SEO plugin for joomla 3.5. Initial SEO settings for Joomla. General SEO optimization rules applicable to Joomla

Without efforts to promote the site, whether it is powered by an engine or not, it will not reach the top of the results list. search engines Oh. Not everyone benefits from being somewhere on the 5th page of a search result.

You can hire VIPSEO specialists, you can make efforts to promote the site yourself, or you can use applications.

How it works

A website built on a CMS can be easily expanded with additional components. Each has its own purpose. The developers have created many extensions, plugins and modules to increase the resource's ranking in search engines. It is quite possible to “appease” search engines that are usually unkind to sites on some CMS.

Thanks to these extensions, the site becomes more convenient for developers and visitors. With their help you can configure it like this appearance some elements and generate new ones so that search robots will be more friendly.

Extensions for CMS Joomla


SEO Generator

SEO-Generator is a paid extension that automatically generates keywords and descriptions for every article on the site, old or new. When you change an article or add a new one, the plugin automatically detects new keywords, leaving the ability to make additions and edits to the list of keys and description. It also allows you to set different title configurations, meta tags, and Google admin verification keys. The plugin works with different languages.

Tag Meta

Allows you to effectively manage all site meta information. With this free extension it is possible, for example, to set a “title” tag or meta tags, both common (“description”, “keywords”) and rare (“copyright”, “ external reference") or set a canonical link for a page. Tag Meta also allows you to set a single rule for several URLs or apply several rules at once. The plugin comes with macro support. Therefore, meta information can be dynamically generated for each page.

All metadata can be managed from a single control panel.

ByeByeGenerator

This one is simple free plugin allows the site administrator to change or remove the generator tag, even from RSS and Atom fields. If necessary, these operations can be performed with the robots tag.

SEOFLI - SEO optimized links and images

The free SEOFLI plugin automatically sets the title and alt attributes. They are important for promotion in search engines, but developers often forget about them. The plugin checks these attributes on all links and images. If they are not installed, then the extension constructs them from the associated text or from the name of the image. Additionally, users are given the opportunity to rewrite existing attributes in accordance with automatically compiled ones. The plugin also specifies the height and width of the images.

Title Manager

A free plugin, positioned by the developers as the most popular among Joomla users, allowing you to manage headers for SEO optimization of the site. The plugin can:

  • display the site title in its subsection;
  • Use a custom site name, leaving the main one for emails and so on.;
  • Use a special site name for the home page;
  • Separate the site name and content title;
  • Choose where to use the site name - above or below the content title.

Add-ons to a site using the Joomla engine generate attributes important for promotion. The system works itself, performing the most routine work. But it cannot generate all the content, nor can it formulate the most creative and “catchy” headlines. Therefore, the person will have enough work.

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This point does not directly affect ranking results, but map optimization makes the site systematized and the pages easier to analyze by search engine robots. Accordingly, this work allows us to improve the quality of indexing. First you need to run the sitemap generator - this can be a special add-on or separate program. An analysis of the site pages and its structure will be carried out, which will allow us to obtain current map web resource in xml format.

Popular generators

Available today a large number of free and paid sitemap generators. The following solutions are more suitable for promoting websites on Joomla:

  • OSMap. This is a plugin from Joomla developers. It has perfect compatibility with CMS, so it is actively used by professionals.
  • XML-Sitemaps.com. This is a universal service for compiling site maps. It works well with relatively small projects. But its functionality is not enough to reject “complex” pages. An important advantage of the tool is that it does not need to be installed, since the map can be obtained directly in the online service window.

When the sitemaps file is ready, it must be “showed” to the Google search engine. The map view takes place in the Google Search Console panel, where you need to select “Crawl” in the menu and click on Sitemaps. When the file is downloaded, you will notice that the search engine will send robots to the site to index the pages.

