[14]Joomla 1.6 SEO

[davidtowers]

Hi there,

At Good Web Practices we (Alex and I) have been working hard over the past few days, trying to write a thorough review of how Joomla could be improved in terms of SEO in Joomla 1.6. We really hope this will prove helpful and that some of our suggestions will be realised in Joomla 1.6.

The post we have written considers the why, what, how and when.

Please take time to read our article:

http://www.goodwebpractices.com/joomla/ ... 6-seo.html

We look forward to receiving feedback about these suggestions.

David

[salyris]

SEO and solid SEF has been a need for quite some time now. I believe it is time that Joomla 1.6 take the needed steps to make them integrated. I suggest having the JoomlaAtWork patch integrated along with sh404SEF component. I also suggest that all heading titles be changed to H1. Example:

<h1 class="contentpagetitle">Your Joomla Title Here...</h1>

There has been a hack most of use use and other extensions emulate, but the result is needed just the same.

There is a nice list of SEO/SEF items here: http://www.goodwebpractices.com/joomla/ ... 6-seo.html.

It is tough to upgrade Joomla! (let alone migrating to 1.5 or 1.6) each time and have to go through all the hacking needed for better SEO. For some more opinions go here: http://www.alledia.com/blog/open-questi ... oomla-1.6/

I think Accessible Joomla!: a8eJoomla is on the right path http://a8ejoomla.com/.

[wshealy]

If I can add to the SEO/SEF thought. I believe that the lowest level URL not related to structure most commonly an content item-article should not have all the structure appended to it. We now do site/menu/section/category/article. Simply moving an article to another category, rearranging a menu, or archiving an article destroys any permanent link to the content item-article. We should use site/alias or alt-name for the URL of a content item and simply force alias or alt-name to be unique. This way once content is in the search engine it could always be found, a permanent link.

[KanNog Steeds]

Add a language metatag. The language that is specified in the Advanced Parameters from the Article can be used.
Each article can have its own language specified.

[Stasys]

it would be great to know how things move on on this issue cause seo is very imortant

[marshtric]

From an SEO point of view, it's important to have a website which is well internally linked, a change can be made to the article editor to facilitate this. While we're talking about the editor we've got a small suggestion to help make the Joomla writing experience more pleasant:

* When inserting an image using the "image" button at the bottom of the article text-box, the dimensions of the image should automatically be added.
* The ability to link to other articles on the website from within the editor. This could be done by a "link within website" button next to the "image, "page break" and "read more..." buttons, or simply within the format options by clicking on the link button within the Tiny MCE editor.

[Archangel Michael]

I'm not sure how easy my suggestion would be to implement but here it is ....

Check for duplicate SEO/SEF pages. For sites upgrading, this should come in the form of a "report". I manage a bunch of sites, most of them I'm "technical" manager, and not responsible for content at all. I'm sure that many of my sites have "alias" names are duplicated somewhere. A pre-upgrade "check" would be the best place for this.

Also, blank Alias check (if that is the SEF/SEO page) and a check for "spaces" with the possibility of automatically adding a hyphen or underscore for spaces.

I try to remember that many sites aren't computer / programming geeks, so automagical is a good "default" to aim for.

[guruananthe]

apart from this suggestion you have to do OFF PAGE SEO Work like Article submission,Link building to improve the Page Rank

[mergen]

I am very glad that some of these SEO/SEF items will be included in 1.6 core.

I think most of us agree that Joomla has definitely been lagging WordPress and probably Drupal as well in terms of being SEF from the core package.

I have now subscribed to the announcements via RSS so hopefully I will now be up to date on these posts and can make recommendations/suggestions little bit earlier.

Thanks again for adding the SEO/SEF items.

Keep up the good work,
MC

[RickGlaser]

I just left a comment in another post stating how well Joomla has adapted to SEO needs. I think the major fix would be the Joomla SEF componenent. I hat having the top menu item in the URL when an item is listed below. As of right now SH404SEF fixes all this but, this should be something that is stock. The long stringy ugly urls should be an option that you can turn on (for whatever reason), and SEF urls should be the norm.

[bbnets123]

Joolma is friendly doing SEO, I use joomla for my site.

[baijianpeng]

I suggest having the JoomlaAtWork patch integrated along with sh404SEF component.

Can't agree more!

Wish the Official team of Joomla 1.6 will pay more attention to SEF requests by users.

Thanks.

BTW, it seems that the author of sh404SEF has stopped his work on this great extension. So I hope the Joomla 1.6 team will include this component as its core function.

[MarkReynolds]

Now that sh404sef's future is uncertain, bringing more advanced SEO features to Joomla 1.6 is critical, it probably was anyway. I think it's critical that SEO features should be easy to use for the majority of users (i.e. those with no SEO knowledge). There's usually not a lot of discussion of this.

We need to make sure the interface is easy to use for companies without an employee with great IT/SEO skills. Bringing all meta info fields into the actual article/category, which it seems is being done, is one way of doing this.

301 Redirects
If I was a small business owner with little knowledge of SEO and redirects, then manual 301 redirects would be a feature that I would likely neglect; I would assume that this would be the case for many small business website owners.

I think there should be a serious warning to a user who wants to change the content of the filename/alias field. Changing the filename is potentionally serious and having a warning is a great way to educate web editors. If the field is changed then the automated creation of a 301 redirect would be the only way to go for a user with no SEO/technical knowledge.

We wouldn't want to present Google with 301 redirect after 301 redirect from the one original page, so hopefully any warning would discourage multiple changing of filenames which would otherwise lead to a series of 301 redirects being thrown at Google.

In my opinion everything that directly effects a single article or category should be available for the user to change within the article or category backend page itself, instead of having to go to another part of the Joomla backend interface, which I think is a failing of sh404sef at the moment.

When changing filenames it would be handy if the page gave the option of a permanent change (301) or temporary change (302). I'm sure there could be a situation when this option could be handy. A good addition would be for the system to display past URLs for that article or category, so that the editor is aware of what's gone on in the past. This would help more savvy editors to run checks to see where old 301 redirected URLS are in the search engine's index.

[joomfriend]

Where can I get a complete list of SEO stuff already done and to be done in Joomla 1.6? Thanks!

[salyris]

Where can I get a complete list of SEO stuff already done and to be done in Joomla 1.6? Thanks!

This might help: http://theartofjoomla.com/home/5-commen ... la-16.html

Or

http://www.goodwebpractices.com/joomla/ ... 6-seo.html

[joomfriend]

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.
Also thanks very much for the link to the video.

[salyris]

You're very welcome!