Joomla Search Engine Optimization Blog updates

OpenSEF alternatives for Search Engine Optimization

I wrote some time ago that OpenSEF development has been taken over by new maintainers.

Because I don’t know yet how and when a new release is planned I thought I would start looking at alternatives to some of the most used features in OpenSEF.
Now, don’t take this the wrong way, OpenSEF is still a great component that has many great features and you can still Download OpenSEF

So here is a short list of the items you could work with to get the best options for Joomla SEO in Place:

• sh404SEF – The best free SEF Component at this moment
  I even provides a function to edit you 404 page and give you a proper Joomla 404 Header!
• iJoomla Metatag Generator – Getting an overview of the Fields you still have to fill with Metatag Descriptions and Keywords (you can even do it automatically.. not recommend for best results)
• Sef Service Map , this was the hardest one.. because you can give Google, Yahoo, Ask and Live a sitemap file to make sure they can find all the content on your website.
  OpenSEF has a great part in it that creates a sitemap.xml file with the SEF URL in it…
  I tried Joomap and encountered the same problems as Joemar and tried the new version of Sef Service Map, and that worked out fine!
  It even updates the file automatically after the cache time, so this on it a set and forget it… an improvement over OpenSEF.

You can use these separate components and get even better SEO work done, but the installation and configuration takes a little more time, but that is well worth the effort!!

How to Use Joomla Titles to Improve your Search Engine Optimization

As you might know, the most important factor for Search Engine Optimization (besides content..) is the Title Tag.

In Joomla the Title of your page is the first part of your Content screen.

Writing good titles is essential if you want to get found on the keywords you are targeting.
But you also want to keep the titles on your pages short, to make sure you don’t clutter your page with long title headers.

Long Titles can all so be a problem if you use a SEF Component that rewrites your titles in to URLs.

But there is help on the way… with the new Joomla Content Title Plugin!

You just install the Plugin and start rewriting just your Title Alias to get better Keyword targeted titles that show up tin the Search Results Pages.

There are some things you need to be aware off if your use the alias as a rewrite option in your SEF Component, you can read more about that on my Pathos SEO Blog post: Improve the Joomla nr One SEO Factor 

If you want to read more about the use of Joomla Titles you can read What Title to use in Joomla

I know, some shameless self promotion, but I hope you find even more interesting information on Joomla SEO there that might benefit you in your search on improving your website.

Joomla SEF Components Update

Steve Burge over at www.alledia.com (great Joomla SEO Blog, highly recommended) does a quick update on the status of the mayor Joomla SEF components 

Most Interesting and schocking to me was the fact that the site of OpenSef at http://j-prosolution.com/ has been taken off site….
Luckily the component has been rescued by Chris Davenport and is now available as NuSEF

I am currently looking at the sh404SEF on my new site and must admit it is indeed looking great, you can also read Steve’s Review of the sh404SEF component.

Keeping your Joomla site running

I few months back I had a problem with one of my Joomla based websites.

When I accessed the site there was just thus error about session_id’s
And a problem that I now know how to solve “DB function failed with error number 1016″

If you need to now how to fix this, check this Joomla Forum post .

The problem could occur if there is no regular login from the Administrator to work on the site.
The session table’s are filled by visitors automatically and cleaned after you login.
Of course you keep your site well up to date, so you don’t run into this problem.
But what if you are going on a holiday for several weeks?
You still want your site to be running, then if its not running for several days, this could seriously damage your ranking!

The Session Plugin for Joomla! Table error Prevention

Luckily for you, I found a solution in a Plugin that is offered by http://www.sm2joomla.com/this Plugin is called SM2 Session Plugin and can be downloaded from SM2 Joomla! Extensions

What is does is delete, check or repair the session table if necessary, you can read more on the download site.
You just install it as an Mambot, and make sure you publish it to

It not only keeps your site running, it also optimizes the session table, and by doing so, keeps your website running better al the time.
Without any effort from your side.

And if you want to run further optimization on your MySql tables you might want to read this post Optimizing your Joomla Website from the back end

More Speed for Your Joomla site

I talked to you about How to speed up your Joomla Site and now I have to tell your the next step to take…

A new Joomla Cache Component 

There is a new component for Caching your Joomla website, and it works great for the sites I run and my customers websites.
Dramatically increasing the loading time of your visitors!
The component comes from www.ircmaxell.com and was first brought to my attention by www.alledia.com

This new component has gotten some great reviews on the extensions site of Joomla and IrcMaxell collected a few on the Internet as well on the Review of Page Component.

What the component does, is cache the page in a very efficient way, so loading time is dramatically reduced, sometimes over 90%.
It works on top of your normal Joomla Cache, so please leave this on as well.

How to Install the component

This is very basic, but you need to do some simple homework before trying to install.
Believe me, this time is short and easy.. read it on How to Boost Joomla Performance  the Installation part.

There is however a drawback… the page has to be loaded once to get into the cache, and this initial load takes a few seconds…
After that it is of course up to you for how long this cache stay active, standard is 600 seconds I believe, but for my sites I run it up to 3600 seconds or more depending on how much new content is created.

