How is SEO optimization done in joomla. General rules for SEO optimization on Joomla The best seo plugin for joomla 3

The myths that Joomla sites are poorly SEO-optimized were relevant for versions 1.5 and 2.5. Joomla 3.x is well indexed and promoted in search results. In this article, we will dispel common misconceptions about Joomla regarding SEO.

In this review, we will consider the most popular myths about the unsuitability of websites on Joomla to advance in search engines and put an end to them.

Joomla generates duplicate pages?

Duplicate pages are a terrible evil that greatly harms the promotion of the site in search results. The thing is that the search engine can index a duplicate page on the site, and exclude the main one that you are promoting from the search results. As a result, the work on linking and external promotion will be in vain.

Are duplicates relevant for Joomla today?

Yes, but that doesn't make her worse than others. CMS: almost all have duplicates CMS(paid and free). And one of the stages of SEO-optimization of the site on Joomla, as with any other engine, is their exception to indexing by search engines: you just need to work once and forget about this problem .

Joomla is badly indexed?

The legend is as old as the world, and the following points serve as the source of this statement:

Before, before Joomla version 3.3, in the file robots.txt part desired folders was closed from indexing, in particular the images folder.

Search robots, of course, see your entire site, but here are the bans in robots.txt sometimes followed and not added to the image index.

Plus, lately, search bots need to see your site the same way users see it, and on this moment it is important that CSS and JS files are not prohibited from indexing.

Even earlier, on Joomla 1.5 there were problems with CNC links ( SEF URL human-readable URLs). But the bottom line is that a folder was added to the links of the site pages components, for indexing which in robots.txt there has always been a ban. That's why pages on some sites might not get into the search results.

It's important to know:

Website content on current versions Joomla is remarkably indexed and promoted in search engines.

Is it possible to add meta tags in Joomla?

Yes, there used to be problems with writing meta tags for some pages.

Functionality is currently Joomla allows you to prescribe all the meta tags necessary for SEO optimization ( Title, Description, keywords, robots) for content pages, categories, and menu items. In addition, the Title tag can be specified separately from the title of the material or menu item.

It's important to know:

In the current versions of Joomla, you can register all the meta tags necessary for SEO.

Are Joomla sites too slow?

This topic was relevant for Joomla 1.5 and component VirtueMart.

On the Joomla 3 and above, everything is in order with the download speed: the basic functionality allows you to implement server-side caching and GZIP compression of output data. Separate questions about speed appear, but they are addressed to setting up hosting and to site owners involved in adding materials.

In other words, no matter how fast your car is, you will not be able to drive it fast on a bad road, with bad gas and a driver who was given a license the day before.

It's important to know:

Sites on current versions of Joomla load no worse than others.

To learn how to ensure maximum site loading speed on Joomla 3, read in this section.

The end of SEO myths about Joomla

This is where the myths end.

What can be the conclusion?

All of these metrics:

• the presence of duplicates
• good site structure
• meta tags,
• download speed,

are important points in SEO-optimization of any site.

• competent linking,
• content optimization,
• plus, a very important element for advancement today is micro-markup.

Here with her, in one area or another, everyone has problems. And in general, there is no adequate documentation on it. But for Jumla I completely solved this problem.

Since our site is mainly inhabited by site owners Joomla, then list the advantages of this CMS I think it’s not worth it: you already know very well about the cool functionality of this system, which surpasses many paid engines.

As a conclusion

Jumla 3 great for promotion. There are problems with duplicates, but it is solvable.

In order for the site to be in high positions in the search results, you need to work on it and this axiom is for all sites. The roots of the myths about what sites are on Joomla poorly promoted, coming from the 1.5 days and newbie blog posts by word of mouth. Jumla, like any other CMS, well indexed and promoted in search results.

If the SEO optimizer says that Jumla this is bad, it means one of two things: either he has not worked with this engine for a long time, or he has not worked with it at all. Therefore, in order not to look clumsy in the eyes of the client, it is better to position yourself as a specialist in CMS and clever terms to tell popular myths.

