The bookmarks component has a hundred times more options then Joomla's built-in Weblinks component. Images (banners) in your links, sub categories, SEO advantages and many other things make it the obvious choice for any Joomla site. However, it can seem a little overwhelming at first so here's a step by step guide to the Bookmarks component.

First download and install the 'Bookmarks' component :

Download Bookmarks component

Guide to installing new Joomla components

Now if you already had some links entered into the weblinks component, you will probably want to import those into the new Bookmarks component. Otherwise, skip straight to the 'Configuring Bookmarks' section.

Steps to import links from the default Joomla 'Weblinks' component :

Go to components / bookmarks / bookmarks items

Click on the button 'import & export', in the upper right corner of the page

Now in the section for 'weblinks', select the 'root' category from the dropdown list shown in this image

You are now ready to import the links. Click on the 'import weblinks' button in the toolbar to do this

Configuring the 'Weblinks' component for SEO purposes :

First of all you will want to enable DIRECT links :

Go to components / bookmarks / control panel

Select the tab 'Misc'

Choose 'Yes' for direct links.

Remember to click save to save the configuration.

Now unless you are building some sort of web directory with a ton of links, you will probably not have more links then you could fit on one page. This is also better for SEO purposes as all the link-juice from the homepage will go to 1 page instead of a series of pages. This is why we recommend disabling a lot of options in the bookmarks component which are meant for sites with a large amount of links.

These are our recommended changes / settings :

On the tab 'sorting' :

Choose manual sorting for categories and bookmarks

On the tab 'display' :

Choose 'hide' display mode, 'hide' alpha index and 'hide' navigator.

We also recommend disabling the copyright notice if you are running a commercial website

On the tab 'columns' :

Columns sortable : 'No'

Display 'top anchor' : 'No'

Finally on the tabs 'submit' and 'vote', we recommend disabling both voting and submission unless you are specifically using them for your site.

Now the component should be ready for use and further customisation. These recommended settings will keep the page clean, as a default 'Bookmarks' configuration makes for a very busy page with too many internal links.