. Fix crawl errors: Search engines will view your site as high quality and improve your ranking.
3. Rewrite URL: Default URLs do not give search engines information about the content of the page. You should change the URLs to "friendly" ones, they will help in achieving better results.
4. SEO content of the article: the content must be of high quality. Not just your home page, but each of your articles can influence your search rankings.

Off page:

1. Add a sitemap: and your site will be indexed the way you want.
2. Provide backlinks: More links generally lead to better search engine rankings and better Google Page Rank.

Traffic check: monitoring visitors and constantly working on SEO.

In this article you can find several plugins designed to solve the above problems. You can easily download all these extensions from the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED).

JM sitemap

Free SEO plugin for Joomla 1.5

Functions:

SEOsimple

Free SEO plugin for Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5.

Functions:

1. Setting title
2. Ability to select description and title automatically
3. Installing ROBOTS meta

SEOsimple is the best Joomla SEO meta tag extension you need for your website. SEOsimple helps administrators solve important problems: creating a good description and displaying the title.

But the most amazing thing about this tool is the generation of all the content meta tags. Of course, you can write them yourself, but not all of us are good at SEO. This feature will help your site get a suitable title and description if you are short of ideas. You can use them as is or modify them as you wish.

The latest version has another interesting feature: the ability to set Robots META "noindex, follow" for category pages. You can configure all the options in the plugin settings, check the code before and after using SEOsimple to see the difference.

You can download the latest version.

Sh404SEF

Paid plugin for Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5.

Functions:

1. URL management: rewriting, translation, etc.
2. Setting up metadata
3. Inserting an H-level tag
4. Redirection from error pages: 301, 404

Online service by OceanTheme are a platform where people can unite with each other with mutual interest to purchase premium templates and extensions Joomla! at a bargain price. The target audience of the service are individuals and small and medium businesses, professional web developers to create online stores, community sites or people wishing to have your blog. In our great collection of premium solutions everyone will find what he needs.

Our resource acts as an organizer pooling, specifies the number of people that you want to buy templates and extensions, the cost of goods, as well as the amount and access to these materials. Our website has a lot of opportunities for easy searching of templates and extensions. Intuitive navigation, tagging system, sorting by the filter and the tool "add to bookmarks" will allow you to find the right material you want incredibly fast. In addition You will always find the latest information, so as to update the collection every day.

Access to the entire database of materials is provided for the duration of the club specified in the subscription purse. Subscribers receive unrestricted access to all available archives, news and updates, as well as technical support throughout the subscription period.

All the products you can find on this site are 100% GPL-compatible, which means you can change them as you want and install on unlimited number of sites.

Thanks to our collection you will save a lot of time and money, as the templates and extensions are easy to use, easy to install and configure, multi-functional and diverse. That will allow you to create a website of any complexity and orientation, without learning advanced web development technologies.

Main features of our website

A rich set of functions, working out of the box:

Use all opportunities of our resource to get ready-made professional solution for rapid implementation of your business projects or creative ideas.

Use the search tools

Use advanced search and filtering, and easy navigation for quickly finding the desired web solutions in design, functionality and other criteria.

To favorite materials were always at hand, use the unique function "Add to favorites", and they are available in a separate section for the whole year.

Logged into our site, you will be able to leave comments and to participate in promotions, as well as use of a free subscription with permium access.

Join our club membership

Club subscription gives you full access to our entire catalog of original material. And includes premium templates and extensions for several years.

Download appropriate to your Joomla templates and extensions, both free and subscription for the club without any limits and ogoranicheny speed.

If you liked any material on the site, you can leave your voice, as well as share it with friends via social networks.

After choosing hosting, posting content and publishing the site, most people are faced with one huge problem: for some reason the site is not located in Yandex and Google.

It's simple, you have to optimize your Joomla site for search.

Methods for SEO optimization, just like on Joomla, versions 1.5, 2.5, 3, 3.3 and others are no different from other CMS. Let's look a little more in detail.

Creating and presenting a sitemap for search engines

This step does not directly affect rankings, but rather makes your pages easier for search engines to recognize and organizes them. This way we will improve the site's indexing.

Using a sitemap generator, a special application or a plugin, you will run a program that will crawl the site, compiling each page, check how the pages are structured, get the necessary identification information, and ultimately be able to create a complete map in xml format.

There are a huge number of sitemap generators. There are free versions, paid versions, applications to install on your computer, plugins to install on your website.

I will highlight two:

1. XML-Sitemaps.com. This is a standard sitemap generator. It works best with small sites. It doesn't have many complex tools for disavowing certain pages. You simply enter the URL for your site and click "Start". The generation of a site map will begin, which you can analyze and upload to your website.
2. OSMap (formerly XMap). This Joomla plugin is recommended by experts and is one of the most used.

