Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an incredibly important topic to consider when developing your Joomla Instance, especially if you’d like people to locate you using various search engines. It is important to note that SEO is complicated and continuously changing. What worked last year is different from what works this year. This article offers an overview of SEO, illustrates where to begin enhancing SEO in Joomla, and offers a few additional resources that may be of service.

We does not specialize in SEO and we are not SEO experts. This is general information that might help someone get started, but know that entire organizations exist to help you enhance your Joomla Instance's SEO and that there are several extensions available at extensions.joomla.org that may also help.

 

SEO Overview

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is optimizing (improving the visibility of) your Joomla Instance or individual web pages so that the general public can locate your content on the Internet. When people visit an Internet Search Engine such as Google or Yahoo, they type in a keyword or phrase that is of interest to them. Search engines use web crawling or web spidering as a means to produce accurate and current data when a web search is performed. The search conducted by the web browser produces a SERP, a Search Engine Results Page.

By understanding the different parts of a SERP, one can understand the basics of SEO. There is a Browser Page Title and a Meta Description that will show up within each SERP.

 

Browser Page Title

In a Joomla Instance, the Browser Page Title is, by default, the title you have given to each Menu Item that you create. You do have the ability to make the Title Tag different than the Menu Item title. Inside the Menu Item, in the parameters area, go to Page Display Options, and create a Browser Page Title. Be sure to save your work.

 

Return to the front end of your site and refresh the page. The browser tab should show your Browser Page Title, but the title of the Menu Item will remain the same.

 

It’s important to note that if you’d like the Browser Page Title to be consistent for all pages, you’ll have to repeat this process for each Menu Item on your Joomla Instance.

 

Viewing Page Source

You can see how your Browser Page Title will appear to search engines if you view the page source information. You can do this by right-clicking your mouse on the web page and selecting the View page source option.

 

Meta Descriptions

Utilizing the Meta Keywords and Meta Description options within Joomla are great strategies for improving your SEO. This will take some time and effort on your behalf, but, ultimately, search engines like Google and Yahoo may start to index your Joomla Instance. In Joomla, Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords can be set globally for the entire site or individually for Categories, Articles, or Menu Items.

 

Global Metadata Options

To begin developing metadata for your entire site, log into the Administration area (the back end) of your Joomla Instance, and go to the Global Configuration area. Under the Site tab, locate Metadata Settings.

 

By completing these options you’ll add important metadata to each of the pages of your website. This can significantly aid the search rankings and visibility of a website. It’s important to note that metadata won’t be visible to users. It’s also important to note that several of the metadata parameters here may be overridden by metadata content for categories, articles, or menu items. A description of each of the Metadata Options, provided by Joomla.org, is listed below.

Site Meta Description - Text added here appears in web page headers as the “description” metadata entry. The description added here will often times show up in a SERP. A description of around 20 words is recommended. This metadata entry is omitted from web pages if this entry is blank. Because individuals have abused meta keywords (see below) in the past, meta descriptions tend to be more important than the keywords.

Site Meta Keywords - Words and phrases (separated by commas) added here appear in web page headers as the “keywords” metadata entry. Search engines may use these words to refine their indexing of the site s web pages. This metadata entry is omitted from web pages if this entry is blank. It’s extremely important that the keywords reflect the content of the web page. If not, search engine rankings may go down.

Robots - When a spider from a search engine reaches your site, you can actually instruct the spider to index content in different ways by using the Robots drop down menu in Joomla 2.5.

Index, Follow = the spider will index the entire site - the front page and every other page on the site.
No Index, Follow = the spider will not index the front page, but will index every other page on the site.
Index, No Follow = the spider will index the front page, but will not index any other page on the site.
No Index, No Follow = the spider will not index the front page and will not index any page on the site.

Please note that just because you tell a search engine to index some content and not other content, it may not pay attention to you. Trusted search engines will understand this code and will follow directions, but other search engines may not be able to understand the code or simply may not care.

Content Rights - Text added here appears in web page headers as the “rights” metadata entry. If appropriate, describe here what rights others have to use this content. This metadata entry is omitted from web pages if this entry is blank.

