Joomla: Lay an SEO Foundation with These Settings, Tips & Plugins

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Do you have a beautiful Joomla website, but does your graph in Google Analytics look like that of an ailing heart patient? Then you will have to get to work, to attract more visitors, you have to work on your SEO. Fortunately, Joomla offers you a number of useful options to set up many things around SEO properly. However, you must ensure that, just like with every website you build, you have a good plan before you start. If you just do something without a goal and structure, you will get nowhere.

Don't forget the basics
SEO involves more than just adding some metadata to a site. It is important not to just follow a recipe, but to think carefully about what you actually want to achieve. SEO is of course largely about scoring higher in Google, but for example the click-through ratio within the search results is also very important, and you can optimize this well with the metadata that you set in Joomla.

Furthermore, consider things like a azerbaijan telegram number list good website structure , good user experience (such as site loading speed), a good web host and finally: do your keyword research.

Joomla SEO Basics
The great thing about Joomla is that you actually have most of your SEO tools at your disposal without having to use a plugin. This of course saves you some time when maintaining your website. To start, go to the general settings of Joomla, where you will find a number of SEO-specific things.

First you will find the website name here:

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Think carefully about what you enter here. You can use this website name to appear on every page of your website, before or after the page title. You do this with the Insert website name in page titles setting . Remember that the page title is shown in Google as the heading of your website in the search results, and is very important for influencing the click-through rate.

Then on the same page you will find the SEO settings. Almost always the following combination of settings is the best:

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By default, they are all correct upon installation. You only need to set Use URL rewriting to yes . At the same time as this action, you need to rename the file htaccess.txt in the root folder of your site to .htaccess . This action ensures nice clean URLs.

By the way , leave the metadata settings that you also find in the general settings empty. It is better to set them correctly at a more specific level. The basic settings of the website are now correct.

Build a structure with categories
Next, before you start creating your articles, it is smart to first create the categories in Joomla that you thought of when drawing up your structure. Only if you have a small site can you be satisfied with the basic category uncategorized . For example, if you have a webshop for pet food, you could create categories for dog food, cat food and fish food. Then you can now start creating the articles of your site in the article management and assign them to the relevant categories.

At a later stage, after you have also created your articles, you still have to create your menus. It is often good to have the structure that you have created in your categories also be reflected in your menu structure. For example, if you have a category 'blog', then also link that to the menu 'blog'. This results in very clear and well-organized websites. If visitors (and yourself) can maintain a good overview because of this, this also applies to Google.

Making individual articles SEO-friendly
When creating your texts in your articles, just like in a Word document, make sure that you maintain a logical structure in the use of your headings. Titles of articles are always displayed by Joomla as an H1 or H2 heading, depending on your setup. Make sure that you continue in your running text with H2 or H3 subheadings.

Also note when adding images: you can often provide an alternative description in your editor during uploading. Do this. Google needs this description to understand what the image is about (also visually impaired people). By the way, make sure you upload your images as small as possible, 'heavy images' are often responsible for long loading times.

In the Publication tab you can (must) fill in something relevant for the Meta Description field :

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Make sure it is as relevant as possible, and no more than 150 characters, otherwise Google will cut it off. Remember, this field will be returned to Google! If you do everything right, your site will look like this in Google:

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If you follow these tips well within Joomla, your site will be in better shape in terms of SEO than the average website and hopefully also better than that of your direct competitors. Remember that you really have to build all pages of your site well, not just the home page.

Extensions and Plugins
For the last few percent of SEO optimization, the Joomla core possibilities are just not enough. Where with WordPress sites you end up with all-in-one plugins like 'Yoast' or 'All in One SEO Pack', Joomla offers a few more choices.