Google's Search Console Sitemap View

Once the sitemap is generated, you will need to submit it Google's Search Console(formerly called Google Webmaster Tools).

Now you can provide your sitemap to search engines.

Once you do this, you will immediately see Google sending its bots to check your site, approving page after page.

Correcting Robots.txt

In Joomla, the pictures folder is initially closed. I almost completely agree with this, because... in 99% of cases you take pictures from the Internet that have copyright. And there’s no point in making them public once again.

But there are sites that buy images or take their own. For them, “Search by Image” can sometimes be useful. Accordingly, you need to remove the line in robots.txt Disallow: /images/.

But I repeat, the traffic from image search is quite garbage and the advisability of opening your images for indexing is very doubtful.

Setting up 301 redirects for site mirrors

A site mirror is a complete duplicate of each page. Basically these are versions “with WWW” and “without WWW”, “with /index.php” or “/index.html” and pages with a slash.

Setting up CNC (SEF) in Joomla

One of the easiest ways to make a Joomla site more SEO-friendly is by adjusting the display of URLs.

Here is an example of the old standard URL that Joomla generates:

• http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1:welcome-to-joomla&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=50

Quite ugly. And it's even worse for Google's search engine. Search bots read websites like humans (but at robotic speed), so they want every page to have a meaningful URL that people can understand.

A meaningful URL is called a SEF URL, human-readable or clean URL.

The new version of Joomla converts your URL to SEF URL automatically, but it's still not fully optimized.

It's ironic that a plugin designed to make URLs cleaner has such an unreadable name.

As the best URL optimization tool on the market, sh404SEF will give you complete control, let you customize your URL structure, and advise you on how to do it better.

In general, it is good for the URL to be relevant to the content of the article or page, and to contain a keyword or any other identifying factors.

The key in the URL in transliteration (or translated into English in some cases) - gives a small bonus to page ranking and allows you to use non-anchor links in the form of a URL to pull your pages to the top.

Title and Meta Description tags

If you have a blog or various pages with unique information on the site, for each of them you will need its own Title and Meta Description.

Title tag

Typically, this is the title of the article and what readers will find when they search for something. The first thing they will see in the search results is the Title.

Think of it like an old newspaper headline - what do you want to say (in 70 characters or less), can it characterize your article or page?

The Title tag must contain the keyword, which is another SEO factor that you probably already know a lot about. Keywords are a basic aspect of SEO for Joomla or any other type of website.

However, there is no need to heavily stuff the Title with keywords. Use the keyword once, meaningfully, to pique readers' interest. Any transfer of keys entails fines. I do not recommend using more than 2 commas and dividing the Title into 2 sentences. There is also no need to put periods at the end.

Lastly, the Title Tag must fairly reflect the content.

If you title your blog post “15 Ways to Take Care of Puppies,” but the article is actually a list of dog videos and has nothing to do with caring for them, then Google will not only rank you lower, but sometimes change the title to make it was more appropriate.

You don't want this, do you?

Meta Description

Meta Description is a short paragraph that goes deeper into the details of an article or page, and will show up when users search for something in a search engine.

Meta Description should be less than 155 characters, because if it is longer, Google will cut it off in search results.

Think of the Meta Description as a further way to market your article, add a keyword and entice readers to click.

If you can write a compelling paragraph that accurately describes the article and creates desire in a potential reader or consumer (all in 155 characters), you're doing your job right.

This factor does not directly affect rankings, but directly affects click-through rates in search results (and this is already one of the behavioral factors).

Additionally, just like the Title tag, if you create an inaccurate Meta Description, the search engine will create its own description, based on the content or article, that will be much more boring and uninteresting than what you might have written.

Caching your site

The last essential step in checking whether your Joomla site is optimized for search engines is active caching.

For those who don't know what caching is, please don't worry. It's simple.

When you first visit a page, it may take some time for it to load, perhaps three or four seconds. This is because you are seeing the content on the page for the first time; images, text, videos, graphics, etc. are all new to your browser.

Caching helps your browser remember information about a site after your first visit and load it almost immediately.

For us, caching is a great way to make your site load much faster and is a huge benefit for SEO.

Joomla has a built-in plugin that allows you to enable caching for URLs and content.

In your backend, go to Extension, then Plugin Manager, then System – Cache.

Set the Browser Cache setting to “yes” and make sure the plugin is enabled.

You can find a plugin that will help with caching, but most Joomlov users find the built-in features sufficient.

Speeding up your site

Google and other search engines love responsive, fast-loading sites.

