Among the millions of websites running on Joomla, tremendous numbers of sites follow the effective Joomla SEO tips. As every website owner desires to improve his web presence on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) consistently, developers implement the effective SEO strategies on their site. Being a developer, if you are not getting the improved results, you must be looking for some Joomla SEO tips.
After introducing the top WordPress SEO tips, we will illustrate some of the more effective Joomla SEO tips in this article. These tips are followed by millions of Joomla developers. You must know these strategies to improve your website ranking on the SERP.
Top 10 Joomla SEO Tips
Listed here are the SEO strategies for Joomla sites that you must know.
Meta Description and Title on Home Page
As your home page is one of the most important parts of your website, you must ensure that it contains attractive title and meta description. For this, you should navigate to the SH404SEF URL manager and open the home page meta. On the next screen, you will find many fields, where the page title and Description tag are the imperative areas to be filled up with relevant content. You may skip all the other fields, as Google doesn’t takes these information into consideration while ranking.
Article Meta Description
When your target audience searches for content related to your niche, the first thing they notice about your site on the SERP is your article’s title and meta description. As the title relates directly to the content, the relevancy of meta description ascertains whether the visitor will click through your link. Therefore, you must write a user-friendly as well as SEO-friendly meta description and insert the keyword at a relevant place.
Image Alt Text
Search engines do not have the ability to understand the images on your site. Keeping this in mind, every content management system comes with Image Alt Text that is accessed by the search engine. Hence, when you add an image on your articles or blogs, you should explain the relevancy of the image. However, you should make sure that the principal keywords are used naturally and not stuffed inappropriately.
Internal Linking
Link-building has been an imperative SEO strategy in the last decade. But with the implementation of the new SEO guidelines, using too many external links can create a negative impact. Therefore, instead of creating external links, you should opt for internal linking. It is the type of linking where you offer the links to other articles on your site from one article. Hence, you should practice the internal linking strategy by creating links to multiple relevant articles.
Merge www and non-www prefix
In Joomla, you get an option to choose from the prefix; i.e. whether the “www” will be added to your domain or not. Moreover, if you remove the “www” prefix and someone else uses the address with the prefix, there can be an issue with duplicate URL. Hence, to play safe, you should configure the presence of prefix from the Google Webmaster Tools and redirect the visitors to your address, with or without the www prefix.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
The Google Penguin SEO update is quite strict with the use of keywords in articles and blogs. The articles you publish on your Joomla site must be relevant to the topic and the keywords must be used in appropriate places only. In addition to this, you should not overuse the keywords in the content because it is treated as a Black Hat SEO technique.
Sitemap
Search engines appreciate when you offer easy navigation on your site. However, the sitemap accessed by human traffic cannot provide any assistance to search engines. Keeping this in mind, you should create two sitemaps on your Joomla site; one for human traffic and another for search engines. This would provide assistance to both, visitors and crawlers, and hence your SEO ranking will improve.
Prevent Duplicate content
Duplicate content has been in the list of Black Hat SEO strategies for years. If any of your articles or blogs have plagiarism issues, your SEO ranking can degrade drastically. Hence, you must always check your articles for plagiarism before publishing them on your site. In fact, you should make sure that your content, address of the web page and title are unique.
Use SEO Extensions
As Joomla is an advanced CMS and offers compatibility with plugins and extensions, there are tons of SEO tools for this platform. You can install various plugins such as SEO-Generator and SEOSIMPLE, that boosts up the SEO strategies of your site. However, it is recommendable that you must only install the most appropriate tools. Installing too many extensions on a Joomla site may slow down the loading speed and, ultimately, degrade the performance of the site. So, you need a fast Joomla Hosting if you install too many extensions.
Reduce Social Links and PDF files
Social links and PDF files distract the visitors from exploring your Joomla site. As your primary aim should be to drive traffic on multiple pages of your site, you should treat social links as a secondary option and reduce the usability of PDF files. This is because the visitors may forget to explore your site once they find the social links. Similarly, they may spend too much time on reading the PDF file, although it doesn’t give you any assistance in SEO.
