Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to strategies that you can use to improve the likelihood someone will find your website pages when using specific sets of search phrases or key words in a search engine. Here are some tips specific to Joomla that can be used by your non-profit or non governmental organization (NGO).
Page Titles: Your SEO ranking can be improved by creating descriptive web page titles that include the important keywords you think people will be using to search for your site. Here’s how you can easily make some simple changes.
- Individual Articles: It is important that each page you create has a descriptive title that include the important keywords you think people will be using to search for your site. By default, when Joomla creates an article it gives it a web page title that is the same as the name of the article. It is easy to change the title, just edit the article as you would normally and then change the title in the “Title” box at the top.
- Groups of articles: In Joomla it is possible to have your articles included as one of many articles in a menu. In this case Joomla defaults to giving the menu web page the same title as that of the menu title. Unlike an article, you do not change the menu’s web page title by changing the title of the menu. This is a confusing part of Joomla. The menu’s web page title is changed under the “Parameters (System)” section.
- Your entire web site: It is also possible to add a universal prefix or suffix to your site with the Joomla Title Manager Extension. You could use this to automatically add your non-profit’s name to every page on your website.
Search Engine Friendly URLs: By default Joomla URLs have special codes in them that are used to keep track of the articles you create. This may be good for the Joomla database, but unfortunately this does not make the URLs very easy to read. The biggest disadvantage of this is that the URLs don’t contain any keywords in them that can be used to make SEO easier. Fortunately, Joomla has a search engine optimization (SEO) section on its global configuration page that can be helpful. It converts the codes into keywords that match the page titles of your articles. This video shows you what to do.
What the video doesn’t show is that you may have to edit the .htaccess file in the home directory of your web server. The two most common modifications that will help to get things working are
- Activating or commenting out the line
Options +FollowSymLinks
- Modifying the path for the RewriteBase line. If you have installed joomla in your root directory then this can remain, but if you install in a /joomla subdirectory of your main site you will need to modify it to look like this by mentioning /joomla specifically
RewriteBase /joomla
Install a Joomla editor extension that uses intelligent links : The advantage of the Joomla URL codes mentioned before is that they never change if you change the ordering of your menus or the titles of your articles. With friendly URLs this is not so. This can be a problem if you use URL links between articles. When the article title changes the friendly URL also changes and the link to the friendly URL will now break. The good thing is that you can still use the original URL with the codes to get to the original article. The default Joomla editor has no method of telling you what the codes are when you use friendly URLs, but the JCE editor does. Install the JCE editor extension, and make it your default editor in your Global Configuration page. Edit your links using the editor and it will give you a list of all your articles and this will make your post friendly URL updates much easier. Links in articles created before you used friendly URLs will already have the codes and so will still work OK.
Create a “Page not found” 404 page for Joomla: You don’t often think about it but it is important to have a way to find all content on your website. This is especially important when friendly URLs are just added to your site and URL names change. The content is still there but just in a different place. This tutorial shows you how to create a custom 404 error page, but the real value comes with adding a Google Custom Search Engine box to the 404 page so people can search for the content in the new location.
Sitemaps: Search engines often rely on a sitemap file that lists the URLs of all your pages of your website. Install the Joomap Joomla extension and register the sitemap it creates with the major search engines. Also add the link to the sitemap URL in your robots.txt file in your website’s main Joomla directory. An example of how to do this can be found on the sitemaps.org website.
Analytics: Register with Google Analytics. It allows you to get an idea of the search terms people are using to reach your site and you can then try to add more pertinent keywords to the articles on your site to make them easier to find. You have to make some modifications to your site to get this done properly. First use Google Analytics generate the piece of HTML tracking code specific to your site. Next, add the code to your Joomla template’s index.php file that is used to generate all your site’s Joomla pages. The index.php file can be edited using the Joomla Template Manager via the “Edit HTML” link at the top of the page.
Section and Category Names: You may or may not want to include the Section and Category names in the URLs for your site. If the names are descriptive like in an online Newspaper you may want to display them. If you are just using the categories to make the content more manageable with the possibility of frequent name changes you may want to hide them. You can change these settings in Article Manager where there is a “Parameters” link on the main page.
I hope these tips have been helpful. Please let me know if you have any comments.
