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7 Essential steps for Joomla 3 SEO Follow our tutorial on http://www.dart-creations.com/joomla/joomla-tutorials
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Step 1: Enable SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs for keyword rich page addresses
We recommend you use sh404SEF, besides SEF URLs it has a lot of SEO optimizations for your website.
You can also use native Joomla SEF
Download and install sh404SEF
sh404SEF runs in two modes, with htaccess suppost and without htaccess support.
Enabling SEF without htaccess is very simple.
Simple click on Enable URL optimization
The process to enable sh404SEF requires that you have enabled .htaccess on your Joomla website
Access your website with an ftp explorer and then rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess
You don't have to do any other changes to the .htaccess file
Change the sh404SEF settings to "With .htaccess"
Step 2: Make sure you have good XML sitemap
Download XMAP and install it like a regular Joomla extension.
Enable the necessary plugins to ensure all URLs are generated from the various inbuilt and 3rd party components.
Create a new sitemap and enable which menus you want to be part of the sitemap
Check the generated sitemap
Step 3: Submit the sitemap to Google Webmasters central and Bing Webmasters
Make sure you've added and verfied the site (not described in this video)
Add the address of sitemap you have just generated
Step 4 / 5: Improve your titles and meta descriptions.
sh404SEF handles the titles by default but you can choose to customize them. The meta descriptions should be customi for each page
Visit sh404SEF "Titles and meta manager"
Go to each page and define the appropriate title and meta for each page
Descriptions should be a user friendly description of that page, so that if a person is about to visit page, they know the contents.
The title and descriptions changes upon saving
There are typically a lot of images in your website.
If you name them correctly, the can help and complement your content
By default Joomla does not allow Google to find these images.
Step 6: Optimize robots.txt to allow images to be found by Google
Remove the disallow tag on the images folder
Step 7: Use good ALT descriptions for your images which identify what the image is.