We eat, sleep and breathe Joomla!

You may have noticed that Joomlashack is now running on Joomla 1.5. We did a stealth migration yesterday.

We had one problem we needed to address, and it took a while to figure out, so we thought we would share the solution for others.

Our old site used Joomla 1.0, as I have mentioned before, we wanted to make sure we did a 301 redirect of the Joomla URL's so Google would quickly pick up the new ones and pass the pangerank to the new pages. The problem however was that our 1.0 site used the raw URL:

http://www.joomlashack.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37

We rapidly discovered that mod-write unfortunately will basically ignore all the php parameters here. You can't get rewrite to pay any attention to them.

After some research, some help and lots of trial and error we found that we could make a redirect like this:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\?option=com_content&task=view&id=37(.*)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.joomlashack.com/get-free-joomla-templates? [R=301,L]

Its ulgy, but it works!

We also found that the redirects need to be placed in the htaccess file before the main Joomla code (exploits and core sef).

Now we just have to figure out another Pagerank dilution problem.

• www.joomlashack.com/index.php has a page rank of 6
• www.joomlashack.com has a page rank of 9
  

We'll need to redirect just the index.php without breaking the rest of the core SEF function in Joomla.

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Joomla sh404SEf Component

The sh404SEF Plugin makes Joomla SEO easy. I’ll be posting some simple Joomla seo tips to make Joomla sites work better in Google.

First up – download and install the Joomla sh404SEF Plugin or rather Component.

You can read what others say about this plugin on the Joomla forum, and the instructions to get working are printed below.

sh404SEF Install Documenttation & Instructions

IMPORTANT : if you plan to use mod_rewrite (.htaccess) rewriting :

1. BEFORE making any attempt to activate this component and use its URL rewriting functions, your Joomla installation should already be compatible with URL rewriting. This is not required if you select no .htaccess rewrite mode in sh404SEF advanced parameters (but this mode may not always work as well, depending on your server settings).
   
2. Remember : if you are having difficulties with this, it is unlikely to be a joomla problem, but most likely something related to your server setup. For instance, many times, you will be faced with 404 errors or Internal server errors 500 display. This indicates that there is something in your .htacces file that is not compatible with your apache server setup.
   
3. If you face this kind of errors, I will suggest you contact your hosting company for assistance.

1. Joomla standard .htaccess is very FINE. It will work with most hosting companies. You should use it unmodified, at least to start with. Just remember it comes named as htaccess.txt, so you need to rename it to .htaccess before anything.
2. Joomla standard .htaccess comes configured for Joomla standard SEF system (which makes sense!). To use it with sh404SEF (or OpenSEF, Artio JoomSEF, SEF Advance), you must open it up in an editor, and make the few changes explained in it:
3. If you scroll down towards the end of the file, you’ll see two sections, one marked Begin – Joomla! core SEF Section, and just next to it another marked : ########## Begin – 3rd Party SEF Section
4. Now the tricky part : you should type # at the beginning of each line of the first section, and remove those # in front of those in the second section, so that the whole things looks like :

########## Begin – Joomla! core SEF Section
############# Use this section if using ONLY Joomla! core SEF
## ALL (RewriteCond) lines in this section are only required if you actually
## have directories named ‘content’ or ‘component’ on your server
## If you do not have directories with these names, comment them out.
#
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional – see notes##
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(content/|component/) index.php
#
########## End – Joomla! core SEF Section
########## Begin – 3rd Party SEF Section
############# Use this section if you are using a 3rd party (Non Joomla! core) SEF extension – e.g. OpenSEF, 404_SEF, 404SEFx, SEF Advance, etc
#
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional – see notes##
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php
#
########## End – 3rd Party SEF Section

Notes : this is from the .htaccess that comes with Joomla 1.0.12. If you are using a more recent version of Joomla, in the 1.0.x series, use the latest version of the file instead of this one.