The next thing is that it only works for your visitors and not for Logged in members.
This is not something that is going to be Fixed, because caching for individuals is not that easy as it sounds.
Caching than has to be done per session… which is really not do able.

But the good news is.. Search Engine Spiders are “visitors” so they will benefit from Speeding Up your website.

There are also som Plugins to help out on more specific components like Joomlaboard.
Otherwise you can exclude you problem component form being handled by the Page Cache.

Last but not least

The component leave a nice Footer behind on your website “Powered By Page_Cache by Ircmaxell” which can be removed if you dive into the code.
Or by a Ten Dollar donation to the developer. Which of the options you like to use, its fine or as he says “It’s your choice” 

I consider this one as a “must have” for the sites I build in Joomla.

Try the component, if you like it, keep it, if not… you probably did something wrong

How To speed up your Joomla site

Inspired by the post on Alledia blog about Speed and Joomla, I thought I would write some things about how to improve the speed of your Joomla website, using some Joomla integrated stuff and some free tools.

Speed is important, both for Search Engine spiders as for the visitors of your website!

First thing you should do, is test your website with the The Ocatagate tool to get a basic feeling of the loading time before you start… you want some reference point don’t you.

The slow loading things you might see are,:
- the absence of  a favicon.ico in the root of you file.
That is easily solved by creating one from an image at Online Chami Favicon creator and uploading it to the root of your website.
- Big images – reduce the images to the size the really need, don’t let a browser resize them “on the fly” and make sure you use the “height” and “width” specifications with each image if possible.
- That nice looking Joomla Module that gets all kinds of content form the database…
- Java scripting and external links..
Try to use those only where you really, really need them.

A great free tool to resize images to the right format is Irfanview , it works great in keeping the images scharp even if you resize down from a very large image.

Speeding up with Joomla Core

Joomla itself has a really nice feature already installed for you, its called Cache, and you can turn it on in the configuration file.

Set the cache time to something appropriate to your site, for a news site, keep the standard of 900 seconds which is 150 minutes.
Most of my site will have 43200 seconds, that’s 12 hours.

After you have done that, turn on the caching functions of each module if needed, don’t forget to check each module!

If you still have your statistics turned on, turn them off !, accept for the search.
When was the last time you checked them?

But if you really like statistics.. don’t your really want more information than those basics on your visitors? 

For my sites statistics I use Statcounter and I get all the information I need, including the history in a nice stats graphic even for a whole year to see the growth.
If you want to know where the visitors came from and lots more.
Best part is this detail information and the rest is Free for the first 100 pageviews per site , and its fast !!

If you think a link out to Statcounter might hurt your ranking…  , think again, they are one of the very few websites that have a Google PR of 10!

After you optimized, and cleaned up your site, check the loading time again.

I hope you get a pleasant surprise, and so do search engine, as they are able to index your pages faster then before…

Using RSS Feed Syndication for your Joomla website Promotion

Joomla! has some great features build in to set up an RSS Feed that your visitors can describe to.

First a short explanation of RSS from wikipedia;
“A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.”

This means that the content of the updated or new pages in your feed is delivered to your feed subscribers frontdoor…

They don’t have to go to your site to look for updates, they are notified of new content by the RSS Feed.

The Joomla Components for RSS
In the back-end of Joomla there are two standard components to handle RSS Feeds.

• News Feeds which you can use to publish other RSS Feeds on your website
• Syndication that is only for Frontpage syndication.

If you are going to use the last one , you need to change some things to make it your own, other wise you get the standard lyrics of “Powered by Joomla 1.0″ to change this, read about Joomla RSS Feed setup

But there is a better option available, a component released by www.Run-Digital.com which is there RSS Feed manager now Run Digital is a German website, but I think you are able to find the download….

A special Feed section
To get a separate section for your feed you can create a special section, lets say… oh well, just call it Blog.
Then create a Categorie with the same name or whatever you dream up…
You then throw in some content like a test message or so, you know how to create the content.

By now You have downloaded and Installed the RSS Feed manager.
You can now create a new Feed, don’t use the standard if you don’t want to syndicate the Frontpage!!

Within the Feed manager you can choose just that special section/category, or you can select multiple ones, like the news flashes as well.

The new feed states a line like http://run-digital.com/index.php?option=com_rd_rss&id=2 inside the Component.

Just copy that line, and paste is into you browser address bar, to see  if it comes up with the content you put in there, you should see some real xml definitions..

If you would serve this to you visitors, they probably won’t now what to do with it, unless they are already are RSS Feedreaders…

So lets make it easy for your visitors to describe.. 

Burning your Joomla Feed

Next thing to do, it to head over to www.feedburner.com and get a login, its a free service, so subscribe!
Now follow the guidelines from Feedburner to create a Feed by using the feed URL you tested above.

The service Feedburner provides has also a neat little feature they call Chicklett Chooser, which You can find under the Publicize section.
Take the first option which is the standard.
Scroll down the page and Copy the HTML section.

In Joomla you now have to create a new module and copy that HTML code into it. (Use a Editor that doesn’t change your code, or temporarily disable the rich text editor.

