Joomla! Search Engine Optimization: Drive people to your site with this supercharged guide to Joomla! and Search Engine Optimization with this book and ebook.

Let's start by getting a clear definition of what it means for a site to have Search Engine Friendly URLs.

Sites created with content management systems like Joomla! rely on interaction with the database for the display of content. Accordingly, the URLs often include query strings and other characters that are part of the interaction with the database. A simple HTML site doesn't have this issue; instead, its URLs are typically much simpler and lack the complexity seen in a CMS-powered website.

URLs containing query strings and other odd characters are hard for both humans and search engines to read. Ideal URLs are readable and tell us something about the content of the page. By default, the Joomla! system produces complex URLs containing additional characters that serve no useful purpose for the site visitor. Accordingly, your first step towards making Joomla! more search engine friendly is to get rid of the messy URLs and replace them with Search Engine...

The Joomla! Global Configuration Manager provides you with several options that enable you to create more effective URLs. There are two options to consider; they may not both be right for you, so it's important to understand their implications. The two options relate to whether your URL uses a suffix and whether the URL alias is in Unicode.

Both of the URL configuration options are located in the SEO Settings section of the Configuration Manager and can be seen in the image included in the section immediately above.

The first option to consider is whether you want your URLs to include a suffix. The suffix will be supplied automatically by the system and will reflect the document type. This will result in the system adding .html to the end of the URL. In other words, instead of getting the following URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/getting-started

When this feature is enabled, you will get the following URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/getting-started.html

To enable this option...

Assuming you have set the system to use SEF URLs, as described above, Joomla! will automatically create the URL aliases for your content items. The automatic aliases are based on the article's title, and may not always be optimal for your site. While the default aliases may be fine for many people, if you are concerned about competitive SEO, you will want to exercise your own control over the aliases. Fortunately, Joomla! makes it possible for you to specify your own URL aliases.

The alias can be created either at the time the item is created or later. There are two possible avenues for setting the alias, though both may not be available, depending on the nature of the page's contents.

The title tag is one of the key factors in your SEO success; indeed, many experts will single out the title tag as the single most important factor in SEO. If you ignore the optimization opportunity presented here, you are missing one of your best chances for gaining search engine rank and traffic from the search engines.

To begin, let's define what we're talking about when we refer to the title tag. In the context of SEO, we're talking about the contents of the<title> tag, which is located in the head of the HTML document, as you can see in the next screenshot; the<title> tag is highlighted in this screenshot of the source code for the default Joomla! "Getting Started" page. The title tag is often referred to as the page title, but be careful not to confuse this with the article title, which appears at the top of a page containing article text.

The title tag serves multiple important functions. First, the value given in this tag shows up on the browser...

Metadata is used to describe the contents of a page. In the past, metadata played a key role in helping search engines understand the nature and content of pages, but today it plays a less critical role. Despite its decreasing importance, metadata should never be ignored; it is the one technical feature of pages that is purely intended to help understand and categorize the page content and therefore should always be used to further your SEO goals.

Metadata is added to pages through the use of meta tags, which appear in the head of the HTML document. While the W3C metadata standards provide for a wide range of possible meta tags, Joomla! only gives us easy access to a subset of the standard. The tags available through Joomla! are shown in the following table:

This chapter covers the basic SEO-related configuration options inside the default Joomla! installation. At the end of this chapter, you should be able to set up Search Engine Friendly URLs and optimize to the extent permitted by the default Joomla! system. SEF URLs are a necessity and you should complete this task before going any further in this book.

Other content in this chapter focuses on how to create URL aliases for specific pages or menu items. This is a useful technique and one that you will want to use if SEO is a priority for your site. Make sure you understand the distinction between the title tag and your article titles and how to control them individually.

The final part of the chapter deals with the topic of metadata and shows you how to set up both global metadata and individual page metadata. Again, this is important if SEO is a priority for you, and you need to understand how to set the metadata for your individual articles.

Looking forward, in the next chapter we...