Show Author Meta Tag - When this parameter is set to “Yes” an “author” metadata entry is added to the page header when appropriate, using the content item s author name as the metadata text.

Show Joomla Version - If this is set to “Yes”, the version of Joomla that you are using will be indexed along with the content of your Joomla Instance.

 

Global SEO Settings

There is also SEO Settings within the Global Configuration area. These settings offer a few options for altering the format of URLs for pages within the website, and this may have a significant effect of the search ranking of individual pages. It may also make URLs easier to use and manage for humans. Many of the instructions below also come directly from Joomla.org documentation.

 

It’s recommended that you do not alter the SEO Settings once a website is established. Changing any of the first three items in this area will mean that nearly all of a site s URLs will also change and result in broken links from other sites and perhaps a temporary drop in search engine rankings.

Search Engine Friendly URLs - Joomla's internal representation of URLs tends to be lengthy and difficult to interpret by humans and search engine spiders. This is a typical example of the internal URL for a page displaying a content item: www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22&Itemid=437. If this Global Configuration option is set to “Yes”, the URL is modified into a shorter and more meaningful form: www.example.com/index.php/getting-started. The identifying text in the URL (in this case “getting_started”) is derived from the Alias text set up for each Category, Article, and Menu item. The default setting is “No”.

Use URL rewriting - When this parameter is set to “Yes”, Joomla will use the mod_rewrite function of Apache web servers to eliminate the index.php part of the URL. As a result, the “search engine friendly” URL shown above will become: www.example.com/getting-started.

Adds Suffix to URL - When set to “Yes”, Joomla will add .html to the end of the most site URLs stimulating static file-based web content. The URLs shown above will then become: www.example.com/index.php/getting-started.html or www.example.com/getting-started.html. This setting is largely about personal preferences, but you should remember that it is easy to confuse .htm and .html suffixes when typing URLs. The advantage may lie with having this feature switched off. The default setting is “No”.

Unicode Aliases - By default, your site is set to “Transliteration” which means that when saving edited content, Joomla will attempt to convert, when appropriate, any alias text into the corresponding Latin characters. If you turn “Unicode Aliases” to “Yes”, any non-Latin characters in the alias text will be left unchanged.

Include Site Name in Page Titles - This feature, if set to “Yes” will append the site name to page titles in the <title> tag of each web page header. (This text usually appears in the top bar of the web browser window and/or on the browser tab.)

Other Metadata Options

There is also a Metadata Options area located within the parameters are for each category, article, and menu item that you create for your Joomla Instance. The image below illustrates where to find the Metadata Options area for an article.

 

Refer to the Metadata Options listed above when creating descriptions or keywords, but you should know that metadata recorded within a category, article, or menu item may override Metadata recorded elsewhere in the Joomla Instance.

• Open your template and paste the following PHP code somewhere in the head of your template between PHP tags. It’s not nessecary to paste the code in the head but it’s more easy to explain.
  // Set robots for category pages $document =&amp; JFactory::getDocument(); $view = JRequest::getVar('view'); if ($view == 'category') { $document-&gt;setMetaData('robots','noindex,follow'); }

  1 2 3 4

  // Set robots for category pages $document =& JFactory::getDocument(); $view = JRequest::getVar('view'); if ($view == 'category') { $document->setMetaData('robots','noindex,follow'); }

• Save & Close
• Go to a category blog page on your website and refresh the page.
• Open the source of the category blog view and see the meta tag robots set to noindex,follow.
• Click on the read-more button of an article to open that article.
• Open the source of the single article and see the meta tag robots set to index,follow.

With this code set in your template the value of meta tag robots of every page request where the view is “category” will be changed into noindex,follow.

Set meta tag robots in Joomla! 2.5

Using Joomla! 1.6, 1.7 or 2.5 it’s very easy to set the value of meta tag robots for your content article. You don’t have to dig into PHP code. It’s a two-step-strategy to follow.

