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Joomla SEO in 2 Easy Steps

March 10, 2009 By barrie@compassdesigns.net Leave a Comment

Two of the most important things in SEO are:

  • Keywords in the title meta tag (the text that appears in the blue/top bar on your browser
  • Keywords in links that links to pages on your site

By paying careful attention to just a few key steps, you can easily optimize your pages with not too much effort.

Some of the links in this guide go directly to the
admin back end of your site. You will need to login BEFORE clicking on
any of the links for them to work correctly.

Meta Tag Page Titles

The first step in better SEO is to make sure the title tag contains
some useful keywords that you might be found for. You can see in the
example below that the meta title (in the blue bar) is "About Hope
Chapel". This is much more useful and specific that if the title was
just "About Us".

Page Title Tag

But where does this text come from?

It comes from the Menu Item that is linking to that page in your
menu. If we look at the Menu Item Parameters, we can see that the
article being linked to is titled "About Hope Chapel".

Title from Article Title

Unless we define otherwise, the page meta tag title will be generated from the article title.

If we are linking to a section or category, the meta tag title will be generated from the name of that section/category.

This why its critical to carefully choose the titles
of your articles. Thinking hard about SEO and keywords when you do this
makes everything else much easier!

If the page is reached without going through a menu item, for
example, if it was a read more link in a blog, then the article title
will again be used as the page title meta tag.

If for some reason we want to override this automated meta tag title creation, we can do so in the system parameters.

Override the default title 

Initially the Page Title field is blank. This means the automated
default is used as described above. If we enter in some text here, this
will be used as the meta tag page title.

Internal Links

The second factor we initially mentioned was having keywords in
links to a page. It doesn’t matter whether its an offsite or an
internal link, its still good for SEO.

We saw above that the link in our example was "About Us". There are
not many keywords there, but, if we padded it out, the menu would look
terrible. So what to do?

Your site has several modules that will output a series of links to various articles in your site.

  • Latest news:
    Creates a series of links to the most recently created articles in selected sections/categories.
  • Most Read Content:
    Creates a series of links to the  articles with the most pageviews in selected sections/categories.
  • Related Articles:
    Creates a series of links to the articles that are "related". This
    relation is determined by common words in the keywords in Metadata
    Information for articles.

Use the Content Link modules as "fire and forget" link generation for your site.

Even better, the text in the link will be the title of the article,
so if you have carefully crafted the article title, then you’ll be
getting more benefit out of these links as well.

This tutorial originally from:

www.simplweb.com/how-to/171-how-to-optmize-your-pages-for-search-engines

Its one of the many tutorials and guides that are part of the Simplweb turnkey Joomla site package.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Skinny

I am an entrepreneur, web consultant, author and educator.

I have been involved in starting a K-12 School District, a Private High School, and three web tech companies. I also wrote one of the original and best selling books on Joomla.

And I like sailing with kids.

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