Attracting More Visitors With Joomla
In order to be found in Google, you should optimize every page of your website.
If done well, every page will be indexed, and can show up in the search results, on many related search key-words.
A lot of effort will be spent on optimizing how your website results show up in Google.
Let's first look at an example snippet from Google:
Using your main key-words is vital here, so make sure you choose those wisely.
If you do not set the title and meta-description yourself, Google will usually pick some lines from your site and use those.
This may result in broken-off sentences, which does not look very nice.
Basic steps to optimize your Joomla website: Most importantly, make sure you start setting your Global Configuration settings.
This is very straightforward, and it will make sure that at least on a global level, all pages of your site have a meta-description.
To set this up, sign in as an administrator, and go to Global Configuration.
You will see a few tabs here, but the information you will have to fill out is on the first tab already, so you will see it right away:
Anything more is useless.
Give every page a unique title and meta-description You should make sure that every page has a unique title and a unique meta-description.
For every article in your website, make sure to give the article a nice title, and make sure it is not longer then 60 characters, or it will be broken off.
Also fill out the meta-description field in the meta-data tab.
It is a lot of work, and you don't see it displayed on the site, but it works tremendously for SEO, so take your time.
Next to this field, you see the meta-keywords.
You can ignore this field.
It has been abused so often that Google ignores these.
Joomla SEO extensions Joomla can easily be extended with plugins and extensions, and some of these are built for search engine optimization.
They are best suited for advanced users, but can greatly help your SEO activities.
Some known extensions are:
If your site loads fast, your visitors will appreciate this, and probably browse more pages.
To make your website load fast, use the options Joomla has available.
You can use the built-in caching mechanism, which you can simply switch on from the System tab in the Global Configuration, and also you can activate the Cache plugin from the plugin manager.
Also switching on G-zip can make a big difference (also in Global Configuration).
If done well, every page will be indexed, and can show up in the search results, on many related search key-words.
A lot of effort will be spent on optimizing how your website results show up in Google.
Let's first look at an example snippet from Google:
- It always starts with short line: the title
- Followed by usually 2 lines of text, called the meta-description
Using your main key-words is vital here, so make sure you choose those wisely.
If you do not set the title and meta-description yourself, Google will usually pick some lines from your site and use those.
This may result in broken-off sentences, which does not look very nice.
Basic steps to optimize your Joomla website: Most importantly, make sure you start setting your Global Configuration settings.
This is very straightforward, and it will make sure that at least on a global level, all pages of your site have a meta-description.
To set this up, sign in as an administrator, and go to Global Configuration.
You will see a few tabs here, but the information you will have to fill out is on the first tab already, so you will see it right away:
- For the Site-settings, make sure to fill in a short name for your site
- Then, Meta-data settings: Fill in a description of no more than 168 characters and 2-3 keywords
- And finally, the SEO-settings: - Set Search Engine Friendly URLs to Yes - Set Use URL rewriting to Yes - Include Site Name in Page Titles, depends if you have a relevant sitename with good keywords
Anything more is useless.
Give every page a unique title and meta-description You should make sure that every page has a unique title and a unique meta-description.
For every article in your website, make sure to give the article a nice title, and make sure it is not longer then 60 characters, or it will be broken off.
Also fill out the meta-description field in the meta-data tab.
It is a lot of work, and you don't see it displayed on the site, but it works tremendously for SEO, so take your time.
Next to this field, you see the meta-keywords.
You can ignore this field.
It has been abused so often that Google ignores these.
Joomla SEO extensions Joomla can easily be extended with plugins and extensions, and some of these are built for search engine optimization.
They are best suited for advanced users, but can greatly help your SEO activities.
Some known extensions are:
- SH404SEF
- JoomSEF
- MijoSEF
- Etc.
If your site loads fast, your visitors will appreciate this, and probably browse more pages.
To make your website load fast, use the options Joomla has available.
You can use the built-in caching mechanism, which you can simply switch on from the System tab in the Global Configuration, and also you can activate the Cache plugin from the plugin manager.
Also switching on G-zip can make a big difference (also in Global Configuration).