Joomla is one of the most popular content management systems at the moment. It's ease of use and many extensions make it easy to use in many different applications. To make your Joomla site more SEO friendly however, there are a couple of things you should do. As part of your SEO campaign, this article will focus on the SEO changes you can make on your site, as opposed to the off-site SEO work you are doing.

The SEO optimization we will work on fall into two categories;

• On-site

• On-page optimization.

On-Site SEO optimization refers to changes that affect the whole site for example changing the sites url structure. On-page optimization refers to changes that affect a single page for example changing the meta tags of the page.

On Site SEO changes

There are some site wide changes you should implement in order to increase your sites SEO.

Enable Search Engine Friendly URL's

Under Global Configuration/Site, you should change the three SEO settings to "yes" (Make sure your hosting provider allows for.htaccess files, and rename the htaccess.txt to.htaccess in your site root)

Update the site Metadata

Fill in descriptive metadata - this will be used for your home page. Make sure the description meta tg is descriptive, as this is what is displayed by search engines in the search results.

Enable caching.

Although not strictly SEO optimization, enabling caching speeds up your site, and search engines like faster sites...

Under Global Configuration/System, enable the use of cache (Only enable this once your site design and page creation is complete)

Enable GZip compression

Again, as with caching, this is not strictly a SEO optimization technique, but compression speeds up delivery of content.

Under Global Configuration/Server, enable gzip compression (again, make sure your hosting provider has this enabled)

Install the following extensions:

1. Xmap - excellent site map generator

2. Menu Meta Manager - Gives you the ability to set meta keyword and description for each menu in your site

On Page SEO Changes

Now that we have made the site wide changes, we will focus on what you should complete for every page

Use a descriptive title

The title metatag is the most important SEO optimization change you can make. This is what is displayed as the title to the search engine results. It should be descriptive, related to your content and also contain the key words you are trying to rank for.

Use a descriptive Alias

The alias is used to build the url of the page. This should be descriptive, and directly related to the content of the page. This is also another opportunity to add a keyword or two.

Page specific metadata

On the right of the page, expand Metadata Information. Here you need to complete the Description as well as keywords. As with the site description metatag, the description is used as the description in the search engine results for your site.

Conclusion

The SEO optimization techniques described above, need to form part of a comprehensive SEO campaign. We recommend using the SEO Services from a SEO company as the changes suggested above only form a small part of the work that goes into an effective SEO compaign.

By applying the suggested changed described above, your Joomla site can be made Search Engine Friendly. Remember that some of the changes require that your web hosting provider allows for things like.htaccess files.