Joomla and Search Engine Optimization

Following my post about building a high quality website for less than a 100$ I would like to provide an overview of one of the best engines that run today's websites - Joomla .

I cannot explain it better than the community itself so if you want to learn more about it go to their about page

Joomla is an open source platform you can download and use without paying a license fee. It provides the code upon you  build a great website with no technical knowledge which includes:

- easy installation 

- quick creation of menus, pages, modules to display banners, ads and etc.

- create users and assign access levels

- easy use of multiple templates to change website design

A good way to start with joomla is their documents wiki . However, I believe that like most of you I found a lot of this stuff confusing at first and I was under short deadlines to learn the system so I bought this book 

Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition)

It is very good book that helped me learn Joomla much quicker. It takes you from A to Z. One of the very good chapters is on SEO practices.

Search Engine Optimization of your Joomla site is an easy task once you have done keyword research, bought a domain and chosen hosting provider. 

There are two ways to go about it: use out of the box SEO capabilities or use a component/plugin.

I would recommend using a component/plugin like sh404sef  because it provides some features that are good for seo that you can do right out of the box with joomla /301 redirects, patching security holes, assigning sef ursl on popular modules and etc./

Combined with a tool like JCrawler to refresh and submit your sitemap to the search engines you will have a pretty well optimized Joomla Site.

You might have questions if you are new to Joomla and I will be happy to answer them. I was recently included in the Joomla Resources Directory as a reliable resource for SEO advice.

 http://resources.joomla.org/directory/support-services/seo/petar-dimov.html 

Just use the form on the right.

You can also use the thousands of posts on the Joomla Forum that are the best place to learn the specifics of Joomla.