Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the best SEO tips for Joomla.
We’ve worked with Joomla for many years and understand the challenges you might face when trying to optimize the articles and pages on your site. We’re happy to share what we’ve learned with you!
In this article, we’ll go over what exactly SEO is, how you can ensure all your pages have great SEO, how to create quality content, and more. So, let’s just jump in!
The following tips will provide concrete examples of how you can integrate the three important SEO ranking factors into your Joomla pages and blog posts.
Tip 1: Improve website load times
Have you ever clicked on a website suggested by Google, only for you to see the little loading icon spin over and over again? If you are like most people, you probably backed out of the site and tried a new link.
If you’ve done this, you are not alone. According to Hosting Tribunal, a single, 1-second page loading delay can reduce page views by 11%. If you move up to a 1-10 second page loading display, the bounce rate (chance that someone will hit the ‘back’ button), goes up to 123%!
With so many options out there, people are not willing to wait for something they could have faster. That’s why one of the best SEO tips for Joomla is to optimize your website’s load time.
There are a few easy ways you can do this, including:
Optimize your images:
Ensure that all the pictures on your website are optimized for the web. You can compress them without losing quality using free tools such as TinyPng.
Step 1: Go to TinyPng.com and upload your files
Type in www.tinypng.com into your web address. You will see the below page. Drag and drop your images into the large square in the centre of the page. Or, you can click on the square and you will be taken to your files, where you can select and upload up to 20 images.
Step 2: Wait for the upload to complete
Once you have selected your file(s), they will automatically begin to upload and the compression process will begin. Depending on the size of your file(s) and how many files you choose to upload at at time, this may take a few minutes. Once you see the “Finished” bar, it means your images are ready to download.
Step 3: Download your file(s)
Once your files are fully uploaded and compressed, you can download them back onto your computer. You can choose to download each file individually by clicking the “download” text beside each image. Or, you can download all the files at once, by clicking the green “Download All” button below. You can even save your images to Dropbox by clicking the blue “Save To Dropbox” button.
Bonus tip:
You can also make sure that the images you add to your website are the right size. For example, if you are trying to fill a 650×650 space, there’s no need for your image to be 1000×1000.
Take a website speed optimization test:
Once you’ve optimized your images and site for mobile use, you can take an optimization test to see if your efforts have paid off! If not, you may need to tweak your images a bit more.
Step 1: Go to developers.google.com and insert your URL into the search bar
Once you get to the PageSpeed Insights website, you will see the search bar below.
Input your website’s URL into the search bar.
Step 2: Click the “ANALYZE” button
After your URL is put into the search bar, click the “ANALYZE” button.
Step 3: Wait for analyzing to complete
After you submit your URL, you will have to wait for Google to fully analyze your website.
Once again, this might take some time. You can watch the loading bar to see the progress.
Get your results
Once analyzing is complete, you will see results like the ones below. The results will tell you if your page speed is slow, medium, or fast compared to other pages. If you notice that your pages are in the red, you can do things such as improve your image size (as we outlined above) and optimize content on page to help bring your website out of the red zone.
We don’t always consider website load times and speed when we think about SEO, but excellent load times can keep customers satisfied – and reduce the chances that they’ll leave!
Test your website for mobile responsiveness:
Your site may load quickly on desktop, but you must ensure that you get the same results when you load it on a mobile device. More and more consumers are using their phones to shop – recent statistics show that over half of shoppers use their mobile device to access the web! See how to test on mobile using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test below.
Step 1: Go to search.google.com and insert your URL
When you arrive at Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, you will see the following page. Insert your website’s URL in the search bar.
Step 2: Test your URL
Next, you will hit the orange “TEST URL” button. Google will begin to analyze your website.
Step 3: Wait for analyzing to complete
Next, you will have to sit back and be patient as the tool analyzes your website. It might take some time, but typically will not take longer than 1-2 minutes.
Get your results
After the test is completed, you will be taken to the “test results” page. From here, you will see your overall rating as well as additional resources. If your page is not mobilefriendly, you will have to go back and see how you can optimize it to better suit a mobile device.
Step 2: Know where to include meta sescriptions & other SEO elements
In order to best optimize your Joomla website for Google and other search engines, you’ll need to know where to put SEO information, such as:
- The meta description
- The keywords you want to include in your article
- The URL (best to keep it short!)
- Your article title
Below, you can see a screenshot that shows where to put in all of this SEO information.