Correction of the service file Robots.txt

By default, the engine closes the directory with images from indexing. This is logical, since most projects use images from the Web. It is better not to show copied content to search engines. But if you plan to use your own or purchased graphic materials, then the site promotion strategy on Joomla should include image indexing. This will help you get traffic from image search. To open a folder with graphic content, just remove the line Disallow: /images/ from the Robots.txt file.

Configuring the server response for a 404 error

When attempting to navigate to a non-existent or erroneous URL, the server must send a “404” response to the browser. Not Found" System Joomla controls in this case it may not work correctly. This usually happens when the CNC is not configured or when installing third-party components. The problem is expressed in the response “200 OK” - but in this situation the page is displayed incorrectly, which greatly slows down indexing. In order for the 404 error to be processed correctly, you need to carefully configure the .htaccess file. In each individual case, he optimizes individually, so there are no universal recommendations on this issue.

Working with CNC in Joomla

Standard link. User-friendliness of URLs is an important ranking factor. If you do not interfere with the CMS settings, the standard link to a site page will look something like this:

http://www.primer.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1:welcome-to-joomla&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=70

Obviously, such an address says absolutely nothing about the content of the page. Therefore, you need to create logically understandable URLs or CNCs. It should be noted that the latest version of Joomla can automatically generate human-readable addresses based on the content of the page, but the engine does not always do this correctly.

Working with the plugin. Therefore, experts recommend using the sh404SEF plugin. This advanced CNC tuning tool is available on the official CMS website. It allows you to gain convenient control over the site page addresses. The plugin independently makes recommendations regarding best options URL structure and writing. Ideally, the page address should be meaningfully relevant to the content. To do this, it includes transliterated or translated into English language keyword. This allows you to improve your rankings, and also makes it possible to effectively use non-anchor links when promoting sites on Joomla.

Attention to Title and Description meta tags

One of the mandatory elements of internal website optimization is working with Title and Description tags. These are small texts that help search engines quickly determine the topic of the content. It is especially important to have an original Title and Meta Description on pages with high-quality unique content, as this will help you rank higher in thematic search results.

Features of Title optimization for Joomla

Title is exactly what users should see when they search the Internet for information relevant to the page. In terms of importance, this element can be compared to a newspaper headline. Here, too, you need to briefly convey the main value of the content and interest the audience, keeping it within 70 characters. In this regard, SEO of sites on Joomla does not have any unique features. Title must contain key phrase, easy to read and arousing interest. It is important to avoid keyword spamming. There is no need to use more than one phrase from semantic core in the page title. A banal listing of keys is the path to pessimization of positions. A good Title is one meaningful sentence without a period at the end.

Features of Meta Description optimization for Joomla

The Description field is short, but more detailed description, than Title, a description of the page content. This data, in whole or in part (no more than 155 characters), is displayed in the site snippet in search results. This information should be considered as data that should actively motivate the user who has read the Title to click on the link. A high-quality Description contains a keyword, as well as a “catchy” call to go to the site, and it is advisable to keep it within 155 characters. The content of the text does not directly affect the page’s position in the ranking. However, good text significantly increases click-through rates, that is, it improves what is extremely important today. behavioral factors. It should be noted that if you compose a low-quality Description or ignore this field, the search engine will generate the text itself. However, this option will definitely not “catch” the target audience.

Setting up site caching

Novice webmasters are often wary of this point of internal website optimization, considering it too complicated. But that's not true. First you just need to understand the essence of the technology. When a user first lands on a site, loading may take 4-5 seconds, since the browser has to load texts, images, graphics and all other page elements for the first time. Search engines consider this loading time to be excessive, which negatively affects the quality of rankings. Caching technology makes it possible to save basic data about the site in a special directory in the browser. As a result, when visiting again, the page loads almost instantly. It must be said that such a scenario will appeal not only to search engine algorithms, but also to the users themselves.

