The Joomla! SEO Checklist

We create commercial websites using Joomla!. We also offer SEO services. Here's our simple SEO check list for anyone running a Joomla! website. These Joomla! SEO tips work.

• Use SEF URL's. Our preferred solution is SEF Advance.  It's not perfect but it works very well. Use the following settings:
  Long URL's - no
  Lower case URL's - yes
  Using these settings your SEF URL will be created using your menu name.
• If you are using SEF Advance use static content pages for normal web pages. The URL's are cleaner and it keeps things simple.
• Set the page title to HIDE in the static content page's parameters. This allows the page Title to be used for a well crafted page TITLE tag - very important for SEO.
• With the page title set to HIDE create an H1 on-page header, assuming the page content needs a header. You may need to style your CSS to make this look OK.
• Create a unique META DESCRIPTION for each page. Google uses these in the SERPs.
• Create unique META KEYWORDS for each page. They are no longer important but it's better to be safe than sorry.
• Empty the global META TAGS in Global Config.
• Empty the Site Name in the Global Config. If this isn't empty it will be pre-pended to every page TITLE tag. You want your keywords to be in the most important position in your TITLE tags not your Site Name.
• This will leave an annoying "-" at the start of your title tags. If you are happy editing PHP files you can edit includes/joomla.php. MAKE SURE YOU BACK UP FIRST!!!
  Replace this:
  $this->_head['title'] = $title ? $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] . ' - '. $title : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];
  with this:
  $this->_head['title'] = $title ? $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] . $title : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];
• To fix the so called canonical issues and make sure you only have one version of your homepage add the following lines to your .htaccess file AFTER replacing 'yourdomain.com' with your own domain.
  #Red Evo non www fix
  Options +FollowSymLinks
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
  #Red Evo index.php fix
  RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
  RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.yourdomain.com/ [R=301,L]
  #Red Evo Homepage fix
  Redirect 301 /home http://www.yourdomain.com
• Install the Joomap extension and tell Google and Yahoo about your site!
• Install Google Analytics into your template's index.php file using the in built Joomla! Template Manager.