SEO for Joomla: Best Practices and Tips to Support It

When managing a website, you certainly need a CMS, or Content Management System. With a CMS, you can manage website content easily and efficiently. One of the most widely used CMS is Joomla. Then, do you know how to perform SEO for Joomla?

The following is an explanation of what Joomla is, best practices, plugin recommendations, and supporting tips for maximizing Joomla SEO for your website. Check out the explanation below.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is a Content Management System (CMS) released in 2005. Being open source, Joomla allows you to build websites or applications for free. Even though there are not as many users as WordPress, Joomla is known as a CMS that is easy and simple to use.

The advantages possessed by Joomla include that it makes it easier for you to control and manage user access, supports various foreign languages, and has better flexibility than other CMS. 

However, for those of you who are new to Joomla, don't be surprised if you still need some time to adapt. This is because Joomla is indeed designed with website developers as its main target audience.

Best Practices: SEO for Joomla

For those of you who use Joomla, do you want to optimize your business website with SEO? Here are some best practices for Joomla SEO techniques that you need to know.

1. Configure the SEO Settings

To do SEO for Joomla, the first step you can take is to configure the optimization settings. Setting up SEO in Joomla does take a long time, but you will get very good results.

One of the simple configurations you can do is 'clean up' links. Use URLs that are short, concise, clear, and relevant to your website. This is because URLs that consider user convenience are one of the reasons a website ranks at the top of the SERP.

2. Create a Sitemap

Creating a sitemap is one of the easy ways in Joomla's SEO strategy to increase your website's ranking. Simply put, a sitemap can help search engines find a lot of critical information about your website.

A sitemap can help search engines understand that your content is relevant to the queries that users are looking for. To create a simple sitemap, you can use the sitemap generator tool, then submit the sitemap to the Google Search Console. After that, all you have to do is wait for the search engines to crawl your website.

3. Use the Latest Version of the Extension

Even though it sounds simple, using the latest version of the extension can optimize SEO for Joomla on your website. This is because updated extensions can help create the latest features for your website.

Using the latest version of the extension is able to maintain the performance of your website as expected and produce a positive user experience (UX) for users.

4. Use a Linking Strategy

In fact, using a linking strategy can be one of the three main reasons why a website can rank well on Google. Therefore, a good link installation strategy is needed to maximize SEO for Joomla.

Several types of links that have a big role in gaining traffic for your website include:

• Internal Links: Installing internal links can help search engines recognize every page on your website. Make internal links by linking pages that have related or similar topics.
• Backlinks: Backlinks are links posted by other websites that point to your website. Backlinks can show that your website has an independent promoter and can help increase website traffic more easily.
• Outbound Links: Outbound links are able to strengthen the topic being raised by your content or website. In addition, this type of link can make it easier for Google to understand the context or niche of your website.

5. Local SEO

Implementing local SEO can help search engines recognize where you currently live. For example, when you design an online presence feature in Joomla, this means that you have implemented local SEO.

Use location-based keywords on your website, so that both users and search engines can easily find out where your business currently operates. Don't forget to also register your website with Google My Business, because this can help you get found in local searches, which are reinforced by a map of your location.

Recommended SEO Plugins for Joomla

Confused about which plugin to use for Joomla SEO on your website? Here are some recommendations for the plugins that you can use as references:

• Sh404sef: If you are familiar with Yoast SEO in WordPress, then Sh404sef is a plugin whose function is similar to that of Yoast SEO but can only be used in Joomla.
• RSSEO: The Joomla plugin can help you create a sitemap and monitor keywords more easily.
• SEO-generator: This plugin focuses on metadata configuration. It is very easy and simple to use. 

Tips to Support SEO for Joomla

There are several supporting tips to maximize Joomla SEO for your website. Check out the following explanation:

1. Brainstorm Content Ideas

Think of interesting and relevant content ideas for your website. Browse search engines to find out the search intent of a query. This aims to find out the context of the article or content that contains the query.

Aside from that, you can use Google Trends to find out what are the most recent topics that users are searching for. This is because good, interesting, and user-friendly content can help your website rise to the top of search engine results.

2. Keyword Research

If you want the business on your website to grow, prepare an actual plan to set the SEO strategy. One of the big strategies for growing a business with SEO is to do keyword research. Look for keywords that are most relevant to your website's business niche.

Additionally, don't just use one tool to do keyword research. To find more keyword variants, you can use several tools at once, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Ubersuggest.

You can also convert short-tail keywords to long-tail keywords for more specific contexts, lowering competition in search engines. Apart from that, LSI keywords can also help you get a wider variety of keywords.

3. Measure Website Performance

You must diligently measure website performance to find out how feasible the website is. To make it easier for you, use Google Analytics and Google Search Console as the bundling packages.

Google Analytics is able to show how the website is performing, while Google Search Console focuses on technical issues and organic traffic analysis on the website.

Thus, the discussion on SEO for Joomla ranges from what Joomla is, its best practices, plugin recommendations, and supporting tips for optimizing performance for your website.

Use SEO services to help manage Joomla SEO on your website. SEO services are able to work in detail and thoroughly to support your business.