Presentation from Joomla!Day Melbourne 2010 and Joomla!Day Sydney 2010 on using SEF and implementing SEO in Joomla

1. Patrick Jackson
www.kpsystems.com.au
Twitter @partic
Web | Events | IT Support | Hosting | Communications | SEO

2. SEF
•62 SEF definitions
•Space Experiment Facility
•staphylococcal enterotoxin F
•Scanning Electron Fractograph
•Search Engine Friendly

3. SEF
Ingredients
How to turn on SEF URLS
Use Aliases
Enter Meta Data
3rd Party Components
The Black Hat

4. 10.75% of expenditure produces 89.47% of results

5. Source: SEOmoz

6. Ingredients
A few assumptions I’m going to make…
•Joomla site is up to date - 1.5.15 currently
•You can access your files on your server using
FTP, cPanel File
Manager, eXtplorer, NinjaXplorer
•You’ve got sufficient access privileges on your
site to access the backend and Global
Configuration

7. Turning on SEF in Joomla
• Joomla! Out of the box has dynamic URLs like
index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=5&id=10
• For J1.5, you can quickly make your URLS more Search
Engine Friendly
• J1.5 creates a SEF URL from the alias tags
• This creates a URL like 1-about-joomla.html
• You turn on Joomla SEF URLs in Global Configuration
• You can improve the default further by using .htaccess

9. Changing the SEF URL
• So once you have your SEF URLs turned on, Joomla
is generating them based on the Alias Tag
• When you create a menu item or article, if you leave
the alias blank, Joomla will automatically populate it
based on the Title of the item.
• For standard Joomla SEF, this all happens
dynamically.

10. Aliases
• The alias tags in Joomla are the key to good SEF URLS
• Joomla will automatically generate them from the article title,
menu name or other component features such as Contact’s
Name for com_contact
• Auto Generated ones can be lengthy if your title’s long
• By customising your Alias tags, you’ll end up with cleaner and
often shorter URLS.
• You can also focus keywords into URLS by customising your
alias tags – but don’t go overboard!
• My strategy: make the URLs HUMAN friendly – and then
they’re also search engine friendly.

11. Metadata
• When Joomla is installed, your site is instantly displaying
metadata
• Metadata Description– Default Joomla description
• Metadata Keywords – Default list of Joomla keywords
• Change the default global values by going to Global
Configuration
• Make your metadata unique for each article
• Keep your keywords to around 10 – 15 maximum
• Make the description and keywords for an article relate
and target the article’s contents

12. 3rd Party Extensions
• Components are still handy though for a few things
• sh404SEF & RSSEO let’s you improve your META
tags, tidy up the URL and have multiple alias URLS.
• Xmap & RSSEO creates a dynamic Google site map
• Several other extensions are available from
extensions.joomla.org
• Do your homework on them before you install them!

13. Components
• So you’ll then find that for a simple joomla site, you’ll now have
SEF URLs up and running!
• But not everything starts working straight away!
• Components will generate a SEF URL, but if the URL is not
based on a component that has a SEF extension, the URL may
not be as readable as it could be
• Virtuemart, Fireboard, Community Builder, SOBI, all have SEF
plugins to allow their URLs to be converted, and work best with
an additional 3rd Party Component
•sh404SEF Extensions on JED
• sh404SEF Extensions List

14. Non-www to www
• Joomla or non-joomla site, people should be able to reach
your site via either www.mysite.com or mysite.com
• Accessing both is fine, but Google used to treat them as 2
sites, so if you are interested in pagerank, it could have been
effected.
• On your site, you can add a few simple lines to your .htaccess
file that will intercept the non-www and send it off to the www
• RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
• Also use Google Webmaster Tools and set your preferred
domain
• More info on the concept is at Compass Designs

15. Sitelinks
•Sitelinks are automatically generated when Google thinks
your site is useful.
•Generates fairly easily when there’s a combination of
SEF, Site map, traffic and search traffic for the site.

16. Migration
• When migrating an old site to Joomla, you want to keep
the existing URL’s in tact, especially ones indexed on
Google and other search engines.
• Easily done!
• Setup your SEF & sh404SEF
• Create your initial SEF URL’s in sh404SEF
• Go to View / Edit SEF URL’s to see the list
• Click on the automatically generated URL
• In the Alias list, type the old URL
• Save the record
• Test that URL

17. Warning: Black Hat
• Some extensions include backlinks to other sites, or other
black hat SEO techniques!
• This can infringe on Google’s policies, and may lead to your
site being blocked in Google’s search results.
• The example below is how Artio JoomSEF inserts backlinks
into the Joomla Generator Tag.