How To Seo Your Joomla Site
By Florin Costache
So you have a great design, great content and even a few links to your site but it still seems that you aren't going nowhere in the search engines. Well, there is a reason: although is a great CMS it isn't that good with SEO. Let's see what we can do so will become the Search Engines' best friend:

1. Enable SEF urls: this is almost critical for good rankings. Even though search engines are very good at indexing dynamic urls many webmasters have seen better results when using search engine friendly urls.

Here is how to enable it: log in the administrator backend and look for the "Global Configuration" icon. Now click it and in the upper right part you must enable "Search Engine Friendly URLs". Also, if your site runs on an Apache server than you must rename the "htaccess.txt" file to ".htaccess".

Although Joomla's built-in SEF component is rather limited the output is still seen very well by the Search Engines. But it gets even better with the next module.

2. OpenSEF ( tinyurl.com/2oeogw ): this the best SEF component for Joomla. It works great, doesn't slow down your site and is very configurable. Some of OpenSEF's features:

- automatic rewrite of all urls
- ability to define how SEF urls will look based on section, category and article title
- define 404 Error url
- unlimited number of alias URL mappings
- possibility to create and update XML sitemaps, usable by Google, Yahoo and MSN
- many more...

And it does all this without modifying Joomla's core files!

3. Put up a sitemap ( tinyurl.com/3y9bz6 ): in case you don't want or can't use the OpenSEF component you should create a XML sitemap to help the search engines index your site easier. It is integrated with other built-in components so contacts, newsfeeds and weblinks are supported.

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