Listed below are must-see Seo tips to make your Joomla website place on top in the Google Search:

1. H1 & Alt tags

If you've been around Joomla seo for a while - you will know the importance of the H1 tag. This is one of the most important on-page Joomla and can still be used to directly influence SEO. If you use the H1 correctly, you can have a very postive influence on your search engine rankings. Your page should have only one

As per google algorithm, google spider very much consider on h1 and alt tags for onsite seo, The alt text tags’ purpose is to be displayed when an image is unable to load. Search engines take the alt tag into consideration, so don't forget to add alt tag to your images html.

2. Create your title tags

Tittle is also a very important item for SEO, or could be the most important. Title tag should be unique for every page ( max 60 chars ). It is possible to override the title using the Page Display Options in the advanced options of menu-items. Using this feature, you will have full control about your menu item titles.Menus >> Menu name >> Menu item >> Page display tab

3. Use Meta Description

The meta description is used to describe short summary of a page. So that readers can decide whether the page is what they are looking for or looks interesting. Your meta description will have the most impact if it is 160 characters or less in length, including spaces and punctuation. Make them compelling, concise and informative.

When you're writing your meta description, keep in mind the following tips:

• Don’t abuse important keywords
• Do write high quality descriptions.
• Don't repeat information that is in the page title.
• Don't include your site name or URL. value.
• Don't repeat descriptions over multiple pages

4. Don’t do keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is now considered as a strictly black-hat SEO technique. It does tend to have some positive short-term effects, but it’s playing with fire and rarely is beneficial in the long run. Ideally, each page of your website will use three to five keyword phrases, specific to that page.

5. Optimize anchor text

Optimizing you anchor text is extremely important, especially for your on-site URL's. When building in internal link structure, this is the most important issue to look at. Your anchor text links should contain keywords that describe your article, not something vague such as, read more, click here, etc.

Some recommended Search Engine Optimization extensions are MijoSEF, sh404SEF, and JoomSEF.

6. www or non-www url’s

If you Joomla site is accessible either with or without a www-prefix is actually also a matter of duplicate URL's. Google ask you to choose one in Webmaster Tools, and it's also important to choose one in Joomla. You can go into Google Webmaster Tools and specify how you want Google to index your site, with or without www. Or you also can set up the redirect in your .htaccess file:

non-www to www redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

www to non-www redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

7. Internal and external link

Linking internally is as good as creating backlinks from external websites.

Creating incoming links from other domain is really hard work while for internal links you are able to do it easily – that’s your site. So if you have a page with content relevant to the article you’re writing no wait further link to it internally! - it will improve your rankings.

Linking externally, you might need to usethe rel="nofollow" tag in your links. Too many external links from a page can be bad for SEO, so setting some of them to nofollow can be good.

<a rel="nofollow" href=http://differentdomain.com title=" Text"> Text</a>

8. Good site map to get Google indexed

One you created your site you should create a sitemap.xml file which contains the structure of your Joomla site’s URLs. This helps Google and other search engines to determine the structure of your website and how to reach all parts of it. The file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset   xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" etc. etc.>
     <url>
          <loc>http://joomlavi.com/</loc>
     </url>
     <url>
           <loc>http://joomlavi.com/another-page</loc>
     </url>
          ..................
</urlset>

9. Use Joomla SEO Extensions

The Joomla Extensions Directory - JED contains a lot of Joomla extensions and plugins for SEO. Using SEO extensions is a useful way to make sure your Joomla website is optimized for search engines. Below are some other widely recommended Joomla SEO plugins:

SH404SEF

SH404SEF is probably the most pupolar SEO extension for Joomla. It has been around for a long time and supported for all Joomla versions. The main features are rewriting URL, avoiding duplicate content and 301-redirect.

X-Map

This is a free and most extension for sitemap extensions on JED. Xmap creates a sitemap based on the menustructure of your Joomla website. Xmap allows you to create a map of your site using the structure of your menus.

SEO-Generator

This native Joomla 1.5 - 3.x plugin automatically generates keywords and description for each article by pulling text from the title and/or the content to help with SEO. It also gives you the ability to set different title configurations, robots meta tags and Google webmaster verification keys.

Header Tags

The Header Tags plugin gives you more control over the heading tags (h1-h6) in your website. The plugin searches for existing heading tags within the selected content area and handles them according to your specifications. So if want all the H4 tags in your site to be changed to H3

SEOSimple

This Joomla (1.5/1.6/1.7/2.5/3) plugin simply takes the starting chunk of text from the page’s content and applies that as the value for the meta description tag in the page’s 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’s content.

Easy Frontend SEO

EFSEO is also a free SEO extension for Joomla. you can control all important metadata manually and automatically.

