OSTips – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Joomla

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Joomla

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Joomla has always been a bit of a crapshoot.

Well not anymore!  As I just said, it’s sometimes really hard to get your seo perfected in your Joomla website.

In this video, I’m going to introduce you to a component called Route 66 that works just like the amazing Yoast plug-in in WordPress.

It really is unbelievable, so let’s go!


“Welcome to OSTips from OSTraining. I’m Rod Martin.

We are talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Joomla and this is Route 66 for Joomla. It’s a free download, but if you’re using K2, Virtuemart, or Hikky Shop, you’ll need to subscribe for 19.99 Euros a year. For the purpose of this video, I’m not worried about the pro version. Let’s take a look at the free version and again, it’s a free download. You don’t even have to have a login!

Taking a quick peek at some of the component hightlights:

  1. Flexible SEF urls
  2. SEO content analysis powered by Yoast (of course if you’re familiar with WordPress you know that is fantastic)
  3. Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed scores
  4. Facebook instant articles
  5. XML sitemaps

…and the list goes on and on.

One of the things I really love about this extension is the score you get in your feedback as you work hard to make your article more SEO friendly. Let’s take a look.

Here’s an article I wrote last year called The 1-minute Workbench Build. I’ve been getting into some woodworking lately, and it’s been a lot of fun, so I found this ultimate DIY workbench on YouTube and bought the plans for $25.  I built my own version, and here I posted some pictures. The author of the video series wanted me to post my own pictures to give him an idea of some of the modifications I made.  One of the big modifications I made as that my miter saw was just too big, so I cut a hole, and it worked anyway.

The thing I want to point out here is how much Route 66 helped me optimize for search engines, so I’m going to head back into that article.

You’ll note here, I have an SEO score of 0. Now this is Route 66 that we are looking at.  I deleted some things on purpose, so we could work our way through this article. It isn’t very text heavy, has a lot of images, and a video that I attached, so I want to make sure the search engines will find it.

  • click on SEO
  • add a focus keyword  (I’m going to use: workbench)

One of the things that it likes is if the keyword is

  1. In your title
  2. In the very first section of your text

So I get a 73 right out of the gate, but I can do more.  You’ll note down here, it gives me some really great help: Meta Description lengths. Well I don’t have any Meta Description.

  • click on publishing tab
  • add those keywords in the meta data boxes

You’ll note my score automatically updates to reflect the new text that I put in, and now I have a 79.

So some other suggestions:

  1. I have no internal links ( I’m not going to probably add any for this)
  2. A key phrase in the introduction
  3. Your key phrase or synonyms do not appear in the first paragraph (so a little bit of work here.)
  • go back to content

…This is just for my sanity department.  I’ve been getting into woodworking as a hobby and a fun thing to do, so needless to say I’m having fun.

I can update this a little bit just to make it a little bit more friendly.

…creating this workbench is outside the realm of my normal work life, so needless to say, I’m having fun.

  • click Save

Now my score is 83! This is getting good.

  1. Meta description length is too short (okay so I need a little bit more maybe SEO title with that)
  2. SEO title is too short (so they’re suggesting here that I might have a little bit more in the title)
  3. Image alt attributes – images on this page don’t have alt attributes with the keywords

Well that’s easy to fix as well. Let’s take a quick peek.

  • click on an image
  • type in text containing key words for the alt text
  • click Save

Now my SEO score jumped to 86! This is really, really good.

  1. The exact match of the key phrase appears in the title but not at the beginning (they suggest moving the key phrase to the beginning to get an even higher score)

Well I’m not going to worry too much about that. Once again you can play with this as much as you want.

  1. Does this take extra time? Absolutely.
  2. Is this gonna make your articles be better found on the internet? Absolutely.

Alright, so Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Joomla is easily accomplished with this free extension that shows you in real time, with a real grade, just how good your search engine optimization is going to be on any given article in your Joomla website.

I can’t recommend it enough.

Well thanks for watching. This has been OStips from OS Training.”

Author

  • Rod Martin

    Rod holds two masters degrees and has been training people how to do "things" for over 25 years. Originally from Australia, he grew up in Canada and now resides just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. He has worked in both the non-profit and for-profit worlds, in small companies and large corporations. His extensive open source experience includes WordPress, Joomla and Drupal and he really knows how to help you get the most out of the system you chose. Rod plays ice hockey a couple of times a week and rides his Goldwing motorcycle pretty much everywhere he can.

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