How to activate

A standard plugin for activating caching is available in the administrative panel. To enable the feature, you need to go through the following path:

  • go to Extension in the admin panel;
  • select Plugin Manager;
  • go to System – Cache;
  • In the Browser Cache window, select “yes”.

You can enable caching using third-party add-ons, but the standard Jumla plugin copes with this task without any complaints.

Increasing website speed

All search engines are loyal to web resources that function quickly. To achieve a good result in this direction, caching alone is not enough. You need to be sure that the capacity of the server used is sufficient and always available in full. The speed of a website greatly depends on hosting, but many web project owners do not pay enough attention to this point. It must be remembered that if at the time of launching the resource the server provided all its needs, then over time the hosting may not be able to cope. This is due to the fact that during the development process, more content appears on the site and traffic increases. Most large hosting providers offer products with easy scalability. This means that, if necessary, you can simply buy additional server resources, which will eliminate the time-consuming “moving” to another hosting.

Let's sum it up

The Joomla content management system is a good basis for creating and further promoting websites. Latest versions engines have a rich set of tools for SEO optimization. In addition, there are a lot of third-party add-ons to solve various problems in promotion. But, like any universal mass solution, this CMS has certain problems with basic settings. You need to know about them so that default decisions do not negatively affect the site’s rankings. Otherwise search engine optimization websites on Joomla do not require special knowledge or skills. Projects made on this engine, with the right approach to SEO, are well indexed and easily reach the top of thematic search results.

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of optimizing the pages of your website to raise the site in search engine results (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, etc.).

In other words, if you want a site on CMS Joomla to be well indexed by search engines and rise in the rankings search queries, then you need to work on it a little, and not just upload it to the hosting and wait for a miracle.

In Joomla 3.x (as in other and more earlier versions) there are built-in SEO optimization settings for the site. To open and edit these settings, you need to go to the main menu: Menu “System” => general settings = website tab (SEO Settings option).

Activation of SEF (CNC links)

Includes processing and optimization URLs Online

Standard regular URLs in Joomla look something like this:

Using URL Redirection

For URL redirection to work in Joomla, you must use htaccess or web.config:
For users who use Apache – Rename the htaccess.txt file in the root of your site to the .htaccess file (a dot is required before the name)
For users who use Windows IIS 7, rename the web.config.txt file to web.config file and then enable the URL redirection option.

Adding an HTML suffix to a URL

Adds the suffix *.html to the end of all links

After disabling (if you just write the title without specifying the alias. By default, the date of creation of the menu or article is entered):

After disabling (if you specify the aliases manually):

If you do not want to use Cyrillic in the URL, then I recommend using additional plugins for automatic creation aliases in Latin. In this case, when creating an article or menu, the alias will be automatically created in Latin.

Displaying the site name in content headers

Adds the name of the site itself to the headers of all pages of the site or open menu when viewing a section or category. You can choose where the header should be displayed (before or after the main page header).

For example, your site is called “Space Company Joomla”, when you enable this option, the name of your site will be automatically added to all article headings, for example, an article title with the title “Are there really UFOs?”, after enabling this option in the browser it will look like So:
Are there really UFOs? - Space company Joomla

Setting up Joomla metadata

In addition to the above, it is recommended to configure the metadata of all site pages on the Joomla CMS. Write relevant news headlines that match the news itself, meta descriptions, and keywords. Also be sure to fill in the meta data home page website on CMS Joomla. An example is shown in the screenshot below.

Remember! When creating a website on CMS Joomla, be sure to configure it first, namely, optimize the pages for search engines. For Joomla CMS there is a mass additional plugins which make it easier to work with SEF links and metadata. For example, components such as AceSEF, sh404SEF, JoomSEF or many other additional SEO plugins that simply automatically generate meta data and title aliases.

SEO optimization joomla

The article describes how to optimize the Joomla engine for the Yandex and Google search engines.

How does SEO optimization work for joomla?