• Open your Joomla! backend
• Step 1. Go to Content >> Category Manager and open the category you need to change
• Open the parameters tab “Metadata Options” and set the value of Robots to “No index, follow“
• Save & Close
• Step 2. Go to Menus >> Menu Manager and open the menu containing the menu item to the category blog you need to change.
• Open the menu item you need to change.
• Open the parameters tab “Metadata Options” and set the value of Robots to “Index, Follow“.
• Save & Close
• Go to the menu item on the frontend and refresh the page.
• Open the source of the category blog view and see the meta tag robots set to noindex,follow.
• Click on the read-more button of an article to open that article.
• Open the source of the single article and see the meta tag robots set to index,follow.

With this configuration set the value of meta tag robots of the changed category will be changed into noindex,follow.

Higher ranking on individual pages using noindex

Search engines rank your page using internal and external links going from and to your website pages. You can improve the rank of your website pages by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to your pages. Since a category page has lots of great internal links from and to your website it will rank higher then each and every separate article in that category. This results in higher ranking of your category pages then your individual pages. By using the explanation above the meta tag robots of your category pages have the value noindex,follow and will have a lower ranking then your individual pages.

SEO过程中可能遇到不希望搜索引擎收录的页面和链接，noindex和nofollow两个标签就是为了解决这个问题。

noindex：禁止收录该页

nofollow：禁止抓取该链接

一、noindex和nofollow用法

 noindex用法

Meta robots标签必须放在＜head＞和＜/head＞之间，格式：<meta name="robots" content="noindex">。

作用：告诉搜索引擎不要收录该页，如果该页已经收录，那么删除已经收录页面。

nofollow用法

nofollow有两种用法

1、Meta robots标签必须放在＜head＞和＜/head＞之间，格式：<meta name="robots" content=”nofollow”>。

作用：告诉搜索引擎不要抓取该页所有链接。

2、放在链接中<a rel=” nofollow” href=”url”>

作用：告诉搜索引擎不要抓取该链接。

二、noindex和nofollow混合使用

INDEX命令：告诉搜索引擎允许抓取这个页面
FOLLOW命令：告诉搜索引擎可以从这个页面上抓取链接，然后继续访问抓取下去。
NOINDEX命令：告诉搜索引擎不允许抓取这个页面
NOFOLLOW命令：告诉搜索引擎不允许从此页面抓取链接、拒绝其继续访问。

四种使用情况

根据以上的命令，我们就有了一下的四种组合

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">：可以抓取本页，而且可以顺着本页继续索引别的链接

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">：不许抓取本页，但是可以顺着本页抓取索引别的链接

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW">：可以抓取本页，但是不许顺着本页抓取索引别的链接

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">：不许抓取本页，也不许顺着本页抓取索引别的链接。

这里需要注意的是，不要把两个对立的反义词写到一起，例如

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOINDEX">
 

 三、noindex和nofollow使用环境情况

1、让搜索引擎不要收录该页，如果已经收录则删除（去掉已经有排名的网页），允许搜索引擎抓取该页其他链接。

使用：<meta name="robots" content="noindex">。

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">和<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">效果一样。

2、让搜索引擎不要收录该页，如果已经收录则删除（去掉已经有排名的网页），禁止搜索引擎抓取该页其他链接。

使用<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">。

3、不允许搜索引擎抓取该页链接（该页可以正常抓取）。

使用：<meta name="robots" content=”nofollow”>或者<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW">。

4、不允许抓取本文某一个链接。

使用：<a rel=” nofollow” href=”url”>。

备注：

META NAME="ROBOTS"指所有的搜索引擎的，也可以指定某一个搜索引擎，例如META NAME="Googlebot(谷歌蜘蛛)"、META NAME="Baiduspider（百度蜘蛛）、META NAME="HaoSouSpider（好搜蜘蛛）”、META NAME="Sogou News Spider ”（搜狗蜘蛛）"等。content部分有四个命令：index、noindex、follow、nofollow，命令间以英文的“,”分隔。

So your e-commerce site is up-and-running, and you think your work is done? Not so fast! There’s plenty more to do! It’s all well and good to have an e-commerce website, but you want people to be able to find it, and you want search engines to rank it so more people can find it. For that, you’ll need to get to work on a little bit of search engine optimisation (SEO). Below, we have a few tips to get you started. SEO is a complex and sometimes arcane art, so the below is not exhaustive. But it should be enough to give you a bit of a headstart – once you’ve mastered the easy-to-do SEO, you can start looking into the more complex and difficult stuff.

