All Joomla site owners need to understand the very importance of website optimization. The primary goal of any optimization strategy is to drive more traffic to a website by becoming more visible on a search engine. That job is as easy for Joomla users as it is for WordPress, Drupal or Magento users.
Here are the top 5 tips from experts that will help you keep your website updated with the latest search trends:
1. Keeps things light and fast
Sometimes, page loading will take more than 5 or 6 seconds. It usually happens when a site is using large images, large video files or not Gzip-ing their content. Now, there are hundreds of ways you can speed up your website and enabling Joomla cache is undoubtedly one of them. Joomla uses dynamic website structures, where the CMS pulls all the content from a database. These contents include the necessary and defining features of your website that the end user can see. So, when a person visits your site for the first time, this fetching and loading process will take some time. However, when the user visits repetitively, they can skip it later upon Joomla Cache activation. Just like there are plugins to reduce server response time WordPress, there are pluginsthat can help Joomla sites perform faster by offering combined Gzip compression and cache systems.
2. Take help from your Joomla plugins directory
The best thing about Joomla is the extensive help it offers to the users. Even in case of SEO, you will get plenty of support from the Joomla front. They will tell you how to optimize your site, and you will find plenty of literature about the best appropriate tools for the job. Finding the best free tools to finish the task is one of the easiest things you may have done to date. SEO on Joomla sites has become pleasant and worthwhile thanks to the hundreds of developers, who contribute to the forums, discussions, and blogs on Joomla website maintenance.
3. Take care of your 404s
If there’s something that can kill all your Joomla SEO efforts, it is the presence of 404 errors on your site. The presence of stark 404 error notification pages can cause your site to become an eyesore. In fact, Google bots have a distaste for all sites bearing 404 error messages. In place of the stark conventional 404, you can create a pleasing and fun page that can also help the users find what they are looking for. Several Joomla templates have in-built 404 pages, but always check them before you use them. They should add to the value of your site as well.
4. Pay attention to content
No matter what CMS and website builder you are using, the content quality needs to be superior to help your site rank high. There are several guides on content creation that you can follow. You can also invest in a great content team who can generate good quality content on a regular basis and push out 2-3 posts on a busy day for keeping your website busy. Content on your site and your blog should be value adding. You cannot use content for the sake of framing keywords anymore. Long form content with sufficient keyword density is the perfect way to go about gaining the attention of the search engine bots.
5. Make your URLs search-friendly
Your website URLs need to make sense to the bots as well as human users. Search friendly URLs are easy, once you turn on URL rewriting for your site. Web pages on Joomla usually receive random codes as a part of their URLs during the installation process. Research shows that URLs that are “humanized” rank much higher during the search operations as compared to the random URLs Joomla generates initially. The concept is simple; Google’s search engine spiders need to understand what your webpage or blog URLs represent.
SEO is no longer an option. It is a compulsion irrespective of the CMS you are using. Earlier, search engine optimization on Joomla was a true challenge due to the lack of enough documentation and practical experience. Right now, there are over 35 million downloads. As per the Joomla website, there is one download per 2.5 seconds and counting! This has changed the way developers, and users look at the CMS. Interestingly, most web developers and designers hail Joomla as one of the best CMS available thanks to its flexibility and extensions, although WordPress is the market leader with almost 30% of the market share.