Promotion of any website primarily depends on its content. Optimization only helps to convey it to Internet users. SEO optimization Joomla, like sites on other CMS, consists of setting up the system itself, engine files, choosing a suitable design (usability settings), using additional plugins, extensions and modules, page optimization, external optimization. We will not consider external optimization and design choice here, since these are separate serious topics. Let's focus directly on CMS Joomla, setting up files on hosting. Let's start with the fact that first, to optimize the engine, you need to select the main address of the site so that there is no main page with different addresses. If not carried out correct setting engine files, then the following addresses (duplicates) of the main page may appear: with www, without www, with index.php... This can be configured using the .htaccess file. Other duplicate pages (same content on different addresses) can be corrected using .htaccess and robots.txt by redirecting and closing, respectively, the necessary addresses. It is recommended that in robots.txt the standard lines of recommendations for the robot from Joomla be duplicated separately and for Yandex (User-agent: Yandex, indicating Host: site.ru), be sure to indicate the path to the site map, which can be generated either on Internet services or with using the OSmap plugin. An example of robots for Joomla can be viewed by adding /robots.txt to the domain of our website.

In Joomla, the default .htaccess file is htaccess.txt. This can be fixed by changing its extension. Some hostings have file managers in control systems with the ability to edit names and extensions of files and folders. If there are no such managers, then you need to download the file from the hosting (you can use ftp client Filezilla or another) and rename the extension (type) from “htaccess.txt” to “.htaccess”, and then upload it back to the hosting. You can learn more about the general rules of technical SEO website optimization. SEO optimization of Joomla begins with setting up the main site address and other URLs.

How to set up Joomla page addresses.

It is recommended to configure (optimize) SEF or CNC page addresses (human-readable URLs) that are user-friendly. They are usually made into Latin using transliteration and are automatically generated by default. You can enter them manually in the ALIAS field.

To generate NC addresses in GENERAL SETTINGS - SEO SETTINGS enable corresponding values ENABLE SEF (CNC). We also enable URL redirection for redirection (redirection), which will make it possible to deal with duplicate pages. It is not necessary to add a suffix to the URL.

But at the same time, it is MANDATORY to rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess and, if necessary, configure it! The figure shows an example of which fields to use and which not.

Where to place meta tags in Joomla.

Meta tags are the main optimization parameter, especially for Google. You can write meta tags in CMS Joomla in the admin panel itself in the designated fields (metadata). These fields are located directly next to text editor or in the material tabs and they are easy to find, or if the material or category is tied to a menu item, then in the menu item settings. In versions of Joomla 3.7 and higher, developers made it possible to register your own tag Title in materials in the tab Displayed at the very bottom in the field

If the version is earlier, then by default there is one inconvenience - the main tag for searching Title is generated from the title of the material. To change it to your own, you need to either link it to a menu item and configure it there, or install third-party SEO plugins. More on this later.

For Joomla, when creating material, the Description and Keywords meta tag fields, depending on the version, look like this:

If the Title is generated from the site name (the site name is duplicated on all pages), then general settings We don’t write the name of the site, but the Title and Description tags on the main page can be obtained by editing the menu item for the main page. Meta tags are inserted into the appropriate fields in the settings of this menu item - ADDITIONAL SETTINGS tab - PAGE DISPLAY SETTINGS - field PAGE DISPLAY IN THE BROWSER write Title. Description and keywords are filled in the appropriate fields in the METADATA section. You can edit the title of other pages in the same way.

But this method is suitable for more or less simple sites, when the material (category) can be linked to a menu item and is recommended for optimizing the main page for all Joomla sites. In online stores, places for meta tags are prepared in advance in engines and corresponding online store plugins for Joomla, for example VirtueMart. After optimizing the Joomla engine, it is advisable to resort to other useful additions (modules and plugins), which we will consider in the next article and which will help improve the functionality and information content of the site, which will allow it to rise to the top of Google and Yandex search results. We read about SEO optimization of CMS Wordpress and optimization of Opencart.