Joomla SEO Hacks: 10 Actionable SEO Tips, You Can’t Miss in 2019

SEO for Joomla is a wide topic that requires hundreds of techniques, strategies and deep knowledge if you want to do it right. But once you start optimizing your Joomla website for SEO, you will find a closer path to your SEO goals.

Today, we are sharing 10 essential Joomla SEO tips that will significantly boost your ranking in a short span of time.

Tip 1: Enable Search Friendly URLs and URL Rewriting

If you are an old Joomla user you probably already have heard about this tip million times before. however, it still works like a charm, it’s easy to implement and it brings immediate impact on your ranking.

Enabling search-friendly URLs will get rid you of meaningless URLs in your site such as https://www.vividetechno.com/index.php?option=com_view=item&id=125:seohacks

Moreover, It will change the URL to be more human-readable and shorter like https://www.vividtechno.com/blog/seohacks

This will allow search engines to keep URLs in account while indexing your website, as well as makes it more user-friendly.

is it turned on?

Actually, you don’t need to do anything in order to turn it on. because Joomla automatically keeps these options on in their recent versions. however, for some reason, if your website URL is not readable. you can follow these steps to turn it on.

• Log into your Joomla dashboard.
• Click on “System“, then “Global Configurations“.

Under “SEO Settings” Turn on “URL Rewriting” and “Search Engine friendly URL“.

Tip 2: Submitting Sitemap to Webmaster Tools

One of the most critical steps in SEO is to create HTML/XML Sitemap files to make sure that Google knows about all pages on your website during its crawling process. There are many free extensions for you to create a sitemap if you don’t have one. Then, head over to the Joomla Extension Directory or simply use the xml-sitemap.com. It’s easy to use and effective.

Just put in your website URL in the box and hit the “Start” button.

It might take 3-5 minutes to craw all pages on your website, after that it will show you the created Sitemap.

Tip 3: Improve your Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Pages titles and meta descriptions are often ignored by many users. It should be on your top priority in your SEO plan.

Whenever a user searches a keyword on a search engine. On search engine result pages (SERPs), they are only able to see the page title and meta descriptions. if your title and meta description is not appealing, you might lose out on potential users. Always remember, you should write compelling page titles and meta descriptions.

Not just for users, title and meta descriptions are also helpful to crawl bots. If these are well optimized for SEO, the bots will understand your content better, knowing which keyword is focusing on which article.

You can follow these rules when writing page titles and meta descriptions:

• Always use keywords in your page title and meta descriptions.
• Create a description that explains in 160 characters that, what a user is gonna see or learn when they visit your website.
• Avoid using stop words such as a, an, the, etc

Tip 4: Optimize your Images

Do you know? photos get processed faster than text in our brains. It should be one of the reasons you use images in your articles. 

When it comes to image optimization. you should always compress the images before uploading them to your website. you can use the PXLCompressor plugin to automatically compress images in your Joomla website. 

and you use TinyPNG to manually optimize your images before uploading them to your website. Use JPEG format for colorful images and PNG for text and wordy images.

Have you heard of tags in images? An alt tag provides a text description of an image. Which is a way to describe an image for the bot and who cannot see the image. Bots and other site readers will read the alt tag as an alternative to the image itself.

A strong alt tag should contain 5-10 descriptive words and include at least one keyword.

Tip 5: Optimize your Robots.txt File

The robots.txt file instructs search engine bots where they can and cannot crawl on your website. In other words, you are telling these bots (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) what they are allowed to see on your website and what is restricted.

When considering robots.ext file from an SEO perspective, you have to allow all the places where you want search engines to crawl and index the pages. and you should disallow all the places where you don’t want search engine bots to crawl.

Therefore, We want search engine bots to crawl our images, so if you have a disallow on images, you should immediately change it to allow.

Another useful tip is to include your website sitemap in your robots.txt file. By doing this, your website will be indexed much faster. Check out the image below, to add your sitemap to the robots.txt file.

Tip 6: Boost Your Joomla Site Speed

Page speed has been considered as a ranking factor of Google. but it only focuses on desktop page speed back in 2010. But in July 2018, Google leveled up their game by adding “Mobile Speed update“. 

The faster your site loads on a mobile device or a desktop, the more chances you will get to rank high in search engines.

Therefore, you need to enhance the speed of your Joomla site. We are going to share some tips on how to speed up your site:

• Enable Joomla Gzip Page Compression in Global configuration

Gzip page compression is a feature that allows the server to compress files before sending them to the user. This means that the user has to download less content because it is compressed, and thus pages should load faster for your users.

In order to enable Gzip page compression. From your Joomla dashboard, head over to System then click Global Configuration and select server from there. Under server settings, enable the Gzip page compression and you are good to go.

• Enable Joomla Cache in Global configuration.

Follow the steps below to enable the Joomla cache settings for your site.

• Optimize your image size

When you upload an image to your Joomla media manager. Make sure you either compress it with TinyPNG or you do it automatically with installing the PXL Compressor plugin. An optimized image has the less file size for the same quality that you were having earlier. Choose your image format wisely according to your needs.

At a target file-size of 26KB, its possible to obtain a higher perceived quality with modern options compared to lossy JPEG alone

• Always use an optimized template and extensions.

You should always consider checking your page speed from time to time. You can use google’s PageSpeed Insights to check for potential errors that are making your website slow. It also suggests the fix for the errors. 

While PageSpeed Insights identifies all errors and potential issues that are making your website slow. You can check out GTmetrix, it does an in-depth analysis of your site speed and shows you a recommendation to fix the issues that will make your site load faster.

