What is Joomla SEO?
Joomla SEO is the practice for optimizing your Joomla site to boost its conversion and ranking. It's not a small task because search engine bots are getting smarter and if you do not optimize your page, you are sure to drop your traffic.
Joomla SEO is divided into two parts - On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. To do the off-page optimization for your Joomla site, no Joomla SEO plugins or Joomla SEO extensions will help you. It will require an expert SEO guy, but you can manually do the on-page optimization by yourself.
Configure Joomla SEO setting
Before taking you through any advanced techniques or mastermind, let's go through all the little things we can optimize in Joomla for SEO.
It may seem long but it’s very important for your result latter and will take you about 5 - 10 minutes to do all of it, so be sure don’t miss any of those.
1- Enable Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF URL)
If you don’t want your URL to look something like this: https://joomlamax.com/index.php?option=com_view=item&id=124:joomlaseo
It’s hard to read for both humans and search engines, but more importantly, being URL friendly is counted as one of many factors for your site to get a high ranking. Therefore, be sure to enable Search Engine Friendly URLs in the Global setting.
After that, all of your URL will be shortened, and be much more comfortable to read like this:
https://joomlamax.com/joomla-seo/index.php
2 - Remove index.php by using URL Rewriting
To truly achieve what search engine call URL Friendly, you need to remove the index.php at the end of your URL. And the method to get rid of it is simple, just by enabling URL Rewriting in SEO settings.
However, on some websites, especially new ones, you may have to take an extra step further. And that is renaming the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess in your Joomla data folder.
3 - Remove ID in URL
Joomla Default automatically adds a number in your URL as a counting mechanism. Majority of Joomla users and any SEO optimization guideline thinks it's bad for your site. We also think that too. So let’s get rid of it. (if you have it on your site).
From Joomla 3.8, you can easily get it done with less effort.
Step 1: Go to Content/Articles then choose the "Options" button
Step 2: Click the "Integration" tab.
Step 3: Set URL Routing to "Modern".
Step 4: Set Remove IDs from URLs to "Yes".
Check back and see the result.
4 - Enable Gzip Compression in Joomla
Enabling this setting will make your website load faster. It works like a zip application when it asks your server to compress your file before sending them to the receiver. So, smaller files, better load speed.
Here is how you enable the setting.
Go to: System/ Global Configuration then find Server Tab/ Enable Gzip Page compression