Due to the great interest in this issue, I open new series articles on SEO-optimization of Joomla. In this article I will talk about the basics of optimizing a site for search engines, as well as the tools built into Joomla to solve this problem.

This article will consider the basics of seo-optimization of the site and the basic Joomla tools familiar to all advanced users.

Why optimize a site?

So, why do we need to optimize the site? This question can be called rhetorical, because almost all webmasters know the answer to it. The goal of any quality site in 90% of cases is primarily to attract visitors to it. You can attract them in different ways, but search engines have been and will remain one of the main sources of visitors for a long time.

The higher the site in the search results for popular queries, the more people will go to it and, accordingly, the more popular it will be. This is clear to almost everyone and does not require much explanation.

The main questions begin when the site owner thinks: "HOW do I make my site rank high in the search results?". In this case, there is serious competition, since every webmaster / site owner wants his brainchild to get a place in the sun. Many are even ready to invest big money in it. Due to the high competition on the site, all the details must be perfectly verified, otherwise, ceteris paribus (for example, financial investments, age of the site, etc.), the competitor will get a small, but advantage, which will help him to beat you in the search results.

In this series of articles, we will focus on internal site optimization factors (those that any webmaster can implement at no additional cost).

The most important factors of internal website optimization

All work on SEO-optimization of the site can be divided into two large blocks:

• External site optimization– work with external factors affecting the site (buying links, promotion in in social networks and etc.)
• Internal website optimization– work with the site itself, its technical side, content and user behavior.

Below I have compiled a list of the most important factors internal optimization, which can be configured in Joomla (importance decreases with each following factor):

1. Content- a factor not directly related to Joomla, but having the highest priority of importance. Much has already been said about this, but I will repeat: the more interesting, high-quality and useful the information on your site is, the more visitors it will receive. Seo-optimization of content also exists, but now it does not belong to the topic of our article, since it depends more on the art of the author writing the article than on Joomla.
2. Page title (title)– A very important part of internal optimization. It is the title that is shown in bold letters in the search results and it is the title that users first of all pay attention to. Joomla creates the title of the page according to the title of the article, but there are subtleties. I'll talk about them a little later.
3. Meta description (description) - just like the title plays an important role in the internal optimization of the page. It's also important because some search engines, like Google, show the meta description in the SERPs below the title. If you have a well-written description, the number of visitors who will go to your site may increase.
4. Page link url is also one of the important things about internal optimization. If the link is written in Latin or Russian letters, search engines pay attention to this, increasing the site in the search results.
5. User behavior on the site– The number of page views, the time spent on the site, the return or non-return to a further search for a query - all this is extremely important today for successful promotion. You need to try to make the site such that users are completely satisfied with it.
6. Internal site linking- the pages of the site should be interconnected by links, and the wider this connection is, the better it will affect the results of the issuance.
7. Page keywords (keywords)- today it is believed that this part of the page description has almost no effect on the results of the issuance, but there is still some benefit from them (note: we are talking about meta name = "keywords", not about keywords in the text).

This is what a general list of internal website optimization factors looks like. Of course, each webmaster or SEO optimizer has his own secrets of work, but the ones I have listed are well known and should not be neglected.

Seo-optimization of Joomla. Built-in tools

Now consider what allows us standard means Joomla in terms of internal optimization. I will say right away they allow a lot, but not all. Now in order.

The first thing to understand is that Joomla and Joomla extensions are completely different things. Joomla is not designed for SEO-optimization of third-party extensions. It can only work with what is included in standard version. Therefore, if we are talking about optimization, for example, VirtueMart , Community Builder , and other Joomla extensions, we must understand that we will have to use an additional optimization extension, because. Joomla does not allow you to do this inline. We will talk about additional extensions in the next articles of the series, and now I will tell you what can still be done with the built-in Joomla tools.

General SEO settings in Joomla

So, we decided to optimize our Joomla site. The first thing we need to do is rename the file " htaccess.txt", located in the Joomla root directory, in " .htaccess". I won’t describe in detail the meaning of this procedure (it’s long and rather complicated), I’ll just say that it’s necessary. If, nevertheless, someone is interested in what this htaccess is and what it is eaten with, then, as they say, Welcome to Google, there is comprehensive information there.

