How to Increase My SEO Joomla Ranking?

In 2017, no online marketer would deny the importance of a successful SEO campaign. Because digital marketing is one of the most competitive places businesses face today, SEO became an essential condition for any company to survive in the field. It doesn’t matter what business you are in, search engine optimization will help you stay ahead of the competition and meet your objectives much faster.

Every day hundreds of new websites are built with Joomla. If you are one of those website owners who has also chosen Joomla to build the site, then it’s highly advisable to make sure your site is search engine optimized. Wondering how to do that? No need to worry — Semalt specialists are here to help you. Today we’ll reveal the top secrets to improve your SEO Joomla. Read on to discover them all!

Eight Useful Tips to Boost Your SEO Joomla

1. Enable SEO Friendly URLs

By enabling SEO friendly URLs, you’ll automatically remove all the dynamically generated URLs and replace them with the alias of the menu item that you are applying on the page.

2. Enable URL Rewriting

The next thing you should consider is removing the /index.php/ from the URL. To do that enable "Use URL Rewriting" option.  

3. Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess

The next one is to make your website look nicer. You can reach this goal by renaming the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess. Simple as that.

4. Optimize Your Meta Description

A successful implementation of the meta description is very beneficial for your website’s SEO. You can update your meta description in the "Metadata Settings" section. Note: your meta description should be no longer than 165 symbols, including punctuation and space. Try to make it informative, concise and exciting to read.  

5. Robots.txt File Optimization

The robots.txt file primary purpose is to inform the search engine bots about the files that you don't want to index. The whole hitch is that there is a rule for the images directory that informs Google not to index the image folder.

As you might know, images and graphics can drive a chunk of traffic from Google and other search engines. That is the reason why you should remove the /images/ line from your robots.txt file. As soon as you delete the following line, your images will be successfully indexed by search engine bots.  

6. Enable Gzip

Enabling "GZip Page Compression" is an excellent way to reduce your website’s loading speed. Compression is the key feature that makes your website load faster.

7. Install a Sitemap

The purpose of a sitemap is to inform webmasters and search engines about pages on your website that are available for crawling. It helps Google and the viewers find their way through your site.  

8. Submit to Webmaster Tools

Submitting your sitemap to the Bing Webmaster and Google Webmaster is also highly recommended. Google Search Console is perhaps the best solution for anyone needing to monitor their website’s performance in search results.

Conclusion

Our Semalt team hopes you have found this article useful. In case you have any other ideas for optimizing the SEO Joomla website, tell us about them!