10. Avoid duplicate URL’s

Any kind of duplicate content in your site could harm search engine rankings. The main reason for duplicates to appear is the wrong structure of the website . First, you need to think over the structure and identify main categories and subcategories.. If you create multiple categories in advance this can prevent duplicate pages from appearing in future. There are many way of getting rid of duplicate URL’s like using 301 redirects, setting up rules in .htaccess, setting up robots.txt, use SEO extension mentioned above, google webmaster tool.

11. Avoid 404-errors

Google recommends building a nice custom 404 page for your case with the quote “A good custom 404 page will help people find the information they're looking for, as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further."

When someone to click on a link to your website and get a 404 error. Make sure that people can never end up with a meaningless 404 Page not found error message. Especially the default Joomla page for this is very ugly. As it will also completely different from the rest of your site, people will think the site is broken and leave it. If this happens often it can negatively affect your SEO rankings. The best way is to create a custom 404-page for your template. All our Joomla Templates have custom 404-page to make to they are good for SEO

12. Avoid Flash

If you're serious about SEO, just don't use any content that is invisible to search engines. So, basically just avoid Flash because of the following reasons:

• Flash is bad for SEO.
• Flash requires lots of bandwidth.
• Flash bad impact for user experience.
• Flash is not accessible.
• Many Mobile Devices Do Not Support Flash

13. 301 – redirect for old URL’s

As explained above, you should avoid 404 errors as much as possible. When you are migrating from an old site to a new one, or entirely renew your site. Your URL's will change. Also the Google index will take a period of time to update new URL, and it will keep on sending users from the search results to your old URL's. If you don’t do this, it will badly impact your search rankings! You have to determine what your old URL's are, redirect them to the new ones. You can custom redirects by using SEO extension like SH404SEF , or Shin .htaccess with following structure:

RewriteRule ^oldpage1$ "http://newsite.com/newpage1" [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^oldpage2$ "http://newsite.com/newpage2" [R=301,L]
etc.

14. Google webmaster tools

Google's Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort. Once you've created your SiteMap, you will be able to submit it to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools gives the advanced search expert with following key features:

• show all sorts of errors with a site
• Set Site Defaults
• Analyze Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
• Top Search Queries
• Manage Sitelinks
• Enhance 404 Error Pages

15. Optimize your Robots.txt file to allow images to be indexed

The robots.txt file's purpose is to inform the search engines bots/crawlers/spiders about the files you don't want them to index. Beside content, html structure… you can use images to make your website SEO friendly by removing the Disallow on the images folder in the robots files.

Open your robots.txt file (in the root folder of your Joomla! website) and remove the images line so that now search engines are not denied from indexing your images.

Beside allowing your Robots.txt file for images, you also need to optimize image for site speed improvement. This will help a little for SEO

 

What is a Canonical Url

Canonical links are tags that helps webmasters avoid duplicate content issues by telling Google indexes the correct page or specifying the "canonical", or "preferred" version of a web page for a part of SEO. Many sites are encountering duplicate problems in the Google index. Duplicate entries happen when the same content is accessible from multiple URLs. For instance, http://example.com/page.html would be indexed by search engines differently from page http://example.com/page.html?parameter=1, even though both URLs return the same content. It is one of the methods advised by Google for handling with your URL's.

How to use Canonical URLs

I'm assuming that we have 2 duplicate Urls like above: http://example.com/page.html?parameter=1 and http://example.com/page.html

When this page is requested, you can tell the search engines that the preferred and correct URL is http://example.com/page.html by specifying the preferred URL with this HTML tag in head area of your source code:

<link href="http://example.com/page.html" rel="canonical" />

Solutions for canonical URL in Joomla 3

Joomla 3 sometimes has issues with canonical URL's, so if you are serious about Joomla SEO, it is a problem that needs to be addressed. There are some solutions to sort them out:

• Create an override for the file /plugins/system/sef/sef.php on line 51.
• If it just concerns one or two pages on the whole site, you could consider using ReReplacer plugin to set the correct tag.
• Use a plugin or extension. The major SEF extensions all set a canonical URL such as sh404SEF. When you have this in place, you need to install the Canonical Links plugin from Gnome on the Run. This creates the canonical link tag for your SEF URLs automatically

 

1. Keep your Joomla site up-to-date

You should always keep your Joomla site up-to-date with the latest version of Joomla. The latest version is Joomla 3.3.6 with tons of new features added and security improment. Every new Joomla release may solve some security issues that are informed to the Joomla community at the time of the update. Therefore if you don't update your joomla for so long, the chance of being hacked will increase accordingly.

