Joomla is one of the most popular enterprise-level Content Management Systems today and part of that popularity comes from how quickly search-engine-optimization can be applied to a Joomla site and Joomla pages/articles. Here is a quick 5 minute tutorial to get your Joomla site set up to woo the search engines.

(This tutorial assumes you have some understanding of SEO - if any principles mentioned here are not clear don't hesitate to contact me; I'll be happy to help.)

 

Step 1

SEO settings in the Global Configuration area

Log into the administration area of your Joomla site and navigate to Site -> Global Configuration -> SEO Settings and be sure to set both "Search Engine Friendly URLs" and "Use Apache mod_rewrite" to 'Yes'. Before saving this setting, use your FTP client to navigate to the root of your Joomla site and rename the file 'htaccess.txt' to '.htaccess'. Click on the 'Apply' button in the top right of the page.

Step 2

Metadata settings in the Global Configuration area

Still on the same page, enter a keyword-strong description into the "Global Site Meta Description" box and like-wise enter some comma-seperated keywords in the "Global Site Meta Keywords" box.

Entering content in these two boxes ensures that in case you miss entering specific meta-descriptions and meta-keywords for a page or pages, these values will be used by Joomla. This way every piece of content in your Joomla site will have valid meta-data.

Now let's look at using SEO principles for each Joomla article.

Step 3

Every Joomla article has a "Title" field and an "Alias" field. These two fields are very powerful for SEO if used properly.

For the "Title" of your article, use a descriptive phrase packed with keywords e.g. the title of this article is "Joomla - how to optimize your Joomla articles for Search Engines". This is both descriptive and keyword-rich. Apart from making a nice title for the article this is also used as the title for the page i.e. the "title" metatag, a tag that is counted highly by search engines, so it's important that it be as keyword-rich as possible without losing context.

By default, Joomla generates the alias from the "Title" when you first save the article and although this is fine you can edit it so that it is slightly different from the title e.g. the alias for this article is "joomla-seo-optimize-joomla-articles-for-search-engines" and this alias is used by Joomla as the 'search-engine-friendly' url for this article.
Making the 'title' metatag and the url of a page different seems to make search engines happy so make sure you re-write the 'alias' to something that is also keyword-rich but different to the 'title'.

Step 4

"Meta-description" and "Meta-keywords" for the article

Of these two meta-tags, the meta-description tag is the more important and it is a great opportunity to create a short, contextual description that search engines can use. This description is used to calculate the value of the page in search engine ranking as well as the blurb of text under the name of the page in the search engine results pages. Keep it keyword-rich, in context, and your page will score better.

So this is a quick way to ensure that your pages are found by search engines and that they score well. Be sure to generate good, well-written and useful content i.e. content people are searching for, and your site will do well in the rankings.