Seo for Joomla - Making Joomla Search Engine Optimized

You know about Google and his sitemap function?
Yes? Then skip the first part and go to the making of….
No? Then read the first part:

Google Sitemaps

If You go over to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ there is a section called Webmaster Tools.

This is a section that will bring you lots of information about how Google has indexed your site and what you can do to improve on being found by Google.
And as I am writing this, the same kind of sitemap files are going to apply to Yahoo and live.com (msn)

To be able to submit your Joomla sitemap for Google you have to Login with your Google Account or your Gmail account.
If you don’t have a Google account yet you are able to get it as you click on the webmaster tools.

If you have your account and login, you give the url to your website and follow the procedures that confirms to Google that you are the owner of that domain.

Now you are ready for:

Create a Google Sitemap in Joomla

I told you about the Open-Sef component and hope you have this component installed and working now.

In the administration panel of Open-Sef there is a function for making the Google sitemap.
But to be able to run this great utillty, you got to have some things put in place and configure the tool.

First: create an empty file on you computer called sitemap.xml for windows user, you can do this by opening Notepad and save the file as sitemap.xml , done

Second: Upload the file you created via FTP to the root of your Joomla installation and change the permissions to 707 = read and write access for Owner and Public.

Third: Go to the administration panel of Open-Sef and configure the Google sitemap function.
In the first field put in “sitemap” without any file extension.
In the second field there should be the url of your site already in place, now empty the second field to make sure the sitemap.xml is found in the root.

Fourth: Create the sitemap via The sidebar function “Generate XML” if al is done correctly you should see the content of the XML file without any errors, now click save in the uppor right corner.
You then get a screen that states that the sitemap.xml is generated and on the bottom of that screen there is a litle line that states “Submit to Google sitemaps” don’t click this one until you told Google where to find the sitemap.

Fifth: Call you sitemap in the adress bar, do this in a separete browser window. Just use http://www.example.org/sitemap.xml (replace www.example.org with your own domain url) and you see the file that was just created.
Copy the url and place tell Google via the webmaster panel where they can find the file.

Six: Go back to your Joomla Opensef component Google sitemap and now Click ”Submit to Google sitemaps“

Now go back to you Joomla site and do whatever you want to do….
Relax and go back to the Google webmaster information panel in about 15 minutes.
You will find information of the status of your sitemap, mostly its oke, otherwise check the error it will provide the line number and the error.

Submit the sitemap every time you made changes to the content of your website.

Check in on a regular base into Google webmaster central and look at the status of you website.

Next time: A Website sitemap in Joomla to get indexed better