For Joomla 2.5.x, you should know this "As of 1 October 2014 the only version of Joomla 2.5.x believed to be secure is J2.5.27"

2. Keep your Joomla extension up-to-day

Beside updating main Joomla core. You need to make sure that you always have the latest version of the extension and you need to update to the latest version whenever there’s a new one.Updating Joomla and its extentions is the most important part of securing your Joomla website. Keeping your Joomla extension update not only helps improving security but may make your joomla faster as well

3. Remove Unused Extensions

People often test different extensions, components or modules and forget to remove them once they finish working with them. Leaving these extensions installed, even if they are disabled, can create a potential security risk. These can lead to unseen vulnerabilities down the road. Therefore it’s advisable to remove these after any testing has been completed. Removing them can help to speed up your joomla too.

4. Use Strong Login Details

It is important to have a strong password for your website. Many attackers try to guess yours by using list of commonly used passwords. For almost every website that you build, there will be various user accounts that you have to create and manage. For each of these you should create a secure password. Choosing a password that other people won’t guess easily is a matter of creating unlikely letter and number combinations.

A strong password should:

• Not use common words for passwords like love, god, pass, admin, admin123, etc.
• Avoid personal information in passwords like your personal or family name.
• Have at least eight characters long.
• Not contain your user name, real name, or company name.
• Not contain a complete word.
• Avoid password generators. Password generators use algorithms to generate the passwords which can be compromised by an attacker.
• Use as many special characters ( *!@#)$ ), numbers and capital letters in your password as possible.
• be different from previously used passwords.
• Contain a mixture of uppercase, lowercase characters and numbers.

5. Disallow User Registration

If your website isn’t a community or social network then you should disallow user registration for security reasons by doing following steps:

• Log in to backend
• Go to Users >> User Manager and find the Options tab at the top of the page
• Find the setting Allow User Registration
• Set Allow User Registration to No
• Click Save button on the top right

6. Hide your Joomla and Extension version

The main reason why we should hide our Joomla and its extensions versions is because there are malicious scripts on the Internet, their target is to find which type of CMS is your site powerd. So showing up your Joomla version in your HTML code is not a good idea. Similar an invitation for hacker attact. For example, if an attacker finds out that a certain website is running Joomla version 1.7, he will be able to search and know what are the vulnerabilities of this Joomla version (they are listed by the Joomla community), and then start performing his attacks accordingly.

If you want to check that you are exposing your Joomla version to the world, then just go to your website using Firefox, right click on the page, and then click on “View Page Source”. View this file /templates/system/css/system.css , you may file these line for its Joomla version accordingly

Joomla 1.6:   * @version $Id: system.css 20196 2011-01-09 02:40:25Z ian $

Joomla 1.7:   * @version $Id: system.css 21322 2011-05-11 01:10:29Z dextercowley $ 

Joomla 2.5:   * @copyright    Copyright (C) 2005 – 2012 Open Source Matters

 

7. Change your administrator username

By default, the administrator username in Joomla website consists is admin. Most often, people never change this default username, which makes it quite easy for hackers to gainaccess to your site as they already know one half of your login details, the remaining is to obtain your password. Changing the administrator username reduces the chances of hacker guessing your login details. This is an easy, yet important tip for streghthen your Joomla security.

To create a new Super User Account just:

• Log into the Administration area as the current Super User
• Click on Users >> User Manager >> Add New User
• Assign the new user the “Super Users” role
• Log out of your current Super User account
• Log in with your new Super User account
• Locate the old Super User account, and raname it.

8. Use SSL on your site and force Joomla into SSL mode for all logins

Using SSL, you can enable a few features already built-in to Joomla! and protect from some easy exploits that may be taken against your site and users users. Note that you must have a properly configured SSL certificate for your site’s domain, or you will not be able to enable this feature.

When you have an SSL certificate on your website, this setting will have the user’s browser encrypt their user name and password before it’s sent over the internet to your server.

To enable the SSL Login feature in Joomla 3:

• Go to Extensions >> Module Manager
• Filter Login Module
• Locate and open up the Logins module
• Select YES the option “Encrypt Login Form
• Click "Save"

9. Protecting your session cookies

When a user logs into the back end area of your website, a special session cookie is set in the browser to identify that user. That cookie is transmitted with every page load so that Joomla can determine which user is viewing the page. If the cookie was to be intercepted by a third party they would be granted the same privileges to do what any registered user or administrator user can do.That cookie then grants them the priveleges to do what any registered or administrator user can do.

You can force SSL to be enabled for the entire session for either the Super User (admin) or all registered users visiting the site. This will prevent the cookie from being tampered with by a third party looking to gain access to your website.You should choose the “Administrator Only” option instead

10. Disable the FTP Layer

For the majority of Joomla installations the FTP layer is not required, so we recommend that you disable this by doing following:

• Login into the Joomla backend
• Go to System >> Global Configuration >>Server
• Under “FTP Settings” select “No” for the Enable FTP option.
• Click on the “Save & Close”.

