Excellent SEO plugins for Joomla website - Detailed Guideline

Each of us knows about the importance of improving search engine optimization (SEO). You can read a lot of articles about how to optimize original Joomla templates on the Internet - but it's not the best way. You can save your time and have a better result with SEO plugins for Joomla. That's the reason why one of the most frequently questions now is: "Which Joomla extensions are good for SEO?"

First, I will note what you need to do to improve SEO of your website:

• On page
  
  • Control Meta tags (such as title tag, description tag): the keywords in these elements will be shown up in search results. Search engines can know your site talks about what.
  • Fix crawl errors: search engines will regard your website as a high-quality one and improve your ranking.
  • Rewrite the URLs: The default URL can't help search engines to get information about the content of a page. You should rewrite the URLs, so that the friendly URLs allow your site to achieve better rankings.
  • SEO article content: Not only the main page but also each of your articles can affect the ranking in search results.
• Off page
  • Submit sitemap: get your website indexed by search engines in the way you want.
  • Build back links: more links will generally lead to better search engine rankings and a better Google Page Rank.
• Check the traffic: monitor the visitors and improve your SEO continuously.

I have been testing various extensions to solve all of the above points. I choose tools for Joomla websites only. I didn't evaluate tools for general websites such as: SEO Powersuite, SEOmoz or Raven. Therefore, this article will give you six excellent SEO plugins which you can search for easily in Joomla extensions directory (JED).

JM sitemap

Free SEO plugin for Joomla 1.5

Main functions:

• Create a site map

JM sitemap will help you to make an XML sitemap that is search engine friendly. In one of our articles: Six free must-have Joomla extensions - Have you installed them all? , we mentioned Xmap but JM sitemap is good, too, so you can consider it. There are 3 big reasons for you to use this extension: It's easy to use, it helps you control the menus to publish and it's free.

After you install it, you can go to the JM Sitemap components to choose the menus that you want use to create the sitemap. Then you go to the administration Main menu, create a Menu link for your JM sitemap. You should choose Default layout in this step to make a sitemap for all search engines.

Choose Default layout for site map

Visit link for your JM sitemap

The sitemap will be created automatically and your only work is to visit the link to see the result. By visiting the link, a "sitemap.xml" file will be created in the root of the Joomla directory and that's the Google sitemap generation for your website.

Your sitemap appears after using JM Sitemap

As you see, it's really simple and correct. You can click to download JM Sitemap.

SEOsimple 

Free SEO plugin for Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5

Main functions:

• Set the title
• Choose description and title automatically
• Set ROBOTS meta

In my opinion, SEOsimple is the best Joomla SEO extension for all the Meta tags that are necessary in your website.SEOsimple helps the administrator to solve big problems: write a good description and show the title of website. Your title tag now is more flexible than ever with a lot of different ways to appear. You can arrange the positions of the Site titleand Custom title so the keywords will be in the positions you want.

But the most wonderful thing about this tool is generating all Meta tags from the content. Of course you can write them all by yourself, but not all of us are good SEOers. With this function, it will help your website have a suitable title and description when you have no idea. You can use them as they are or change them as you wish.

The latest version has one more interesting feature for you: the ability to set ROBOTS Meta "noindex, follow" for category pages. You can configure all that settings in the Plugin parameters; check the code before and after using SEOsimple to see the differences.

Configure SEOsimple in parameters