So you have a great design, great content and even a few links to your Joomla site but it still seems that you aren't going nowhere in the search engines. Well, there is a reason: although Joomla is a great CMS it isn't that good with SEO. Let's see what we can do so Joomla will become the Search Engines' best friend:



1. Enable SEF urls: this is almost critical for good rankings. Even though search engines are very good at indexing dynamic urls many webmasters have seen better results when using search engine friendly urls.

Here is how to enable it: log in the administrator backend and look for the "Global Configuration" icon. Now click it and in the upper right part you must enable "Search Engine Friendly URLs". Also, if your site runs on an Apache server than you must rename the "htaccess.txt" file to ".htaccess".

Although Joomla's built-in SEF component is rather limited the output is still seen very well by the Search Engines. But it gets even better with the next module.

2. OpenSEF ( tinyurl.com/2oeogw ): this the best SEF component for Joomla. It works great, doesn't slow down your site and is very configurable. Some of OpenSEF's features:

- automatic rewrite of all urls

- ability to define how SEF urls will look based on section, category and article title

- define 404 Error url

- unlimited number of alias URL mappings

- possibility to create and update XML sitemaps, usable by Google, Yahoo and MSN

- many more...

And it does all this without modifying Joomla's core files!

3. Put up a sitemap ( tinyurl.com/3y9bz6 ): in case you don't want or can't use the OpenSEF component you should create a XML sitemap to help the search engines index your site easier. It is integrated with other built-in components so contacts, newsfeeds and weblinks are supported.

4. Use metatags: this is very important if you want good rankings and many clicks from the search engines. The keywords metatag isn't used by the search engines anymore, but using the description is a very good idea.

The best use for the description metatag actually is to influence visitors to click more - leaving the text excerpt that is shown up to the search engines is not the best idea in the world.

5. Ping module ( tinyurl.com/y8m5aa ): pinging is usually done only by blogs, but it can be used to great success with normal sites too! Install this component and after each time you write a new piece of content click "Syndicate" in the "Components" menu to ping Technorati.

6. Technorati tags ( tinyurl.com/2nkcqt ): this plugin adds tags at the end of your content, tags that are linked to Technorati. This way, when you ping Technorati with the ping module I've told you about before it will help you categorize the search engines.

7. Trackback module ( tinyurl.com/2wvj7l ): this is another thing we can pick up from blogs to help us get higher in the search engines. If you write about blogs this can help you get a few links. Think of it as a new form of link exchange - you place a link from a page on your site to another page on another site and you get a link back.