The SEO Benefits Of Using Joomla (Template)

Joomla is a leading content management system (CMS) that has a lot of very loyal followers. Using a Joomla template along with the top 10 or 20 Joomla specialty extensions is a good way to get going quickly with a search engine-friendly site. The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits of using a Joomla template are many, in fact, and can help get you the rankings while driving traffic to your site, too. Essentially, it's about having good, usable, "sticky" content and then being able to "prove" to the search engines that your site should be indexed as broadly as possible. All you need to get started is Joomla and the following free extensions: Joomseo, Search Engine Friendly Patch, sh404SEF and Xmap/Joomap. Depending on your time, your abilities and your imagination, there are the "Good," "Better" and "Best" ways to harness the Joomla SEO benefits. The "Good" way: Quick and dirty Joomla SEO Phil Brown's great Joomseo extension takes the major pain out of optimizing a Joomla site when used with sh404sef and the sitemap components. It creates a lot of the required tags and meta tags that you need for good SEO results by using the titles of your content items for Page Title Tags. You save time and prevent errors because you no longer need to enter all this information yourself, manually. Joomseo will take care of this as well as many other important. Anything that moves you toward your SEO goal is valuable, especially if it's automated and in the background like this maneuver. The downside, of course, is that creating SEO elements via a script won't get you the best results as if you took the time to do it yourself. Your human mind works differently than computer processors, and your creative thinking and "life lessons" (experience) can be added in for great effect.


You can always take a bit of time to tweak the Joomseo output, but that starts a process that may even defeat the reason for using Joomseo in the first place, which is to save time. You should use this option when you have no time to do it another way. This is, in fact, a great benefit, in that you can now apportion your project time to the most critical matters and still be confident that your tag business is taken care of decently. The "Better" way: Logical and thorough Joomlatwork's Search Engine Friendly Patch is another excellent tool and works almost as well as the "Best" method for many applications. As in the "Good" method above, this options use sh404SEF and a sitemap to let you manually enter the Title Tags and all meta data for your articles, front page and all menu items. This option for optimizing a site is very logical, since you place all necessary SEO information precisely where (and, of course, when) it would be expected, right in the parameters of the specific articles or menus when you first set them up. Now, of course, there is a downside. For one thing, the SEF patch does not place nice with every other component. For one example, it has been tested with Virtuemart and it does not offer much help there since, through no fault of the SEF patch developers, shop items aren't covered. In addition, it is technically more akin to a hack, since it overwrites some core Joomla files when used in these contexts.


Just remember that when you update your Joomla install you will be overwriting (over-overwriting?) the files that you already changed with the SEF Patch. You can count on the Joomlatwork crew to release updates of their own right on the heels of any Joomla releases. Remember to keep things straight with your patching and repatching. The "Best" way The sh404SEF extension is an indispensable tool. Like SEF Patch it allows you to create Title Tags and other meta tags one at a time, but differs by letting you do it per URL or web address. The key benefit here is that the process is compatible with any other components you may have installed on the Joomla site because you are able to assign additional meta to your URL. That is truly clever. The sh40SEF extension needs no communication with other components to do its job. It just comes on the scene and straightens up the existing mess. The sh404SEF workflow is not entirely intuitive and may take some practice. After you write and publish content items you will check in with the sh404SEF component, view the list of URLs, select the appropriate one to modify and, finally, add tags. This can get confusing if your content is not right there in front of your eyes to refer to while creating the page titles and the rest. Still, this is the preferred option of many Joomla gurus and earns its "Best" rating for the reasons above-particularly the fact that all the URLs or addresses on a site can have custom Page Title Tags, meta descriptions and everything else. Very, very cool. Using Joomla templates with a few of the best, free extensions gets you a tremendous payoff in SEO benefits that you can't achieve as elegantly any other way. The user community continues to put its collective creativity into this powerful CMS, and all of the components are evolving purposefully to give site builders a growing range of good, better and best ways to optimize their page rankings and results.