As of September 2019, 70% of all websites are running 3 CMS systems:

45.02% WordPress.
13.27% Joomla.
12.09% 1C-Bitrix.
We have already written about 1C-Bitrix and WordPress, so it would be strange to ignore the second most popular CMS. In this article we will tell all about the search engine optimization site on Joomla.

What is Joomla

Joomla is a free system for creating websites. This is an open source project, which, like most similar projects, does not stand still. It is very successfully developed and popular among millions of users around the world.

Like any CMS it has its own features and problems. The most frequent complaints about joomla is just because of poor search engine optimization. Sites simply are not indexed on the Internet or poorly promoted. To effectively promote your resource on seo need to consider the features of this CMS. Let us dwell on the description of the main features.

Creating and submitting a sitemap to search engines

A frequent cause of the fact that your site does not appear in search engines (especially in Google) – the lack of xml-map site. To create it you can use a special plugin (more about them below). The plugin will scan all the pages of the resource and give you a complete map of your resource in xml format. You can use the following plugins:

• JSitemap Pro – paid component for Joomla, which includes a large set of SEO-tools, one of which is a powerful generator of Sitemap files.
• XML-Sitemaps.com. This is a standard sitemap generator. The service works best with small sites, where you do not need to hide any pages from indexing. You simply enter the URL for your site and click “Start”. It will start generating a sitemap, which you can analyze and download to your site.

This list of tools is enough for you to generate a complete and high-quality sitemap. Now all you have to do is upload the map to Google’s Search Console and Google will send search robots to your site.

Configuring Robots.txt

By default, Joomla sites have the images folder (/images) locked for indexing. There are two sides of the question.

The first is negative. The thing is that after indexing your images search engine will be able to show them for some queries in the image search section. This can be an additional source of traffic to your site and sales.
The second is positive. More than 90% of all sites use images not of their own, but taken from stock images or just from search. All images created in the last 30-50 years have an author who can sue you for using his material without a proper license.

If you use your own images, then image search can be an additional source of traffic for you – feel free to remove the ban on indexing from the folder. Remove line Disallow: /images/ in robots.txt.

Redirect from www on without and back

On WordPress redirect works automatically, but with joomla not so simple. It needs to configure yourself. On Joomla the translation is carried out in the file .htaccess. In order to redirect from a domain name with www to a domain name without www, you must add the following lines to the .htaccess file:

1 RewriteEngine On

2 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.moysayt.com

3 RewriteRule (.*) http://moysayt.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you want to redirect in reverse order, you need to add the following code to .htaccess:

1 RewriteEngine On

2 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.

3 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L].

Configuring CNC in Joomla

Ugly and unreadable urls – another serious problem that affects the promotion of sites on Joomla. By default, the standard urls look like this: http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1:welcome-to-joomla&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=50.

Search engines do not like it (especially Google does not like it). Search engines prefer to see sites manually understood urls (CNC). New versions of Joomla convert urls automatically, and if you have any difficulties with this, then use plugin sh404SEF. Find the plugin here – https://extensions.joomla.org/.

Title and Description tags

Another significant disadvantage of Joomla is the need to use several tools for seo-optimization. And on one sh404SEF and JSitemap Pro will not go far. You can use the following plugins to optimize Title and Description:

• SEOSimple.
• JoomSEF – easier to learn

Why optimize these tags at all?

Title Tag

Title – the title of your article. It should characterize the full content of the document. A good comparison between the title and the newspaper headline. Your task – to interest the reader to go to your resource from search results.

Mandatory condition for the formation of the title – the presence of keywords in its composition (1-2 with the highest frequency). Do not “stuff” the title of the keywords. This leads to penalties from search engines (because it is taken for keyword stuffing). It is not recommended to divide the title with commas, or divide it into 2 or more sentences. Dots at the end is not put.

The most important thing – to make sure that the content of the Title reflects 100% of the content of the article. If your headline promises one thing and tells a completely different story, not only will search engines rank you lower, but sometimes they will change the title.

What kind of headlines work?

• Headlines with numbers have always worked well and always will. “100 SMM Specialist Skills” is a great title.
• Headlines with intrigue. Come up with a headline that makes the user want to read the sequel.
• Headline-benefit. You have to try to fit your benefit into fifty characters. If you have a serious advantage over competitors, you can use this technique.
• Headline-question. Think about what question may be in your CA right now in his head? Loan and loan companies write the question in their promotional materials, “Are you out of money?” An auto lawyer uses the question, “Got into an accident?”

Description

This tag does not affect the search engine promotion, but is involved in the formation of a brief description of the page in the output.

Description – a short paragraph, which is displayed below the title in the search engine results. His task – to further explain the content of the article. So the user will understand that he found what he wanted, not even entering the site. In this case you get more targeted visits to the site (an important behavioral factor).

If you do not set it yourself, then the search engine will do it for you and its description may not match reality – will be much more boring and uninteresting than you could write.

Caching the site

Loading speed is an important parameter. If it’s slow – it takes 3 seconds or more to load a page, you’re losing traffic. Caching helps your browser “remember” the page content and load it faster next time.

Caching reduces second and subsequent load times and is good for SEO. To enable caching, open “Global Settings” – (System > General Settings). Then click on the System tab to open the caching settings. Click on the drop-down list next to “Cache”. Select “Standard caching.

A few more ways to speed up your downloads

Caching alone is difficult to solve the problem of long loading times, so you’ll find a few more ways to shorten loading times below:

Optimize images for web postings. Before and after optimization, the weight of images can vary by an order of magnitude. If you need to put a video on the site, it’s better not to upload it to the hosting, but to load it from YouTube, for example.
Disable unnecessary animation on the site.
Sometimes the problem is in your hosting provider. In this case, simply change it.

Editor for working with content

To work comfortably with content inbuilt editors joomla not enough functionality. Problems start at the time when you need to upload images to the site and do it through a separate menu “media manager”.

An alternative to this mess is JCE (Joomla Content Editor). To date, this is the best text editor for Joomla. The program is located at http://www.joomlacontenteditor.net/. Here you can also find and download the Russian localization.

The bottom line is

Joomla – a fairly popular engine. Yes, it is not always flexible, somewhere not functional and have to apply different “crutches”. At times, SEO optimization on joomla turns into an endless installation of plugins.

But the platform is great for creating small online stores, information sites, personal pages, web resources brands. Ie is practically universal.