* If you get 404 errors or Internal error 500, or similar, when clicking on a rewritten URL, then you should try adding another # at the beginning of this line (near the top of the file): Options FollowSymLinksso that it looks like:#Options FollowSymLinks

* If that does not work, and if your Joomla site is in a sub-directory, you should look for the line that looks like:

#RewriteBase /

and replace it with : RewriteBase /sub_directory_of_your_joomla_install

* On some servers, even if your site is not in a sub-directory, you may want to try replacing

#RewriteBase /

by

RewriteBase /

* Try changing only one thing at a time, and check the result before moving to next step<br>

sh404SEF Configuration :

• sh404SEF configuration is generally easy. For more information on each item hover your mouse over the blue (i) images when you are in the configuration screen. When you save the configuration it will remove all your URL’s from the database.
• If you have a high traffic site it may be wise to put it offline before saving sh404SEF config or purging the database. After doing that, you should use an online tool to build automatically a sitemap or check for broken links. Those spiders will go through all of your site, and therefore all of your links, so they will be all automatically placed in the cache, thus speeding access for your next visitors.
• The caching system of sh404SEF is transparent,and will be rebuild automatically whenever required. Using the cache will vastly speed up the page load time, by dramatically reducing the number of database queries. Beware that URL caching uses up a lot of memory though. Its size can be limited using the appropriate parameter, and it can also be turned off completely.
• If you have a multi-lingual site, you can turn on or off URL translation. Normally, URL elements will be translated into the user language. However, it sometimes better not to translate, such as when using non-latin characters based languages. On such occasions, default site language will always be used
  You may want to purge the 404 log before creating fresh urls.<br>

• Go into Joomla Admin, then sh404SEF Control Panel and
• click ‘ View/Edit SEF Urls’.
• Select the URL you wish to modify.
• If you click the check box labeled ‘Save as Custom Redirect’ it will place this URL into the ‘Custom Redirect’ area which you can navigate to from the sh404SEF Control Panel.
• When you click ‘View/Edit Custom Redirects’ you will see your URL in here now instead. These urls will not be removed when you save the config. You can modify these and save them as you wish.
• This is particularly useful if you are updating from an old site because any URL’s that are no longer availble will be logged.
• You can view these URL’s by clicking ‘View/Edit 404 Logs’ in the sh404SEF Control Panel.
• You can redirect visitors to the new page by selecting the URL you wish to modify and entering the new url.

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The idea is to automate the process of Tag Cloud generation as soon as user writes a post or content on a page. It can be divided into two steps:

1. Generate Tag Clouds from the content.

Ideally, we would like PHP code to extract relevant tags (keywords) from the content. We do not want common words like “is”, “this”, “the” to be keywords. We can set up our own set of rules depending on the requirement.

Sample PHP code:

function generateTagCloud($content){
    $minTagLength=5;
    $maxTagLength=14;
    $baseFont=16;
    $returnArray=array(); 

    $content=str_replace("\r\n"," ",$content);
    $content=strip_tags($content);
    $tagArray=explode(" ",$content);
    for($i=0;$i=$minTagLength && $len< =$maxTagLength) {
            $returnArray[]=$tag;
        }
    }
    $returnArray=array_count_values($returnArray);
    arsort($returnArray);
    ksort($returnArray);
    return $returnArray;
}

1. Display Tags according to their occurrence.

After we have all the tags (keywords) we need to display then according their occurrence or presence in the content. In other words, the tag which is present more times in the content will be displayed in bigger fonts as the rest.

Sample PHP code to achieve this is as follows:

function displayTagCloud($tagCloudArray){
    $buffer="";
    foreach($tagCloudArray as $tags=>$key) {
        $font=($baseFont+($key*10));
        $font=$font."px";
        $buffer.="  $tags  ";
}$buffer.="";
        return $buffer;
 }

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1) Change the robots.txt to permit search engines to read the images folder

When you install Joomla, by default it will setup a robots.txt file. The Robots.txt file sits in the root directory of the server and instructs search engine robots which files and folders they have permission to access. The standard robots.txt file that Joomla comes with correctly instructs robots that they cannot access or index folders like the administrator or temporary folders, however it also instructs them they cannot index any content in the images folder.

Because the images folder is the default location for all images in Joomla, the result of the inclusion is that the majority of sites built in Joomla don’t have any of their images indexed!

To solve this issue, simply edit the robots.txt file and remove the following line:

Disallow: /images/

2) Change the default location for images

If you have added images to the articles you write within Joomla, you probably have noticed that the default location for images is www.website.com/images/stories/. Personally I don’t like this, and it is not best practice in terms of image optimisation.

