How to Create SEO-Friendly Content with Joomla

I believe that when you have reached this blog, you already understand that SEO is the key pillar to focus on if your goal is to build a successful website. Search engines remain one of the best-converting channels, so it’s best to invest in it. However, it can be frustrating and consuming a good amount of your time.

Luckily, there're experts who go ahead of us and have gathered some basics which you can and should do to make your content SEO-friendly.

In this topic, I’m going to discuss some of the top tips and tricks that you can apply to your Joomla site to ensure best optimization performance for the least effort. Believe us or not, these are extremely important if you want your website to stay on top of the search engines’ ranking game.

Why Create a Search Engine Friendly Site?

One of the things that most CEOs, small business owners or new webmasters don't understand and disregard is why you need a SEO friendly website and why make the effort to build your website friendlier to search engines.

There are many reasons why it’s essential to optimize your website, but below are top 5 of the most important ones: 

• It increases your organic traffic.
• It will make your website user friendly.
• It gives you brand credibility.
  
• It is cost effective.
• It helps you understand the needs of your customers.

Tips to make your Joomla website more SEO friendly

Now you have understood the importance of SEO friendly, we will show you some tips that will help you to optimize your website for search engines.

Researching for Keyword and Topic

Content creation is an integral part of your website. When creating content, you help drive traffic to your website and get leads to engage on your site. Not only does it help establish yourself as an authority in your field, but it also helps you target valuable keywords to drive interested leads to your page.

To begin creating your webpage content, you must first choose your topic. This is the part where keyword research comes into play.

Keywords are the words and phrases type into search engines. They're the topics that people are trying to learn about.

By targeting keywords within your content, you’ll help your business appear in more relevant search results, which will drive more traffic to your site and get your website to rank higher in the search results.

Though, keep in mind that optimizing your content for keywords is not about incorporating as many keywords into your posts as possible. Nowadays, doing so is gonna HURT your SEO since search engines consider this as "keyword stuffing"

A good rule of thumb is to focus on one long-tail keyword per post. A long-tail keyword is a very specific search phrase that contains three or more words and it often contains a head term.

You can find more details about keyword research and support tools in our Joomla SEO blog.

Optimizing heading tags for search engines to better understand your website

To help readers clearly understand what you're writing about, you need to structure your content, especially larger pages with massive posts shouldn’t be written as blocks of text. Instead, split it into paragraphs with HTML headings in between.

The ideal format should be H1 as the main heading (the <h1> element in your HTML) and the subsequent heading H2’s. If there’re more hierarchies in your content, there're H3 to H6 to serve your needs.

This structure not only helps the readers to easily understand your content but also helps spiders to recognize your pages' structure and hierarchy.

However, a little reminder for all the Joomla lovers out there, with Joomla's standard set-up, article titles are usually set up as <h2>. It's not a problem to leave it to an H2, but if you want things to be perfect, we suggest using H1's.

There are numerous solutions to this situation, you can: correct Joomla's set-up; use Joomla SEO Extensions or use our JoomlaShine templates.

Another way to untangle this little knot is by using JSN PageBuilder 4. With the drag-n-drop & flexible builder system, you won't have to worry about headings and configuring HTML codes when building your web page anymore.

Building Search Engine Friendly URLs

Since later versions of Joomla, there’s nothing easier than creating search engine friendly URLs as the platform has a much better base configuration. The first thing you need to do when adjusting your Joomla web page is to go to Global Configurations page and check the SEO settings.

Creating easily understandable URLs is very important. When looking at your URLs, both readers and search engines must be able to guess the subject of the page the URL is created for.

Your URLs must be keyword rich and informative. However, the URL doesn’t have to match the title of your blog or post exactly. To our experience, the best practice is to shorten your URL without losing context to what the page is about.

Tips: We suggest that you shouldn’t include numbers in your Joomla site URL (e.g: year, steps). This way, in the future, if you want to update your SEO content, you won't have to update the URL. Updating the URL will create a 301 redirect, which is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. This will hurt your SEO.

To find out more about how to configure URLs in Joomla, check out this post for more information.

Adding Image alt-text

Unlike humans, search engines can’t "see" the image, instead, they look for images with alt-text. An alt-text, which is also called "alt tags" or "alt descriptions" is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage in the circumstance that the image fails to load on the user's screen.

Alt-text allows images to rank in the image section of the search engine results. You should consider optimizing your images with different descriptive variations of your long-tail keywords.

Since we're discussing how image factors affect SEO, I want to mention another factor that also can affect your ranking, which is speed. And by optimizing your image's size, you can increase your site's speed by a ton. There are different ways you can do so, for example:

• Correcting your file format for images.
• Using size images correctly.
• Using background images instead.
• Lazy loading images.

Good news for all Joomla lovers out there, with the big update of Joomla 4, a lazy loading image feature will be added. This gives users the ability to enable lazy loading of images which can help speed up your websites and boost the experience of visitors. Check out our thoughts on Joomla 4's lazy loading images feature at this blog.

Adding Meta Description

Maybe you don't know this, but meta description is NOT used as a ranking factor. However, it creates a massive impact on Click Through Rates

Therefore, when building your Joomla site, make sure to fill the meta-description of each individual page with your main keywords.

A little reminder, the maximum suggested length of a meta description is 150 - 160 characters. Anything longer than that will most likely be cut off.

To learn more about meta descriptions, visit Joomla SEO site for more information.

Building Links & Social Media

Building Links

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. According to Google, "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."

Link building often involves outreach to other relevant websites and blogs in your industry. But importantly, all link building campaigns must start with something worth linking to.

Social Media

As social media keeps growing, search engines take this into account more and more. We won’t go much in detail for social media, just be sure to use all the channels that are important to your website.

In Conclusion

We have covered some of the best tips on how to create your SEO-friendly content with Joomla. I know that can be overwhelming for some of you. However, when you have mastered it, there will be a lot of dedication and excitement in building your own website.

There's plenty of more stuff you can do with Joomla to create SEO content, but these are a good starting point