subject: Some Useful Tips For Joomla Seo For Beginners [print this page] There is no doubt that Joomla is an excellent content management system which is user friendly as well. However, in order to make a website really appealing and profitable, it is important to make it search engine friendly. But with Joomla, you need to put in some efforts to enhance the search engine optimization. If you have some experience about Joomla websites, you must have noticed that the URLs generated by Joomla are not quite search engine friendly. The URLs always have the query parameters, which does not give enough information to search engines so that they can properly index and rank web pages. Mentioned below are some useful tips for beginners to effectively optimise the Joomla site.
1. Select a search engine friendly URL: First and foremost, you need to make the URL search engine friendly. For this purpose, you can use Joomla's default SEF plug-in. This plug-in is not activated in default settings. To activate it, you will have to go to the global configuration page. Another option is to use third party components which are available in both free and paid categories.
2. Set Meta data for all the pages: Meta data is still important and you should work on it to optimize it properly. In order to effectively optimize the meta data for a web page, you should focus more on description and not on keywords. You should write good description of your web page. This is what you will see on search engine result page under your title. Thus it is quite important. If search engines do not find the relevant description, they extract some text from your article body on the page and use that as description on the result page. Also, you should always write different keywords and description for all pages of your site.
3. Create catchy page titles for all pages: You will find a majority of Joomla websites with the default page title- 'home'. Usually beginners do not take notice of this. You must remember that page title is one of the most important on-site criteria considered by search engines to rank web pages. Always give relevant and meaningful title to your pages and include your keywords in it.
4. Derive advantage from 404 error page: Most of the sites have the default 404 error page with small information about the error and a link to home page. You can create a 404 page with the help of a plug-in or you can also create it manually. You can either include a valuable resource on this page or a search form. The main purpose is to prevent the frustration in users by giving them something interesting.
5. Do not forget to insert H1 tags: Always include H1 tag as your article title decorator. It helps in convincing search engines to some extent that the page is actually about the keyword you have been mentioning starting from the page title. It can help you in enhancing the search engine optimization without putting in much efforts.