When evaluating the relevance of content on a website, search engine algorithms examine the directory and file names of the content on a site and ascribe priority to pages that are closer to the site root. In other words, when possible, try and keep content closer to the site root.

I recommend changing the default location of images from images/stories to just images/. You can do this in the Joomla Administrator backend by selecting: Site > Global Configuration > System > Media Settings and then changing the directory in the “Path to Image Folder” box.

Once you have made the change, when you add images to articles, the images will be automatically uploaded into the root images/ folder.

3) Use images on relevant page and use keyword rich file names, alt tags and title tags

Once you have changed robots.txt and the default location for images, you can now start optimising the individual images on your site to ensure they are included in the search engine index.

To optimise the image for a certain keyword or key phrase, you should ensure:

• The image is included on a page which is relevant to the image (e.g. a photo of someone playing Golf in Mauritius on a page about Golf in Mauritius)
  
• The filename of the image is the keyword or key phrase you are targeting and words are separated with a hyphen, for example: golf-in-mauritius.jpg
  
• The alt and title tag of the image should also contain the keyword or key phrase, for example, “Golf in Mauritius”
  
• The location of the image file names should be keyword rich to improve the overall keyword relevancy. This can be accomplished by inserting keywords in the URL when Appropriate e.g. travelbison.com/images/mauritius/golf-in-mauritius.jpg

This is what an optimised image tag would look like:

<img src="http://travelbison.com/images/mauritius/golf-in-mauritius.jpg"
height="200" width="500" alt="Golf in Mauritius" 
title="Playing Golf in Mauritius" />

It does not matter if the Alt and Title tags are not exactly the same but closely related keywords should be used. It is best practice to use hyphens in the filename to separate words.

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It is clear by now that the most critical thing about the success of a website is the amount of traffic that major search engines send to your website. Hence, it is very important to take all the necessary steps to make sure that your Joomla website has been optimized fully for search engines.

There are a lot of things you can do in order to optimize your Joomla website. There are options such as using a sitemap in order to make sure that all your content has been successfully crawled by search engines.

Here are some of the tips on Joomla SEO to help you optimize your Joomla website for attracting more visitors.

• You can reduce the number of articles that appear on your front page.
• Enable caching feature for your Joomla.
• It is important to disable or remove all the components, plug ins or modules you are not using at present.
• Work towards installing an additional database optimization component.
• Minimize the number of internal and external links on your pages. Just leave the ones that are most important.
• Enable debugging from the admin area of Joomla, go to global configuration and analyze the number of queries executed. The higher the number, the slower your applications will run. Remember that if the number of queries is more than 50, you must disable the extension that makes the most of the queries.

You can easily optimize your Joomla site via following all the points mentioned above.

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So you’re creating your Joomla site. You're working hard to make it look good, adding in your keywords and all the right content. Now what about your visitors? To drive the most traffic possible to your site there is some advice you just cannot ignore. Read on below to find 6 quick Joomla SEO tips that will help maximize your traffic potential.

Step 1: Turn on Search Friendly URLs

This is one of the most effective Joomla search engine optimization tips. To enable Search Friendly URLs you first must run Apache server. Then, mod_rewrite must be enabled. Your server will also need to allow .htaccess override.

Step 2: Install sh404SEF Component

To install, you will need to download the sh404SEF plug-in from siliana.com. After downloading, you can go through the straightforward configuration to finish installing.

Step 3: Easy & Clean Joomla Titles and URLs

Joomla automatically enters the entire title of your page in your URL, which can make it unnecessarily long and messy for Google results. One way to fix this is to take out stop words. You can do this using the “Title Alias” option when creating your webpage.

Step 4: Insert H1 Tags

First you will need to install the sh404SEF component, which should be no problem if you followed the earlier step. After installation, go to components > sh404SEF > sh404SEF configuration > Meta/SEO > Insert H1 Tags and select Yes. Your H1 tag should be different from your Joomla page title. It should accurately represent what is on the page.

Step 5: Create a Unique Home Page Title

Your Home page tag is quite frankly the most important element of your Joomla site's titles, and as such it should include your most important keywords.

Step 6: Prevent Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can prove problematic down the road in Google and other search engines. So the best advice is to prevent it!

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