SEO Report – A Look at Joomla

Of all the open source platforms, SEO professionals consider Joomla to be one of the most search engine friendly. Although there are many different reasons why SEO experts might prefer Joomla over other SEO platforms, the main one is this:  Joomla comes with SEF as one of its add on components. SEF stands for Search Engine Friendly, and is what can make optimizing your website a much easier job.

However, when you first install Joomla, this SEF feature is not enabled. If you fail to enable SEF in your Joomla admin, your website’s URLs will be unfriendly and search engine bots may find it difficult to crawl your pages – leading to poor indexing of your website and subsequently a poor ranking in the SERPs. When you have an automatically generated URL that is not search engine friendly, your URLs will not be relevant to your page’s content or your meta tags data. This will work against your website in terms of online performance.When you enable the SEF feature you will be able to generate search engine friendly URLs – a crucial aspect of SEO.

Take note: before you begin to enable SEF feature in Joomla, you must ensure that the required configurations is available from the hosting server. Visit the Joomla administrator console to enable the SEF feature and obtain better control of the your website’s Joomla created URLs. After your SEF URL feature is enabled you will be able to generate URLs that are  relevant to your site’s content instead of consisting of random characters. You will also gain access to a number of controls which will allow you to manage your website’s URL; these include long URLs, URL aliases and unique items, among others. They key advantage is that you will be able to insert your main keywords into your URLs.

The SEF Advance feature is not free; if enabled, you will have to pay a fee. This can be considered a worthwhile investment, and should be budgeted as part of your websites SEO expenses – but don’t jump the gun. Before you pay the fee for the SEF Advance feature, make sure that your hosting has all the required configurations and that your hosting provider supports the feature – otherwise you are wasting your money..

Your SEO service provider will be able to advise you on the SEF feature if you don’t quite understand its usefulness and importance. This is one reason you should hire an experienced team to handle your website’s SEO – in addition to their speed and experience overall, they will have up to date information on all the latest SEO strategies and all the latest tools available in the market. As far as SEO is concerned you should go with an established company that can show examples of websites they have worked on as well as ranking,  traffic and conversion rates for the same. If their own site is buried on page 10 of the SERPs, how can they show you good results with your own site?