Since new generation Joomla! has been released, we have immidiately published the SEO edition of this version. Let us describe some optimization instruments of site based on Joomla! 1.5. The first thing we are interested in, as usual - is the ability to specify our own HTML Titles for site pages. Joomla! developers dramaticcally simplified our life and introduced two innovations in this version that previously we had to implement on our own by making changes to the files.

 

As soon as the next generation of Joomla! appeared, I published its new SEO release on this website. Below I describe new website optimization instruments for Joomla! 1.5. First, what is always most interesting – the possibility to assign custom headings to HTML Title pages. Joomla! developers have simplified our life by introducing two novelties that freed us from the work we had to do before, changing data in files.

The possibility to assign menu links a custom heading: while creating menu link, you can assign it the page heading that its link creates (in earlier Joomla! releases, this was very challenging). Now Joomla! has its own improved built-in SEF that uses Friendly URL. In the Joomla! release that you can download from this website, this option has even wider possibilities.

So for a good start, go to the Global Configuration in the website administration panel. Then switch to the SEO extension panel that is set by default in this release.

The Figure shows that you can change system configurations that concern page headings or meta- tag creations. Originally you will see default settings that are optimal enough for further work. However, you can change them according to what you want. 

In the first field of the form, you can assign a rule to create HTML Title for pages where you have to type in titles yourself and for pages which have default titles. So if you enter [TITLE] –[SITENAME] in the first field, the site title that you have put in will be there, then the website title (its rule is in the field below), and at last a page title or link, typed by you. If there is nothing, just the page title is displayed.  

In the second field, you can type in [SITENAME], the site name that is set in the system by default, or anything you want, for instance, “SEO site of Joomla! optimization”.

As a result, you will get something like: “SEO optimized page title -  SEO site of Joomla! optimization”. This is what you will see in the top box of the Browser and Internet users will see the same thing after they input an optimal for this website keyword in a search engine.

Below – rule fields for all pages that are used for META -tags by default. You will see these fields while creating and editing website pages. This was not in last SEO Joomla! releases. I am sure that users will appreciate this change because now they can assign custom META-tags with cache and archive management rules for Google robots and the DMOZ World  Catalog.   The rules are:

• Forbade  Google page caching
• nosnippet => disallow a summary display
• noodp => disallow a summary from dmoz.org
• noarchive, nosnippet
• noarchive, noodp
• nosnippet, noodp
• noarchive, nosnippet, noodp

The next novelty, which is available in Joomla! 1.5 SEO, is additional fields for operating with website menu links.

1. HTML Page Title where this link goes. Now your page, which is a forum component, for instance, would not have such a simple-minded title like “Forum”, but more exact information that is important to search engines along with everybody else who looks for your forum. For example: “SEO Forum: Search Optimization  and File Promotion on CMS Joomla!”.

2. Alias – This is how the link will look like if you active SEF in the admin using the mod_rewrite transformation module. For example, you can do that the link to the forum would be: http://www.seo-joomla.net/seo-forum/. I do not recommend using transliteration of Russian letters and making the link something like:  raskrutka-reklama-sayta.html. It will be more useful if you include English translations of these words. So the link would be: seo-site-promotion.html.

I have a hypothesis and believe it is true:

SEO website is more adapt for a search engine algorithm if there are words and their translations, but not words and their pronunciations written in a different alphabet.

3. Link HTML Title – the third field -  this original SEO Joomla! field allows you to put in a link and its description in HTML code. This is important for the website and you will be able to see it if you put the cursor on the link. This is convenient and increases the amount of keywords in the text along with page internal relevance to a needed keyword.

The last thing I would like to say is that in SEO Joomla! you can input custom HTML Title of any site article that will be shown on the page according to the parametars that you set in the Global Configurations. Do not forget to type in under the page name its alias – that is how the  Friendly URL will look like.

In addition to these instruments, the release has some components that are important for SEO website, for instance, the site map component.

As a conclusion, do not forget to use all the standard ways to optimize any HTML text. So visitors and search engines would find on your website what you want to show them. For this use 1-4 level page headings, “alt=” in pictures’ tags , input Title meaning for page links, select important text parts, and etc. that are described in many websites devoted to page SEO and the Internet site promotion.