Rename file htaccess.txt, how regular folder on Windows it won't work. Therefore, for renaming, I recommend using either an advanced editor (for example, Notepad ++), or some file manager(for example, Total Commander).

After the file is renamed, you need to go to the Joomla settings (" Website» –> « General settings"). Here, on the right, we can see the "SEO Settings" section, which allows you to configure Joomla's SEO optimization with built-in tools.

Important!!!

If your site is already indexed by search engines, changing these settings will result in the loss of all indexed pages and external links of the site. Be extremely careful!!!

What is there:

• Enable SEF (CNC)– turns on the Joomla seo-optimization mechanism, more precisely friendly SEF-links (links that can include words, and not just code ala index.php?=….) – activate;
• URL redirect- again, go into details for a long time, just activate;
• Add suffix to URL- if enabled, " . html". For search engines, the presence of this ending does not matter. I would advise not to include.
• Aliases in Unicode– Enabling this option will allow you to create URLs in Russian (or another language other than English). It makes sense to enable it only if you have a Cyrillic domain and want to have a URL in Russian.
• Include site name in page title– if enabled, then the title of the site page specified in the general Joomla settings will always be added to the title of the site page. Better not turn it on.

Thus, we enable three options and click the "Save" button. Everything, seo-optimization of Joomla is activated. But it's too early to rejoice. There is still a lot of work ahead.

URL and Title settings in Joomla

After activating Joomla seo optimization, we will see that the URLs of the pages have changed. By default, they are now generated from content titles (or Joomla menu items).

But what if the titles are too long and in general, you want to have a URL different from the title of the article or menu item? You may notice that each page, category, Joomla menu item in the settings has an "Alias" option.

This option is responsible for appearance links of the page, category, menu item.

If you leave this field empty, then the alias will be generated automatically from the name of the material by transliterating characters. If the field is filled with Latin letters, then it will become Page URL(or part of the URL). For example, if we have created a new menu item and in the field " Alias» entered « seojoomla", then the link address of this menu item will be " /seojoomla.html».

By filling in all the aliases in this way, we will get a site with beautiful friendly links.

It is also worth noting that:

1. Each alias must be unique because there cannot be two pages with the same address.
2. It is desirable that the alias contains keywords, characterizing the content, article, category, or menu item for which it is created. This will have a positive effect on the results of issuing this page by search engines.
3. After indexing the site, it is highly undesirable to change the alias, otherwise the page for which it is responsible will temporarily fly out of the search engine index.

As for the Title of the site page, which search engines use as a link to your site in the search results, in Joomla, by default, it is formed the same as the title of the material. But this is not always a true statement. There are many features of working with Titles in Joomla, a separate article is devoted to them. Managing Titles in Joomla . I definitely recommend checking it out.

Meta data settings in Joomla

The built-in features of Joomla for working with the description and keywords of the page are simple:

When creating a material, you can set a description, keywords, and some other meta-data for it.

Internal page linking in Joomla

And finally, the internal linking of the site. On the one hand, Joomla has no problems with this, but on the other hand, everything is done in a semi-automatic mode. For internal linking in Joomla there is a special module called "Related Materials".

Its essence is literally described in the module itself:

This module displays a list of content links that are related to what is currently displayed in the central area of ​​the page. Links are determined by keywords entered in the material parameters.
All keywords in this article are searched in the keyword lists of other published materials. For example, you have the Parrot Breeding material and another Black Cockatoo Breeding Manual. If you include the keyword "parrot" in both of these stories, the Related Content module will consider them related and show a link to Parrot Breeding when viewing the Black Cockatoo Breeding Guide and so on.

As can be understood from the description, the module displays similar materials, thereby relinking the site internally, but:

1. Everything is done by hand, ie. keywords are required for each material. On the one hand, this is good, but on the other hand, it is laborious.
2. A module is not a plugin, it needs a special position, and if we want to display similar articles under the text of the current one, there must be a corresponding module position in that place.

