A basic Joomla installation is not very 'search engine friendly'. Sure, everybody knows they have to enter their own meta keywords and enable 'SEF URLs', but those things are very ineffective these days, especially with the default built-in components. So here are our 5 best tips to vastly improve the search engine friendliness of your Joomla website.

1.    Search Engine Friendly URL's

This is probably the most important of all. Joomla comes with a SEF engine by default, but it doesn't do a very good job. We recommend installing OpenSEF for Joomla.

To enable this, you can follow our guide here :

Configuring 'Search engine friendly URLs' for your Joomla site

2.    Linked titles

Enabling this built in feature will change each article subject / title into a link. And because you are using SEF URLs now, these links will contain keywords relating to the article (if you gave it a good title).

To enable this, you can follow our guide here :

Enabling 'Linked titles' in Joomla

3.    The 'Bookmarks' component 

The built in Joomla component 'Weblinks', is not able to display direct links. Instead, all the links are redirect links which do not count as actual backlinks in Google, or at least not with the desired anchor text. Replacing this component with the 'Bookmarks' component will allow you to enable direct links. You will also have a lot more options on how to organize and display the links. This step is vital if you are planning to do any link trading, because other webmaster will usually only accept direct links in return for their link.

To enable this, you can follow our guide here :

Installing and configuring the 'Bookmarks' component on your Joomla site

4.    Using 'TagClouds'

To enable more keyword rich internal links on your frontpage, I recommend using the component 'TagClouds'. It will generate a cloud of keywords on your frontpage that, when clicked, will bring up a search on your site of that keyword. Usefull to users and good for search engine optimisation.

To enable this, you can follow our guide here :

Installing and configuring the 'TagClouds' component on your Joomla site

5.    Logging and statistics with JoomlaStats 

You are going to have to know how your visitors are coming to your site and whether the amount is increasing after all your hard work. For this purpose you can use the 'JoomlaStats' component. It will provide you with information such as which site referred a user to your site, which search engine did they use and what keywords were they searching for. This is vital information for your search engine optimization campaign.

To enable this, you can follow our guide here :

Installing and configuring the 'JoomlaStats' component on your Joomla site
 

Implementing these 5 simple things on your site will increase the visitors that find your site through the search engines. By the way, these tips have all been implemented on this site, so you can see everything in action right here (except for JoomlaStats, I have only enabled this in the Joomla back-end)