JOOMLA AND SEO

There is no reason whatsoever that a Joomla website should NOT be search engine friendly.

Many people believe in the old myth that unless the page filename ends is HTML or HTM the site will not rank well with popular search engines like Google and Bing. That is not the case. As web design technology has advanced, so has the indexing technology used to rank pages.

Having dynamic content on a website does not mean it cannot be indexed.

However, there are ways and methods of improving the way your site looks to a search engine, and Joomla lends itself well to generation of site content in a search engine friendly manner.

Inside of Joomla there are a group of settings in the 'Site' - 'Global Configuration' area, that allow for the setting of SEF URL's. On an apache web server it is necessary to install a custom .htaccess file when using SEF settings, we've found that on many host servers, the .htaccess file that Joomla creates with it's SEF setting results in "Page Not Found" errors when navigating the website.

Once installed, the SEF URL's will be composed from the path name and the alias entry on the Article title field, so you have full control over how articles are named and how sub-directories are named (the latter requires a bit of figuring out). When you create articles, if you leave the 'alias' field empty then the page file name will be constructed from whatever you enter in the Title field, stripped of non-standard characters with hyphens placed between words. So if you want to call your page something other than what's in the title field, remember to use the Alias field and insert hyphens between words.

The resulting page filenames will be suffixed HTML and treated like any regular HTML page designed in Dreamweaver / Expressions etc.

For Joomla Template design consider Artisteer

CH

PS - if you're looking at Joomla versus perhaps Wordpress, and SEO is a consideration, then read this article on Joomla Versus Wordpress for SEO