Once you created you module, publish it some where into you menu… clearly visible if you want subscribers !!

Click the button that shows up, and see the options you get from Feedburner, this ranges form Google to Netvibes and more!
Now that is service to you visitors!

More Benefits 
Besides the obvious easy subscription there are some more great benefits of using Feedburner..
- Search engine’s spider Feedburner to look for new items, and they find you!!
- The syndicated content is spidered and indexed as well pointing to your website.

But the best part is.. Feedburner is mostly used by Bloggers, and Search Engines love Blogs, because of there regular update content.

And that is the downside for you… you have to start feeding you Blog content categorie on a regular base…
But, since you build a website on your topic, you should not have any problem with this.

P.s. Dont worry that your visitors will only read your RSS feeds and don’t come to your site anymore, most of them want to read from the site itself if the topic is of their intrest!
So you get more quality visits to your website.

Update: You could use the DS-Syndicate Component from JoomlaFun if you do full posts in your feed and want to remain your layout of the pages.

The standard of Joomla cleans out all html and layout before sending the Feed, that is why most people only use short descriptions.
With the above mentioned Component you can work with full post feeds and you can download it from: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/dssyndicate/frs/

The all Important Metatag Description for SEO

Please make sure that You use your Metatag Description the right way.

Looking at Metatags, lots of people think that the metatags aren’t that important anymore, so they tend to ignore them.
Now it is a fact that, due to spamming the keyword metatag in earlier website ages, this has lost a lot off relevance for your position in the search engines.

But, and this is really a big but, this is not true for the Description Metatag!!
In fact this description tag is one of the most valuable assets you have on your page, just after the pagetitle.

Why you should use the Description Metatag 

Why indeed? Because if you look at the Search Engine Results pages, there is almost every time the Description tag content of the page displayed.
Google does sometimes give you a part of the page which it thinks is more relevant, but otherwise you get the content of the Metatag Description.

Try it yourself first, just search on your keyword and be aware of your natural selection process.
What brings you to favour your click to the page of your choice?
Most people read the title, and the content just below to see what fits their need.

Improve the Content of your Descriptions 

So what does it mean for you?
In fact it brings you some kind of free ads in the SERPs… well not really of course, but you should be able to work this.
Fill your description tags with a good description of the page, use your keyword in it.
Most off all, you should write it like a little advert, try to write it so that people who read it, are attracted to your page instead of your competitors.

Make sure however that there is the content you promised on the page you “advertised”.
You don’t want user to have a bad experience, they should be wanting to read more on your website.

P.s. You can write your Description always directly after the article, it than takes about two or three minutes to come up with a good description.
The content of the article is then still fresh in your mind…
And I still put in five to ten keywords in the Keywords Metatag that are in the page content.

Tools to check your descriptions in Joomla pages

If you have your Joomla site all ready and filled with lots of content, it is a pain to check every page for the description tag.

But help is here…. If youd use the OpenSef component, then there is a Metatag Generator build in within the SEO assistant.

If you work with an other SEF Component, you can also download the Free Metatag Generator from www.ijoomla.com

Both Component work similar, they show you the page, and the keyword and description field for thet page.
So you can see very easy where you have soem work to do.
And You can change it from within that overview as well.

Both can generate the content of the fields for you…. please don’t use this feature if you are truly working on getting the best out of your Joomla! website….
But give it a try, just to see what comes out, then you will see what I mean, it is not that bad, but you should aim for the best. 

There is even a Commercial product from JoomlaEquipment that works on the Metatags, and more.
But I am Dutch, so I always check out the free once first to see if they fit my needs

Using Hypens and Not Underscores in Joomla SEO

Most people I guess are still wondering if the should go for Hypens – or Underscores _ in their URL rewrite.

Please don’t wonder any more, because there is a clear statement in guest blog post on Matt Cutss (Google Engineer) Blog by Vanessa Fox (Also from Google) Organic Site review session

” And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores [Ed. Note: bolded by Matt ]. african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that. “

Now with that out of the way, how does this work on a standard Joomla installation?
Answer… It doesn’t..

You need a Sef Component to do that, and you must know by reading the other posts, that I really like the Open-Sef, and guess what…. it does this already, standard in the installation.

Now there are some more Joomla SEF Components.
Like SEF Advanced (Commercial) in which it is an option that you have to make sure you use it.

Remosef is an other one, which you can use for Mambo as well.
To let Remosef use the – instead of the _ you have to edit the sef.custom.php and change the line $_SEF_SPACE = “_”;    to   $_SEF_SPACE = “-”;  

If you look at the other options in that file, you can see there are more things you can do in rewriting your URL, also for third party modules that don’t have a sef_ext.php file.

If you want to use the JoomSef Component, there is also an option in which you can set the blanks replacement. The standard value for JoomSef is also the Hypen  -.

So if you don’t want to use OpenSef for some reason, then please, please !!! use one of the other Joomla SEF Components to rewrite your URLs to User and Search Engine Friendly.

You now know what to choose from the options to replace the blanks , and you can succeed one step further in making you Joomla site Search Engine Optimized.