Joomla is one of the most commonly used CMS (content management systems) for websites. This is a short SEO guide for Joomla webmasters and users that explains how to deal with Joomla SEO problems and implement easy solutions.
Bear in mind that this tutorial focuses on the onsite optimization aspects of Joomla. It is important that you have an administrator login privilege. This means you need to be able to log in as administrator to your Joomla website before you can implement the changes recommended in this tutorial.
The suggestions in this article can be implemented whether your website is in development (still using local host) or in the production stage (at your hosting server).
Fixing the Joomla Front Title tag problem
The default Joomla home page uses "Welcome to Front page." Ideally, you need your home page title tag to be as accurate and descriptive as possible.
Below are the steps you need to take to correct this problem:
1. Log in as administrator to your Joomla website.
2. Go to Content ==> Main Menu.
3. Click the "Home" link.
4. On your right, find "Parameters (System)." Expand it.
5. Replace the traditional "Welcome to Frontpage" title with your preferred home page title tag for your Joomla website.
6. Click "Apply."
7. Click "Save."
8. Clear all browser cache and view your Joomla website. The title tag on the home page should now be changed to your assigned title tag.
Assigning SEO Friendly URLs in Joomla
This suggestion will work best if your Joomla website is still in the development stage (this means the website files are still on your local computer and not yet uploaded to a web hosting server), and still not indexed by search engines.
If you change the URLs after Google indexes thousands of your old URLs, it can take a lot of time for Google to reflect these changes, and can cause your present rankings and existing traffic level to drop.
To get the most out of SEO friendly URLs in Joomla, it is recommended that your Joomla website be powered by an Apache web server. This will allow you to use .htaccess and execute mod rewrite rules.
The following steps will enable SEO friendly URLs in Joomla; they are applicable only to those using Apache web servers.
1. You need to visit your website's root directory (either using an FTP client) and find htaccess.txt. If you can find this file, rename it to .htaccess. If you cannot find htaccess.txt, then proceed to step 2 (make sure, though, that you have .htaccess in your website root directory).
2. Log in in as administrator to your Joomla website.
3. Go to Site ==> Global Configuration.
4. Under SEO Settings, change all the parameters below to "YES."
* Search Engine Friendly URLs
* Use Apache Mod_Rewrite
* Add suffix to URLs
So it will look like the screen shot below:
5. Clear your browser cache, and then try visiting your Joomla pages. You will notice that the URL will be rewritten, and looks clean/SEO friendly.
Note: If you are making these changes in the localhost, and then you are uploading the website files to your hosting server, do NOT forget to edit "configuration.php" (can be found in your Joomla website root directory) and change the following line from:
var $live_site = '';
to this:
var $live_site = 'http://www.thisisyourfinaljoomladomain.com';
Enable internal linking on your Joomla article titles
By default, Joomla's front page lists your articles, for which the title is NOT hyper linked to the exact post URLs.
To get the benefit of having the targeted keywords in the anchor text, you need to change the post/article titles into hyperlinks.
To do this, follow the steps below:
1. Log in as administrator.
2. Go to Content ==> Article Manager.
3. Find "Parameters" and click it.
4. Find the "Title Linkable" option and change it from No to Yes.
5. Click Save/Apply.
6. Go to Menus ==> Main Menu.
7. Click the "Home" link.
8. Expand "Parameters (Component)," which can be found to your right.
9. Look for "Title Linkable" and change it to "Use Global."
10. Click "Apply" and then "Save."
11. Clear your browser cache, and then try visiting your Joomla home page. You will notice that the title tags of your articles as listed in your home page have changed into hyperlinks.
These internal links can help with the indexing of your articles, especially if your Joomla website features a lot of indexable content.
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