Joomla SEO from someone who knows how Joomla builds a page.

Most search problems on a website built with the Joomla content management system come from how Joomla generates addresses, titles and page structure, and Joomla SEO means correcting those before working on the content itself. The principles are the same as any technical SEO. The places the problems hide are specific to Joomla.

Search-friendly URLs and rewriting

Joomla can produce clean addresses, but two settings and a server file have to agree. One setting turns on search-friendly URLs, which replace strings of parameters with words. Another turns on rewriting, which removes index.php from the address and only works when the matching configuration file is active on the web server.

Changing these on a live site alters its addresses, so I map redirects first.

One article, several addresses

Joomla builds an address from the menu item that leads to the content. An article linked from two menus, or shown in a category list as well as on its own menu item, can be reached by more than one route, and the raw parameter address often still works too. Google then has to pick one address, and links pointing at the others are split between them.

I decide the one address each article should have and point the rest to it with redirects and canonical tags. Then I remove the stray routes. Finding them is a matter of indexing and crawling: I crawl the site and note every address that returns the same article.

Titles and meta descriptions

In Joomla the wrong layer often wins. A page title can come from the article or from the menu item, which also has a separate browser title field, with the site name added by a global setting. A meta description can be set per article and per menu item, and when both are empty Joomla falls back to one site-wide description. On a neglected site that leaves many pages sharing one description. I set each deliberately as part of on-page SEO.

Menus are the site structure

A menu item decides the address and the page layout, along with which modules appear around the content. Articles with no menu item of their own get whatever address Joomla can work out for them. So the menus are more than navigation, and planning the menu tree is planning the site architecture.

Extensions, speed and updates

Every extension can add its own stylesheets and scripts to a page, whether the page uses them or not. A site that has collected extensions over the years carries that weight on each load, which shows up in site speed measurements. I list what is installed and what is still used.

Updates are the other half. The Joomla core and each extension update separately, and an extension its developer has abandoned is a common way in for attackers, who tend to fill a site with spam pages.

Migrations to or from Joomla

A Joomla site that is maintained and configured properly doesn’t need replacing to rank. When a move does happen, rankings are safe only when every old address is accounted for. That holds whether the site is moving onto Joomla or off it, and also between major Joomla versions, which can be a far bigger job than a routine update. Before a site migration I export every address that has traffic or links and map each to its new home, then test the redirects before launch.