This article is going to be a long one, showing you all the aspects of the technical details on how to make your Joomla website search enigine friendly.
So take some tea of coffee and learn about all aspects of SEO for Joomla, it is not as hard as it seems, and you will (hopefully) receive more visitors once the search engines have picked up your work…
So, lets start with step 1:
Using the standard Joomla SEF function
Joomla comes with a standard method of creating search engine friendly URLs that reduce the numer of parameters in your URL, so from getting from this
index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10&Itemid=24
to go to
https://www.diysiteseo.com/joomla-seo-optimization/joomla-seo-and-htaccess-files.html
you need to active a option in you global configuration AND use the .htaccess file (the last option only works on apache and l(unix) based webserver.
Only with Joomla 1.5 you will get SEF urls on a windows based server in the standard Joomla function.
Below is the Joomla 1.0.x version of the SEO Tab in the Global Configuration.
One of the options you could use is the "Dynamic Page Titles" but this is also mostly template related, so you can check out how it looks on your website.
I almost always use this option to gain URL keyword rich internal linking.
With Joomla 1.5.x SEO configuration you have two extra options below Search Engine Friendly URLs.
The option to use apache mod_rewrite als depends on your ability to use a .htaccess file.
That way the URL will loose the index.php value.
But without this option you can get nice SEF urls on a windows based server as well.
With the Add suffix, your content items will have an .html at the end of your URL which will make your whole site look more like a website build with static pages.
So you go from the standard sef URLs like http://www.joomla.org/content/view/4483/118/
to something like http://www.photo-digitalus.com/photo-blog/digital-photo-blog/setting-up-the-photo-blog.html
If you can get this option to work, you can take it to the next level with step 2:
Using a SEF component for Joomla
There are several options for Joomla 1.0.x to get an SEF Component, you have SEF Advanced, Artio SEF, NuSEF (prevous OpenSEF) and my favourite sh404SEF.
For Joomla 1.5.x you have ArtioSEF, SmartSEF and sh404SEF that work with the native version of Joomla 1.5.x without the need of the legacy plugin.
One word of warning! if you pick one of them, stick with it ore make sure that if you want to converst to another one, make sure you can create the same urls as you previous sef component!!.
Installing a sef component is just like installing any other Joomla component, just use the Joomla install function for that component and the plugins and/or modules that come with it.
You also want to check out the configuration and documentation with the component of you choice on how to get it active and what to change in your .htaccess file.
Your standard .htaccess file that comes with Joomla! will have to be modified to make these components work.
You can read more on that matter on Joomla and .Htaccess files
sh404SEF if my favourite is a mentioned before, however there is a slight catch with the Joomla 1.5 native version… it only runs on PHP 5 and up.
Not all webhosting company´s are on this version yet… in that case you should try to use SmartSEF that runs on both PHP4 and PHP5 en comes with its own .htaccess file that you can download from the SmartSEF site.
