Many of the Joomla users were the previous struggling with the SEO aspects, and the primary reason behind it was Joomla was not support the SEO concepts that much previously. However, things have mostly changed, and Joomla is now one of the most successful SEO CMS platform, which comes packed with a lot of authentic search engine benefits for the users.
If you have already started with the base Joomla, there are many odds, of which thousands of users are itching to get their hands on. What you need to understand is that there is no point in maintaining a website which your prospective target customers are unable to reach. It is a fact that Joomla is not that search engine friendly out of the box. In fact, you need to go through some expert steps to make your Joomla site SEO friendly.
Here let's discuss some of the easiest and essential steps for you to make your business website search engine friendly, and thereby take it to thousands of consumers who want to get your products and services.
Apache servers as ideal hosts
If you are using a simple IIS server to host your valuable business website built on Joomla, you may be probably suffering that your Mac may simply end up at the bottom. The URL rewriting never gels up that easily with the default rewrite modules IIS servers usually use. Rewrite modules are the most dreadful nightmares for those who use a shared hosting account. The site owners used to face issues with the installation and configuration of Joomla sites on IIS servers.
So, for practical reasons, it is recommended that you save yourself from all the headaches and ideally host the Joomla site on an Apache server which features mod_rewrite too. You can be relaxed to see the ease with which it can accommodate the SEO components you are trying to incorporate.
Installing the JCE Editor
JCE editor is free, and it offers a large bunch of cool features which help any developer to put together the SEO essentials and maintain your site that way. Among the many features available on this platform, two of the most important aspects which you need to take care of while installing this editor includes:
- Does custom configure the JCE editor not to strop code which you add through the editor?
- It also offers a user-friendly interface for you to instantly access for adding images, which instantly get coupled with the Alt tags and set image dimensions.
Create XMAP and submit
As per blueprint SEO strategy, Xmap is another excellent Joomla extension, which can be installed for free. This helps the users to create the site maps easily. Once it is custom created, you can simply log on to the Google Webmaster tools and submit it to be indexed by Google. This further helps the SEO process even though sitemap is not mandatory to be crawled by the search engines.
Do maintain a blog and update it consistently
As we discussed in another article in the same series, it is essential to have good quality content to keep the SEO leverage. For this, many businesses to support their blogging platform as an extension of their website and manage it properly. This further attracts the users who want to gather more information and insights in your field of business. If you can slowly develop a follower group and keep on interacting with them through blogging, it can naturally help increase your search engine visibility and ranking.
The advice to business bloggers is that one should typically post a couple of times per week on the blogs with about 500+ word articles, purely information, and occasionally promotional. One need to do an intensive research to find topics related to your specialization, which is discussed the most, and create fresh and engaging content to grab the attention of potential readers. The topics for discussion can be derived from the customer questions or make use of the auto-complete or Adwords tools of Google to identify various trending blog topics.
Optimizing the contact page too
This is one thing many tend to downplay while trying to optimize Joomla for the search engine. In fact, when it comes to a business website, the contact page holds the most vital information to help the users to find where you are and how to reach to you. Be careful on the creation of this page as to include your business name, phone number, email ID, address in full (known as NAP).
You also have the option to link your NAP to the Google+ local and create microdata to ensure more readability. Apart from contact information, it is also essential not to embed a Google Map into your contact page to help your potential consumers to spot your business locally.
Expand the content
It is advisable that you create separately for each of your services, products, or locations of your business to effectively administer local/independent SEO promotions. Having products or local business offers described separately will help avoid lumping all information onto one page and confusing the users. Likely to the consumer, this approach will also assist the search engines like Google or Big more info and content pages to crawl and get more specific information about the business you do and rightly present it to the prospective audience.
Always ensure that you try to diversify your content on the web page as much as possible, especially if you own a business with a presence at multiple geographical locations. Create unique and engaging content for each page and try to promote separately.
Ensure speed
To provide SEO value now, it is essential to have a website which loads in less than 2 seconds. As the users are much impatient now to get something, search engines too are keen to know how fast your website is. The simple reason behind it is that the Google's bots can crawl through more pages by using fewer resources if the pages are quicker and more efficient.
This can be partly achieved by taking care of various speed-specific aspects during the time of website design and development. Website loading speed is also largely dependent on the capacity and performance of the hosting service you choose. You can use GTMetrix.com to check the speed; the other tools are Google's PageSpeed and Yahoo's YSpeed etc.
Not just these, but there are countless other elements too you can do to increase the SEO value of your website as optimizing footer, avoiding duplicate content, creating SEO-friendly titles and H1 tags, etc. We have only covered just the most primary aspects you need to ensure at the very first point before releasing a Joomla website. If you have any queries or comments about the article, feel free to use the comment space below.
Author bio: Derek Iwasiuk is an SEO expert who has released many concepts of blueprint SEO strategy. He used to write blogs too which now attract a large number of followers.
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