11. Implement Two-Factor Authentication

Two factor authentication is additional layer of security, which creates a temporary (time-based) password which is unique to a specific username. If you don't have access to this temporary password or secret key, you won't be able to login.

You can improve your site’s security by applying this tip. With one more layer and improve security against - Key loggers , Password cracking, Password hacking and many more security threats.

12. Install security extensions

Using security extensions is another easy way to improve your Joomla website security. There are many extensions that will make your website secure. Go ahead and do your research, and install one that is highly recommended by the Joomla community. Listed below are some pupolar Joomla security extensions

Using security extensions is another easy way to improve your Joomla website security. We have developed our own security extension (jHackGuard) that is free for download by anyone. Below you will find a list of the most popular Joomla security extensions:

• jHackGuard
• Akeeba Admin Tools
• jomDefender
• jSecure

13. Change the default database prefix

By default, old Joomla versions used to install with a database table prefix of jos_ . Unfortunately, hackers know that, if you leave the default setting and hacker will adjust their attacks to that end. You should change this alias to a different one (a random 3 or 4 letter word that you can come up with). Note that some of the security extensions on JED can do this for you.

Also, you can pre-set the database prefix when installing your Joomla site. If you've already installed Joomla! and want to change your prefix, do the following:

• Log in to your Joomla Admin Panel.
• Go to Global Configuration and search for the database
• Change your database prefix and press Save.
• Go to phpMyAdmin to access your database.
• Go to export, leave all default values and press Start. Exporting the database can take a while.
• When done, select all code and copy it to notepad (or any other text editor)
• In phpMyAdmin, select all tables and delete them
• In notepad, do a Search & Replace (Ctrl + H). Set the search term to jos_ and change it into your new prefix. Press "Replace all".
• Select everything in your notepad file and copy it. In phpMyAdmin, go to SQL, paste the queries and press Start.

14. Use a SEF component

As you might already have know, a SEF component is used to make the url:s of your Joomla website more Search Engine Friendly. But a good SEF component also gives security improvement. A default Joomla url tells the viewer a lot about the page visited; that it is a Joomla page and what components are used to produce that page. If you do not tell the hacker that your website is powerd Joomla, it will be a lot harder for him to know where to start hacking. Most hackers use the Google inurl: command to search for a vulnerable exploit. Use Artio, SH404SEF or another SEF component to re-write your URL's and prevent hackers from finding the exploits.

In addition, you'll get a higher rank in Google when using search engine friendly URL's.

15. Use a secure web host / secure server configuration

Use good quality secure web hosting including an appropriate PHP file handler such as suPHP or FastCGI and security extensions such as mod_security. A good quality web host will be using a recent version of PHP. Check that your hosting provider is using the latest version of Apache, MySql, PHP, phpMyAdmin, and cPanel. Inform your hosting provider immediately if you see one of them that is not fully up-to-date.

16. Change the default permissions on your Joomla .php files to restrict editing or overwriting

File permissions are a method of controlling what you and other user can do with a file or folder. You can restrict file permissions on some critical files to make it harder for a hacker to edit or overwrite your files. Here are some suggestions:

• Set the permission of /index.php to 444
• Set the permission of /configuration.php to 444
• Set the permission of /templates/*yourtemplate*/index.php to 444
• Set the permission of the folder /templates/*yourtemplate*/ to 555

17. Change your passwords regularly

It is very important to change the following passwords regulary:

• The password of the “admin” user.
• The FTP password
• The MySQL password
• The hosting password (e.g. the cPanel password)

18. Do not allow users to upload scripts to your website

While Joomla, by default, totally forbids user upload of scripts to your website, you might be tempted at one point to allow (for one reason or the other) some of your users to upload inline scripts or executable script files to your website. Allowing users to upload files to your website can be a big website security risk, even if it’s simply to change their avatar. The risk is that any file uploaded however innocent it may look, could contain a script that when executed on your server completely opens up your website. Therefore no matter what the rewards are, avoid this completely. If you think it’s necessary for your website to have a feature to allow people to upload scripts, then ask some Joomla security experts for advice

19. Run a vulnerability scan:

You should regularly run a vulnerability scan on your website. There are many website security scanners out there (just make sure you choose one that is tested and is known to provide reliable results). For our clients, we use Acunetix (read this post we have written a while ago about Acunetix and Joomla).

20. Setup a backup and recovery process

The time to consider an incident management plan is before your site is hacked not after, so take the necessary time to outline what will happen should you fall victim. As the saying goes, "Back up early and often.". You should rely on a strong backup and recovery protocol for your live website. Its not just hacking that may compromise your website but other factors like a faulty upgrade or extension install.