Many of us have found Joomla to be one of the best options for building websites quickly and easily for a variety of industries. This is because it’s ease of use, has many plugins, and its scalability has earned great applause. Unfortunately, Joomla is a little backward SEO wise, and makes it difficult for your content to rank well. Never fear, we have listed here 10 great plugins we have used on clients sites and seen great results. So make 2010 a year of SEO zen with your Joomla website. Please keep in mind that these plugins are somewhat exclusive, while some can be combined, others cannot. Proceed with caution.
1. RS SEO- This great component does a number of invaluable SEO tasks including: crawl your website and index all the pages, modify the Meta Keywords, Meta description and Title on the fly, grade each page for SEO effectiveness, create Google and Yahoo! sitemaps, constantly monitor your competitors and compare them to you, monitor important keyword positions, and set permanent redirects for old links.
2. iJoomla SEO- Another great full featured component with a plethora of SEO features including: position of keywords in Google, use of h1, h2, h3 tags instead of contentheading tag, individual metatag control per page, automatic linking based on keyword, 301 redirects, ability to add nofollows to links (or leave dofollow, if you prefer), and image seo optimization.
3. SEF Service Map 2 (with PingBack system)- This component creates a complete XML sitemap of your site which it then uses to actively report (ping) new or modified items to Google, Yahoo, and other services. (Pinging is one of the tools that makes WordPress so AWESOME for SEO!) Thanks to that, indexing robots (spiders) will visit your site much more often and the site can index itself without your further activity. Make sure to sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.
4. sh404SEF This component adds search engine friendly url’s to Joomla but is much more robust than the built in SEF. sh404SEF lets you create unlimited short URLs for any page, remove duplicate URLs, customize the page title and page description, automatically emphasize all your article titles with “Heading tags,” spam and hacker management, and IP blocking. It also works with or without .htaccess support.
5. Joomla 1.5 SEO Patch- This patch solves the issues in regards of the settings within the html head section of your Joomla pages. The patch allows you to gain fully control over the META and title settings in the http header settings in Joomla 1.5 generated pages.
6. SEO Canonicalisation Plugin- SEO Canonicalisation is a system plugin for Joomla! 1.5 that enables site ‘canonicalisation’, which means that when a user hits your site from another domain than your preferred (for example, www.website.com instead of website.com), Joomla! will redirect the user to the appropriate hostname. Previously this would have to be accomplished by adding a .htaccess rewrite rule to handle the redirect.
7. SEOSimple- This simple Joomla 1.5 plugin takes the starting chunk of text from the page content and applies that as the value for the meta description tag in the page head. Search engines often use a Web page’s meta description in the SERPs, and as such it is important that these meta descriptions have relevant text related to the page content.
8. J!Redirect301- This extension works just as it sounds. The plugin 301 redirects your domains to one domain so that only one version of your site is indexed and also can be used to redirect individual pages to a new a page so search engine results are not lost.
9. Website Name- This Joomla 1.5 plugin displays the Website name in the page title. This is useful for SEO purposes, because it shows relationship between pages of your site. You can choose to display it before or after the Content Title.
10. GD SEO Verify- This nifty little plugin makes verifying your sites at Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center much easier on the backend of Joomla.
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