Tip 7: Must-Have Joomla SEO Extensions

Using SEO plugins is a good way to make sure your content is optimized for search engines.

There are many powerful plugins available on Joomla Extension Directory. I would recommend some of the best ones: 

SEO-Generator

SEO-Generator is an SEO extension for Joomla powered websites. It automatically generates keywords and meta descriptions for each article by pulling text from the title and content.  It also allows you to set different titles, robot meta tags and google webmaster verification keys. It’s a very useful plugin when it comes to optimizing your Joomla website for SEO.

SH404SEF

This SEO extension keeps your websites align with Google’s recommended search engine optimization guidelines. It helps you find duplicate content, see analytics, social network connector and also provide a custom handy 404 error page and much more. 

JoomSEF

JoomSEF is an important SEO extension. It allows you to make your URLs search engine friendly and easily human-readable. It also generates and maintains the Metadata. It allows you to manage duplicate content and keywords management. 

Google Structured Data

Google Structured Data by Tassos.gr is the only extension that provides a complete solution for managing everything related to Structured Data for all your Joomla COntent. It possesses a continuously updated selection of content types to mark your articles, events, reviews, products and many more. It also provides third-party integration of Joomla components. Google  Structured Data is your one-stop-shop.

Tip 8: Write High-quality Content

When it comes to writing the content. You should always remember something, Content is king. 80% of your success in SEO depends on your content. 

You have optimized your website well for SEO, but your content is not engaging and it does not provide in-depth knowledge of a topic, then you know what’s gonna happen? Google won’t love your content and all your SEO efforts will be worthless.

Let me tell you a few secrets that would help you in writing engaging and meaningful content for your audience.

• Know Who is Your Audience: While writing your content. You should always focus on what typ[e of the audience is gonna read it. If you have clearly defined your audience prior to writing your article. Then you will find that you have a clear understanding of people who are gonna read it. It will help you very much in writing good content.

• Originality Matters: Copy and paste don’t make your content rank high on Google. nowadays Googler’s Ai technology automatically detects your duplicate content. So write original content. Read the topic on other websites as much as you want. But when it comes to writing your own article, Always put it in your words.

• Format Your Content For Human Readers: Avoid using long paragraphs. Always keep a paragraph no more than 4-5 lines. use images, videos, Gifs and bullet points in your article. Don’t make it like a book that has no images and nothing just text.

• Share Your Content: Once you create an article. your next goal should be to share it because no one is reading your content then how will google judge whether its useful or not. for every 1 hour spend on writing the content. then please spend 2 hours on top of it for sharing it.

• Write as You Speak: You don’t need to use heavy words or jargon words to make your content sound professional or stand out. It only makes hard for your reader to understand it. Make a habit of reading your content out loud, once you finish writing it. It gives you an idea about whether your content is easy to follow or not.

Tip 9: External Linking and Internal Linking

When it comes to optimizing your content for SEO. You should always make sure that your article contains external links to authority websites. If you have written some article earlier that can be linked to your new article then you should always go with internal linking of the content. 

It’s very hard to remember what articles or content you can interlink with each other when you have a lot of articles on your Joomla website. In order to minimize that hassle, I am going to share a useful extension that will suggest your internal links.

Internal Links

It is a simple plugin that provides this feature that you can add your Joomla internal links(links that refer to article or category or section)to your articles. It will be useful when your articles have many links and you need to change all of them(especially when you switch to SEF mode).

Tip 10: Enable AMP on Your Joomla Website

AMP or accelerated mobile pages is an open-source project focused on allowing the mobile content to load quickly.

It compresses down all the CSS, JS, HTML “Style” code and allows your website content to load as fast as possible. You should make your website AMP friendly so when a user visits any page, it will load up quickly and provide the best experience.

There are many AMP extensions available on Joomla Extension Directory but I have jotted down 3 best Joomla AMP extensions, that you can use to implement amp on your Joomla powered website.

JAmp

If you start looking about amp extension in Joomla extension directory. it won’t take you much time to find out JAMP extension. It’s the most popular extension among Joomla users. Some of the features of these extensions are: 

Automatic conversion: It automatically converts you Joomla content into AMP HTML markup.

Automatic Submission: It automatically submits the AMP links to google for indexing through a unique meta tag that relates to the canonical page.

Highly Customizable: Customize theme, colors, titles, logo and integrate with third-party extensions.

AMP components: take benefits of AMP web components such as a menu, google analytics, sidebar, lightbox, youtube, social media, etc.

Metadata management: JAMP manages JSON-LD metadata for AMP, Schema.org, Open graph  and twitter card.

Google AMP cache: With the help of Google AMP cache, Now your pages will be rendered almost instantly.

With its extensive features and ease of use, JAMP seems like the best solution for creating the AMP page. You can make an AMP page look like an original design and it will load instantly.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

This extension is the most useful and worthy extension of the Joomla extension directory. As an AMP extension, it delivers decent results. This extension comes with many features: 

Fully customizable: Easily customizes Header, Footer, Title, etc.

Show ad on amp pages: It lets you show ads on your AMP pages.

Show carousel (Image Slider): It allows you to display image slider.

Display Joomla Menu bar: Options to set a custom location for Menubar.

Display Social sharing buttons: It lest you showcase your social network buttons such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Lightbox support: Enable lightbox for images on AMP pages.

Video Support: Show youtube videos on AMP pages.

Analytics Support: Lets you enable google analytics.

Add Custom CSS: Lets you add custom CSS styles and header links.

The only minor drawback of this extension is the limitation in supporting 3rd party components when it’s only compatible with K2 till now.

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