Joomla SEO Tips Part 2 of 3

There are many ways to take advantage of the Joomla SEO features to get your site ranked higher and get more targeted visitors. Here, let’s explore a few of these.

The following are some Joomla tips to help you boost your search engine rankings quickly and easily.

Use the Joomla Content Management Features: The Joomla Content Managemengt System (CMS) provides you with a clever, clean and simple way of organizing your website’s content by sections (broad classifications), categories (sub-divisions of the sections) and items (or web pages). Using this you can also name your sections, categories and pages to be search engine friendly. For example, if you have a website about vacation in the Americas, you can have a section for the USA, a category under that for New York and content pages for information about the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building or Grand Central Station. Thus your Joomla SEF (search engine friendly) URLs can look something like: mytouristsite.com/united-states/new-york-tourism/statueofliberty, etc.

Arranging your content under this system of hierarchy also makes it possible and easier for your website visitors to navigate from page to page or one category or content section to another without getting confused, giving up and leaving you website unexplored, thereby rendering your content useless. This also increases the duration that a visitor stays on your website-a critical part of the search engine algorithms for ranking your website.

Note: You can arrange and optimize your content in Joomla whether it is text, video, audio or any other format.

Content META Keywords and Description: Another Joomla SEO feature that is available to you as a Joomla web designer is the ability to optimize every single piece of content item or page (known as an ‘article’ in Joomla terminology) to give your website the best shot at being ranked highly in the search engines.

Here’s how to go about this.

Whenever you create a new article page, you will see that you will be presented with some Joomla SEO options to optimize your site. When an article is open in the backend, you can fill in the META keywords and META description fields provided. These details will be used to index that page and are crucial to how well that article (web page) ranks well among the other websites out there. So, fill in these details and don’t shortchange yourself into not optimizing your website.

Search Engine Submissions: Another Joomla SEO tip that you should take very seriously is to submit your websites to the search engines. This is important when your site is new and has not been indexed in the search engines. To do this, just visit the top search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc and search for “submit site”, “submit URL”, etc and follow the links and instructions to do so.

Caveat: DON’T pay to any third party company that promises to help you submit your website to the SEs. Visit the search engines themselves and submit your website yourself. As a matter of fact, it shouldn’t take more than five minutes to submit all the top ones. So, waste your time and money by paying somebody else to do it for you or using some software that claims to do it for you.