To display similar materials, such as, for example, at the end of this article, there are more convenient, third party extensions Joomla, allowing you to fully automate the process. They will be discussed in future articles.

Also, thanks to the appearance of custom fields in Joomla 3, it became possible to make a block of similar articles without additional modules and plugins.

Thus, we see that Joomla has SEO optimization tools. Although they are not perfect, they can and should be used.

In contact with

- this is my favorite engine, life is such a thing that you like it or not, but you have to learn something new. Therefore, at one time I came across the content management system CMS Joomla. Not to say that I am extremely happy to work with this engine, but in some cases it is more flexible than WP, and allows you to solve slightly different tasks than WordPress-powered sites.

And in the process of working with Joomla, over time, I had to solve many interesting problems, which, as it turned out, are a constant disease of this engine. Problems in terms of optimizing the Joomla site for search engines. There are a lot of different turbidity, so it's very easy to get confused. I used all the methods described below on a site running Joomla, and it’s hard for me to say which of the methods individually works better, but in combination they significantly improved the site’s performance, so I consider all this Joomla optimization work necessary.

It is impossible to describe all the SEO problems that Joomla has, so I will focus on the main ones.

SEO- website optimizationJoomla

1. I don’t know why it happens, but by default in Joomla folder with pictures (/images) is closed from indexing by search engines. And when you start looking at robots.txt, you just can't help but notice it upon closer examination.

Here I will find the first Joomla site I came across - timessquare.com. Let's check that this is really Joomla using http://2ip.ru/cms/

This 2ip.ru service sometimes does not show the site's CMS correctly, but this happens quite rarely, so in most cases you can trust it. But in order to be sure that this is really Joomla, let's check the positions of the modules by entering the URL of the following form http://timessquare.com/?tp=1 into the search bar.

The positions are displayed, which means everything is OK, we have a site on Joomla. Therefore, you can trust me that in the examples it will be sites on Joomla

So, if we look at the robots.txt of this site, we will see that search spiders are directly prohibited from indexing the contents of the /images folder, which stores all the pictures

We can say that the owners of this site upload pictures to some other folder, but no, all site images are loaded here

And this situation is relevant for all sites on Joomla. Therefore, one of the problems that needs to be solved is to remove the ban on indexing the /images folder in the robots.txt file.

2. site `s map.xml

Strictly speaking, Joomla itself is not an easy CMS, so once before my opinion was radically different than now. I used to use the Xmap add-on, however, time suggested a more correct solution.

The sitemap generator itself does not take up much space and eats a few resources, but why is it needed at all? Its main purpose is to generate a sitemap for the purpose of more fast indexing site content. And this sitemap fits in just one single sitemap.xml file. The question arises: why does the Xmap component work then? It is much easier not to add Xmap to the site, but to act like this: publish a bunch of articles on the site, and then use a special service to generate a sitemap in .xml format and upload it to the hosting yourself. Actually, I use this solution almost all the time. Generating large amounts of content, usually more than 500 URLs, will not be free, so if you need to generate a sitemap for free, then you need to use the Xenu Link program.

3. Redirect from www to without and back

I don’t see the point in using www in the domain, so I always make the domain without www the main mirror of the site. However, in Joomla, automatic redirection does not work, unlike in Joomla. Therefore, for Joomla, you have to write the whole thing in the .htaccess file. To redirect from a domain name from www to Domain name without www, you need to add the following lines to the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %(HTTP_HOST) !^www\. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%(HTTP_HOST)/$1

4. Content editor

Initially, the Joomla assembly includes two test editors during installation. These are TinyMCE and Code Mirror. But it’s enough to work with this editor for just a few hours, and it immediately becomes clear that it will be impossible to work like this further. This is how the standard one looks like text editor Joomla

The problems begin from the time when you need to upload images to the site and you will have to do this through a separate menu "Media Manager"

And when you start loading images through the media manager, and not through the text editor itself, then you will think about how not cool it is. An alternative to all this disgrace is the JCE editor (Joomla Content Editor). Once, when I first encountered these editors, I began to look for information on what to change the standard editors for. Googling a little, I realized that the flagship in this field is exactly JCE.

