SEO on a Joomla! Site in VB.NET

Maker USS Code 39 in VB.NET SEO on a Joomla! Site

The developers of Joomla recognize the importance of search engine placement for traffic. To assure that Joomla sites have a good chance of being well crawled, they have included a number of features that help increase site visibility and web presence. Various parameters are used to maximize opportunities for web recognition for everything on the site from individual items of content to sitewide configuration.

CHAPTER 12 s SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND JOOMLA!

Since Joomla dynamically creates the web pages sent to a requestor, it has the advantage that changes made to the configuration are immediately effective on a sitewide basis. However, the dynamic nature of a Joomla site also creates a set of disadvantages, since web masters don t have control over the organization and configuration in the way that they do with static web sites. To remedy this problem, Joomla contains parameter settings for all of the major features that affect web spidering. Among the most important of these features is the Search Engine Friendly URLs setting.

By default, the page access URLs used by Joomla are not very friendly to a search engine spider. If you ve ever looked closely at a URL on a Joomla site with default installation, you may notice that it reads something like this:

That URL may not seem very descriptive to you and it doesn t seem very descriptive to a spider either. The web address contains parameters that tell the Joomla engine the exact content to retrieve and render. At the time a page is requested, Joomla uses the current template and the requested database content to generate a formatted web page to return to the requestor. While the URL is perfectly understandable to Joomla, a web spider has a hard time with it. A more straightforward address such as the following is much clearer about the type of content it points toward:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/

This URL for the CNN web site is formatted like that of a static web site. In contrast to a dynamic site (like Joomla), which renders content on the fly, a static web site stores web page files in various directories (which can be named descriptively) and retrieves them when the proper URL directory path is used. While search engines can catalog content with a path like the default Joomla URLs, pages with static folder addresses and descriptive links will nearly always outrank the dynamically generated ones. How can this problem be resolved Fortunately, the Joomla developers have included two options that allow Joomla to simulate the more descriptive URLs. The options render the URL addresses of the site using a search engine friendly (SEF) folder-like structure. The native Joomla URLs still won t be as descriptive as ones created by hand (such as the CNN directory path just shown), but they will be good enough that search engines will have no problem finding and cataloging pages properly.

CHAPTER 12 s SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND JOOMLA!

The complication with using the SEF URLs and the reason that this option is turned off by default is that for the feature to work, Joomla needs to be able to dynamically modify the URL on the web server. Some web hosting services will not allow a program to make the URL modifications because a hacker could exploit such capabilities.

The SEF options are found in the Joomla Administrator on the Global Configuration screen. Notice that the SEO Settings frame (see Figure 12-1) contains two options: Search Engine Friendly URLs and Use mod_rewrite. You will certainly want to set the SEF URLs option to Yes to make links generated by the system appear as the folder-format URLs.