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