Joomla has built-in search engine optimization (SEO) functionality. The SEO Settings section of the Site tab handles global SEO settings for your Joomla site.
SEF URLs change the way site links are presented and optimize them so that search engines can access more of your web site. The SEF URLs option is available only to sites hosted on Apache servers. Select Yes to enable Joomla to create SEF URLs instead of normal database-generated URLs.
When the SEF URLs option is set to No, the URL of an item selected on a web site is usually difficult to remember. For example, if you click the Virtue Mark link on the web site, the URL will appear as shown in Figure 10-16.
You can see that the URL contains symbols and numbers. After you enable SEF URLs, the symbols and numbers will disappear, and the URL will appear as shown in Figure 10-17.
Note The alias text auto generated by Joomla (or specified by you) is set as the SEF
When the SEF URLs option is set to Yes, the URL that appears in your browser is friendly and easy to remember by the search engines.
When the Add Suffix to URL option is set to Yes, Joomla will add .html to the end of the URLs. The default setting is No. For example, after this option is enabled, the URL for Virtue Mart will appear as shown in Figure 10-18.
To support SEO, use general SEO best practices with your Joomla site. A few of them are listed here:
- Create the Title tag because it shows up in the search engines as headlines for your pages.
- Use limited and required keywords in your pages.
- Use the Meta tags for a Joomla web site because some search engines still use them while searching sites.
- Get lots of internal and external links from relevant sites.
- Create a sitemap of your site, which is an .xml file that contains links to every page on your Then submit your site and your sitemap to Google. Google will crawl the sitemap, so it can read and search your web site’s content more quickly.
Besides these best practices, you can also use Joomla SEO plug-in extensions to optimize your content for search engines. There are several popular plug-ins that support SEO in Joomla: SEO Glossary, SEO Generator, Easy Frontend SEO (EFSEO), SEF Translate, and so on.
Source: Harwani B M (2015), Foundations of Joomla!, Apress; 2nd ed edition