Caching helps with this a bit, and making sure your hosting service is good is also critical.

There are countless hosts out there, and you're probably using a decent one.

However, if you see that your site is loading slowly, check your host's upload speeds, then compare that to what other companies offer.

I usually recommend going with the cheapest one, but you don't want to sacrifice too much speed due to cost? After all, Google and Yandex will rank you worse, like a slow-loading site.

This is of great importance if your site is growing - the hosting will not be able to handle the traffic well.

In conclusion, I would like to introduce you to the Zenlink link selling service. This is not another exchange for purchasing links for a website, but working with crowd links. Those. assistance in attracting target audiences from forums, review sites, etc. The most natural links for which search engines will not filter you.

Myths that Joomla sites are difficult to optimize for SEO were relevant for versions 1.5 and 2.5. Joomla 3.x is well indexed and promoted in search results. In this article we will dispel common misconceptions about Joomla in relation to SEO.

In this review, we will look at the most popular myths about the unsuitability of websites on Joomla to promotion in search engines and put an end to them.

Does Joomla generate duplicate pages?

Duplicate pages are a terrible evil that greatly harms the website’s promotion in search results. The thing is that the search engine can index a duplicate page on the site, and exclude the main one that you are promoting from the search results. As a result, efforts on linking and external promotion will be in vain.

Are duplicates relevant for Joomla today?

Yes, but that doesn't make her worse than others CMS: there are duplicates for almost everything CMS(paid and free). And one of the stages of SEO optimization of a website is Joomla, as with any other engine, is their exclusion from indexing by search engines: you just need to work once and forget about this problem.

Is Joomla poorly indexed?

The legend is as old as time, and the source of this statement is the following points:

Previously, before Joomla version 3.3, in file robots.txt Some of the necessary folders were closed from indexing, in particular the images folder.

Search robots, naturally, see your entire site, but there are prohibitions in robots.txt sometimes they follow and are not added to the image index.

Plus, lately, search robots need to see your site the same way users see it, and at the moment it is important that CSS and JS files are not prohibited from indexing.

Even earlier, on Joomla 1.5 there were problems with CNC links ( SEF URL- human-readable URLs). But the point is that the folder was added to the links of the site pages components, for indexing which in robots.txt there was always a ban. This is why pages on some sites may not be included in search results.

It is important to know:

The content of sites on current versions of Joomla is well indexed and promoted in search engines.

Can't you add meta tags in Joomla?

Yes, there used to be problems with writing meta tags for some pages.

Currently the functionality Joomla allows you to specify all the meta tags necessary for SEO optimization ( Title, Description, Keywords, Robots) for content pages, categories and menu items. In addition, the Title tag can be specified separately from the title of the material or menu item.

It is important to know:

In current versions of Joomla, you can add all the meta tags necessary for SEO.

Are Joomla sites too slow?

This topic was relevant for Joomla 1.5 and component VirtueMart.

On Joomla 3 and higher, with the download speed everything is in perfect order: the basic functionality allows you to implement server caching and GZIP compression of the output data. Some questions regarding speed appear, but they are addressed to setting up hosting and to site owners involved in adding materials.

In other words, no matter how fast your car is, you won’t be able to drive it fast on a bad road, with bad gasoline and a driver who was given a license the day before.

It is important to know:

Sites on current versions of Joomla load no worse than others.

Read about how to ensure maximum site loading speed on Joomla 3 in this section.

The end of SEO myths about Joomla

This is where the myths end.

What can be concluded?

All these indicators:

• presence of duplicates,
• competent site structure,
• meta tags,
• download speed,

are important points in SEO optimization of any website.

• competent linking,
• content optimization,
• plus, a very important element for promotion today is micro markup.

Everyone has problems with it, in one area or another. And in general there is no adequate documentation on it. But for Joomla I completely solved this problem.

Because our site is mainly inhabited by site owners Joomla, then list the advantages of this CMS I think it’s not worth it: you already know very well about the cool functionality of this system, which is superior to many paid engines.

As a conclusion

Joomla 3 great for promotion. There are problems with duplicates, but this can be solved.

In order for a site to rank high in search results, you need to work on it, and this axiom is for all sites. The roots of the myths that sites on Joomla poorly promoted, coming from the days of version 1.5 and newbie blog posts, passed on by word of mouth. Joomla, like any other CMS, is perfectly indexed and promoted in search results.

If the SEO optimizer says that Joomla this is bad, it means one of two things: either he has not worked with this engine for a long time, or he has not worked with it at all. Therefore, in order not to look incompetent in the eyes of the client, it is better to position yourself as an expert in CMS and tell popular myths in clever terms.