Search Engine Optimizing Your Joomla Website

Even if your Joomla website has the fanciest design, the content is bang up to date, knowledgeable and interesting to read, and even if you have a few links to other websites on it, you won’t get very far with it unless it is effectively optimized for search engines. One of the most difficult things to do on your Joomla website is the search engine optimization. However, don’t despair; you will soon get to grips with this essential task once you have read this short article.

The first essential step for high website rankings is to enable SEF urls. These are much more efficiently indexed by search engines than many dynamic urls are. To enable SEF urls, you need to log in as administrator of your Joomla website and go to ‘Global Configuration’. The icon is clear and it will enable search engines to index your website.

This built-in SEF module within Joomla may be a little limited but you can easily build upon this with the OpenSEF module which is one of the best parts of Joomla. It’s a very effective way to automatically rewrite the urls of your website and shape how they appear and are grouped. That makes them clearly visible and searchable by search engine spiders, with very little work from you.

Your Joomla website can have an easily accessible site map created in a few minutes. All the major search engine spiders will easily be able to index your web pages through these site maps. That is the most effective way to get on to the first page of rankings with major search engines, where you need to be, as few people browsing the internet bother to go beyond the first or second pages of results that they get from a search engine.

Search engine keyword meta tags are easily added to Joomla websites. You need these to tell search engines what your website is about.

These are just some of the great search engine optimization features that you can get as add-ons to Joomla websites, all without having to modify the Joomla core files.

You can let inform Technorati every time your website is updated, which helps to keep it high on search engine rankings. That is done with the Joomla ping module. This is most commonly used by bloggers, but it is equally effective for your websites. This component is easily installed and once you have done that you can Syndicate the new content to let Technorati know it is there. Search engines can easily be grouped using Technorati tags on Joomla websites.

Link exchange boosts your website’s search engine rankings. That is made much easier with Joomla’s Technorati tags. These plug ins tag your text and link that to Technorati. Trackback is another way to get your Joomla website higher up the search engine rankings.

So, although search engine optimization is one of the most complex and time-consuming things to do on Joomla websites, it is perfectly possible in a short space of time. Following just these few simple tips which are quick to implement will get your website indexed with the major search engines and will boost you up their rankings.