The JCE panel itself looks like this:

I think that today it is the best text editor for Joomla. The program is located at http://www.joomlacontenteditor.net/. You can also find and download Russian localization here.

5. Plugins forSEO optimizationJoomla

When working with Joomla CMS, this is the most problematic issue. Because there is no type monopoly for this CMS like there is for WordPress.

There are a lot of them for Joomla. Here is an example of a few of them:

Somehow it turns out that the Joomla community is simply huge, and much larger than the WordPress community, but in life it turns out that this size is of no use. Because with a smaller community, leaders are more obvious and help is easier to find.

I tried many times to find qualified help on the Joomla forums, but I don’t know why, this very help never came. People either do not know the solutions to the problems that arise, or simply do not want to help. But if something happens on the part of Joomla, then really finding some help on the forum is extremely problematic. What can not be said about WordPress.

Without going into the details of all these plugins, I can say that the most powerful combine from the above is “Sh404SEF”, and the simplest and most functional is “JoomSEF”.

If you have some site customization skills, then I think that JoomSEF is enough. Because it performs the most basic functions: creating and editing links, installing CNC, meta tags for site pages.

You can watch a video of the SEF plugin below.

As for the "Sh404SEF" component for Joomla, I came across it most often. Frankly speaking, it eats a lot of hosting resources and is not universal in everything. However, it has almost every possible SEO setting that can be. Therefore, I can not say that this plugin is only for beginners. For beginners, there are many customizable parameters that you can not manually register on the hosting. But at the same time, will newcomers understand this? Also a question. In general, this plugin is versatile, bulky with a lot of settings.

6. Search for duplicate pages on the siteJoomla

Based on my own experience with this CMS, I can say that the problem of creating duplicate site pages in Joomla is probably the biggest headache there is. And how to solve this problem - xs, because Joomla in some incredible way creates duplicate pages.

But something needs to be done, so there is a certain range of actions to neutralize this problem.

Task number 1 - duplicate pages need to be found

Task number 2 - duplicate pages need to be removed

How to find duplicate pages on the site?

I assume that if you are reading this article now, then for sure you are either starting in SEO, or are already working in this direction and are looking for something new and interesting. So, I will say the easiest and most inexpensive way to detect duplicates on the site is to use the tool " Google Webmaster Tools". It is enough for a little time to pass after adding the site to this panel, and then you can go in and see if there are duplicates on the site

There are three points that interest us in this case. When we click on the "Duplicate Meta Description" heading, we will immediately see all our duplicates

Actually, this is how duplicate pages of the site are found.

How to remove duplicates on the siteJoomla?

Right here, in the Google webmaster panel, you can create a request to remove objectionable pages of the site

And in Joomla itself, you can remove duplicates using the above SEO component "Sh404SEF"

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

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

How it works

The site on the CMS is easily supplemented with additional components. Each has its own purpose. The developers have created many extensions, plugins and modules to increase the ranking of the resource in search engines. Usually unkind to sites on some CMS search engines are quite possible to "appease".

Thanks to these extensions, the site becomes more convenient for developers and visitors. With their help, you can customize the appearance of 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 your site, old or new. When changing an article or adding 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 various configurations for the title, meta tags, and Google admin verification keys. The plugin works with different languages.

Tag Meta

Allows you to effectively manage all the meta-information of the site. With this free extension, it is possible, for example, to set the title tag or meta tags both common ("description", "keywords") and rare ("copyright", "external link") or set a canonical link for which - either 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 simple free plugin allows the site administrator to change or remove the generator tag, even from the 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 set, then the extension builds them from the associated text or from the name of the picture. Additionally, users are given the opportunity to overwrite 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 developers as the most popular among Joomla users, which allows you to manage headers for SEO optimization of the site. The plugin can:

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

Additions to the site on the Joomla engine generate attributes that are important for promotion. The system works by itself, performing the most routine work. But it cannot generate all the content, nor can it formulate the most creative and catchy headlines. Therefore, a person has enough work.