Joomla! SEO

Steve BurgeAlledia.com

Joomla and Alternatives

• Drupal = Kit Car– Very powerful if you know how to build it

yourself

• Wordpress = Sports Car– Built to do one thing very, very well

• Joomla! = Toyota Corolla– Built to be as useful to as many people as

possible

Specific Problems

• Some extensions are better optimized than others.

• Easy to create too many pages. Small is beautiful.

• Missing some SEO Best practices (unique URLs, metadata etc).

• Problems shared by many dynamic websites.

Specific Solutions

You only need two extensions:

• SEF Patch (metadata / no-follow)• sh404SEF (Keyword URLs, h1 tags,

much more)

These will work on 1.0 and 1.5

Disclaimer #1

• Good optimization won’t have you flying up Google’s rankings.

However….

• Bad SEO will sink you faster than good SEO can help you.

Disclaimer #2

I can’t help you if ….

• Your site launched last week• Your site is empty• Your content is rewritten Wikipedia articles• You’re a spammer• You’re trying to rank for “Las Vegas” or

“Mortgages”

Problem #1 URLs

Default URLs:• /index.php?

option=com_content&task=view&id=74&Itemid=1

Default SEF URLs:• /content/view/74/1

Problem #1 Reasons

• Search engines analyze your URLs for keywords

• They are human readable• SEF URLs avoid duplicate content issues

/content/view/4913/1/ /content/view/4913/31//content/view/4913/33/

Problem #1 Solution

sh404SEF turn this …

• /index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=74&Itemid=1

Into this …

• /great-url-article/

Best with Linux. Windows does work (index.php/great …)Most extensions allow this, but not all.There are alternatives to sh404SEF.

Problem #2 Metadata

Problem #2 Reasons

• Unique page titles are the most important on-site SEO factor.

• Its like giving the the same title and and description to to to every book in the library.

Problem #2 Solution DEFAULT SEF PATCH

•SEF Patch is from Joomlatwork.com

Problem #3 Extra Pages

“When I installed a Calendar it displayed months, weeks or days that did not have an event scheduled.

The Googlebot indexed empty calendar event pages out until the year 3,500 (so basically I have over 80k duplicate pages)”

Problem #3 Reasons

• Sites have a limited amount of Page Rank.

• Its much easier to rank a small, compact site than a large, sprawling one.

• Extra pages tend to be noise, not signal.

Problem #3 Solutions

What to Block

• Calendars• Photo Galleries• Tags• Search Clouds• PDF Pages• Automatically

Translated Pages

How to Block

1) SEF Patch. Add no-follow.

2) Robots.txt file. Disallow: /photos/

Enough With the Problems Already …

Why Use Joomla if SEO is Important?

• The fixes to Joomla’s SEO problems really aren’t difficult.

• The core team are aware of the problems and working on them.

• Content is king. No other CMS makes it as easy to create new content from articles to forum posts, FAQs, wikis and more.

Some Recommended Extensions

• Virtuemart. With sh404SEF, its the best optimized shopping cart I’ve ever seen.

• JReviews. I’ve friends able to outrank CNet and Amazon for very competitive product reviews.

• Mosets Tree. Witness the extraordinary popularity of Joomla’s Extensions Directory. It’s a very easily spidered directory.

Joomla Google Success Stories

• WHReviews.com. #1 for “Webhosting Reviews”

• IPodSpeakerReviews.com. #1 for “ipod speakers” above CNet and Apple!

• Joomla.org. #1 for “Content Management System”

Questions …..