Research the keywords you want to target

The first and most important e-commerce SEO tip: Do your homework! You’ll need to put some time into researching the most relevant and effective keywords to target on your e-commerce website. Use Google’s free AdWords Keyword Planner tool to identify keywords that have a good search volume, but not too much competition. Just type a keyword into the box, and then click on the ‘Keyword ideas’ tab – this will bring up a long list of similar keywords, along with their search volume and competitiveness (ranked from low to high). Play around with the tool for a while, and aim for long-tail (i.e. lower search volume), tightly focused keywords (at least in the beginning) that won’t be so competitive. If your imagination is failing you, a tool like Ubersuggest [http://ubersuggest.org/] will do the creative work for you, and suggest related keywords you might not ever have thought of.

Include your keywords in anchor text

It might seem obvious, but some e-commerce site owners do miss this trick: Don’t embed links to things like product pages in phrases like ‘click here’ or ‘view here’, instead, embed links in your keyword phrases. So, for example, if you have a gallery page of men’s sports shoes, embed the product page link in a keyword phrase like ‘SuperBrand green and white men’s basketball shoes’. This keyword-rich anchor text will help search engines see what it is that you’re selling, and thus help you to rank for those keywords.

Make good use of images, and make sure you use alt tags!

As an e-commerce site owner, you should know by now how important an image-rich, visually appealing website design is. Hopefully, you already have one! But don’t forget to fill in that ‘Alt text’ box for each and every image on your website. For those unfamiliar with Alt tags, they’re what search engines and screen readers (as used by the visually impaired) use to ‘read’ images online. A search engine can’t ‘see’ an image, it can only read the Alt text you’ve included. If you don’t fill in these boxes, all of your product images will be invisible to search engines. So fill up those boxes with keyword rich descriptions! It’s also a good idea to fill in the Alt text for images like logos and other brand artwork. You want your brand to be visible everywhere.

Bear in mind that how fast your site loads is a factor in how a search engine ranks you. (See this article for more on this.) Also, with m-commerce becoming more and more important, you don’t want a website that loads painfully slowly over a mobile connection. So with your images you’ll need to strike a balance between resolution (quality) and weight (how many KB or MB it ‘weighs’). The higher the resolution, the higher the weight and the slower an your site will load; the lower the resolution the lower the quality. You’ll want to go for something in the middle.

Keep an eye on your traffic

Get yourself a Google Analytics account and start watching and analysing your traffic. Using Analytics, you can see which pages are performing, and which aren’t, and use this information to beef up the underperforming ones by modifying your target keywords. You’ll want to look at the raw traffic numbers, but you should also pay close attention to the bounce rate. If a product page has high traffic but a high bounce rate, it could be that people are coming to your site from search results, seeing something they didn’t expect, and bouncing away again. If that’s happening, you’ll need to modify your target keywords so that the visitors who come to your site are visitors who will turn into customers! A large volume of traffic is useless if all those people come to your site looking for something you’re not selling.

Ask for reviews, and publish them on product pages

Apart from the usefulness of reviews for customers, they have another function – an SEO function. Reviews are text content, which is readable by search engines – the more content you have on your site, the easier it is for a search engine to figure out what it is that you’re selling, and the more likely you are to rank! Reviews will also constantly update your site – and search engines like websites that are regularly updated.

You could offer discounts or other rewards to customers for leaving a review – just send them a friendly email when their product has dispatched and ask them to review it on your site in exchange for a discount on their next purchase, or a chance to win a prize.

While this is only an overview of e-commerce SEO, there should be more than enough in the above to keep you busy for a while! We’ll look more closely at e-commerce SEO tips and tricks in future articles, so stay tuned!