If you own OR manage a Joomla website, you need to understand that online marketing is the most competitive place to walk through and SEO tweaks in the website plays a vital role in achieving the best results in the search engines.
Here are few tips and best practises to improve the ranking of your Joomla website:
1) Speed up your Joomla website
One of the most important factor from the Search Engine point of view is “How fast your website loads”. Better the speed best the ranking website will get. Also, it will improve the user experience as well.
In order to speed up your Joomla website, you need to have fast web server + few Joomla optimizations in place.
2) Search Engine Friendly URL Structure
Another important aspect is “Search Engine Friendly URLs”. Joomla CMS provides a very good SEO friendly URL structure but you have to make sure, it is enabled from Global configuration settings. So go to Global Configuration and tick the “Search Engine Friendly URLs” and “Use URL Rewriting” to “Yes”. This will remove randomly generated ugly URLs and optimize them so they rank higher in the search engines.
Along with that, you can use the 3rd party SEO extensions as well in order to improve the URL structure.
3) Relevant Page Titles & Meta Descriptions
TITLE tags are highly regarded by Search Engines. Title is one of the highest seo ranking factors when it comes to on-page SEO which you can influence and can make a significant positive or negative impact. So please make sure that Page Titles matches the keywords you want to rank for and also make sure that Page Titles matches the quality guidelines by Google.
Meta Description is also an equivalent important factor as Meta Title so you should put a description which makes sense, ideally for each page. Meta Description should include targeted keyword and also it needs to be written cleverly so search engine crawlers find it interesting and also, it looks appealing to real users.
4) Mobile Friendly
In past few years, Google has made a lots of changes in their search engine algorithm and most of them are favouring the mobile factor in great manner. So if your website is responsive and mobile friendly, it will definitely get more attention by Google crawlers for mobile site search as well as non-mobile searches.
Along with the search engines, it will improve the real user experience as well if your website is optimized to view best in mobiles and tablets.
5) Quality Content
Last but not the least, it all depends on what kind of content you have on your website. Content was the KING and will remain the KING!
Duplicate content is a ranking killer so quite frankly, one of the best things you can do for your website’s search engine rankings is consistently invest in quality content. It takes time but believe me, over the time it will get attention by search engines and real users and you will start seeing the benefits of it.
Content of your Joomla website does not always need to be SEO centric but it needs to be valuable and useful for your website users too so that they keep visiting your website, keep coming to your website and share your content too.