Not sure how to get this screen to pop up for you? Within the Joomla editor, you will see four tab options just below “Title” – Content, Images and Links, Options, and Publishing.
You’ll want to click on the “Publishing” tab. From there, these options will pop up. You can also add additional information in this section that might be helpful for your team to know, such as publishing dates, ID information, Author and Created By information, and more.
This information won’t help with SEO, but if you need to include it, you’ll find it here.
Step 3: Where to include on-page SEO information
No matter what platform you are using to build your website, on-page SEO will look the same. However, where and how you include that information will vary depending on the editor you use!
When writing on Joomla, you’ll need to know how to include links, headings and subheadings, and where to put your text.
Take a look at the video below to see how you can include this information.
In our example above, our keyword is “SEO tips for Joomla.” You can see that this keyword is included in the URL, in the title, and in the article copy.
You can also see how you can change your text format, include links in your article, and what the text editor looks like.
Step 4: Be careful with “WWW”
Other web building platforms, such as WordPress, will automatically redirect viewers to your website if they, for example, leave out the “www” in your website URL. However, this is not the case for Joomla.
You will have to manually choose whether or not you want to include the “WWW” in front of your website – or not.
From Joomla: “It doesn’t necessarily matter which one you choose, but make sure you select one and make the other inaccessible. This eliminates any unnecessary confusion and prevents Google from thinking you have duplicate content.”
Once you choose a www or non-www URL, you will have to manually set up redirect to ensure that users who type in your web address will make it to your website.
For example, let’s say you choose a www address – www.yourwebsite.com. If someone types in yourwebsite.com, a manual redirect will ensure that those viewers will get to your website – and won’t end up with a 404 error.
Click here to find out how to set up redirects.
Watch the video below to see how to set up your redirect to make a www. direct to a non www. URL.
Step 5: Create quality content
Last but certainly not least, the best way to improve your search engine ranking is to create the highest quality content available on the internet! Google (and other search engines) care about their users. They want to ensure their users have the best experience possible.
That’s why they will do their best to ensure the highest quality content appears first when someone makes a search query.
Now, it might be hard to recognize what exactly makes high or low quality content. Let’s take a look at two real examples from the Profitworks website.
This older article from Profitwork talks about YouTube advertisements, and is a pretty good example of what not to do. Check out the screenshot below. Well, that’s all the content that was included on the page.
The simple list you see – well, that’s it. There is some good information there, but unfortunately, the article doesn’t give the reader a thorough explanation of anything included on the page.
There are also no images or videos included on the page. Aside from two bullet lists of text, there is nothing else on the page.
Considering the title of this article, it’s safe to assume most readers would think they would get to see a few videos right on the page. But that is not the case. A quality article will answer the readers’ questions before they ask it. This article does not live up to that standard.
Now, let’s take a look at a high quality article.
In this article titled “How Nike Became Successful and the Leader in the Sports Product Market”, you can see just how much time and effort goes into a high quality content article.
This article may have taken significantly longer to write than the YouTube article, but the payoff was well worth it.
This Nike article regularly gets hits, while the YouTube article is no longer relevant and, even if it was, I’m sure there are many other articles with similar or more content about the same topic!
The higher quality content article contains lots of pictures, video examples, relevant links (both internal and external links), graphs, infographics, and tons of thorough information about the topic.
When you create an article that is beneficial for your readers – one that contains all the information they want in one place – Google will recognize that, and you will eventually start to see the results of your SEO efforts.
Remember, good SEO on Joomla and any other website building platform does take time and effort. You can’t cheat the system. Google knows all the tricks, and can even penalize websites for using “black hat SEO” – that is, unethical SEO practices.
Using the tips above and understanding that improving your ranking on your Joomla site (or any other site) takes time are both key to better SEO!
Get started with your Joomla site now!
Good SEO takes time, patience, and practice. There’s no better time to start improving your website’s SEO than right now!
By strategically choosing keywords and placing them on your site, improving content quality, and understanding the Joomla platform better than before, you will be well on your way to improving your website’s SEO.
Lauren is a writer, editor and SEO specialist at Profitworks. Profitworks is a company that provides marketing services with a specialization in SEO. Profitworks has been using Joomla and Acymail since June 2010.
Follow Profitworks on Youtube and listen to their marketing Podcast, The Sales & Marketing Podcast on any podcast platform where great podcasts are found.
