SEO Step By Step Guide– 105. Using Joomla SEF Component

Among all the open source platforms, SEO professionals consider Joomla to be one of the most search engine friendly platforms. There are number of reasons why SEO experts prefer Joomla over the other SEO platforms. One of the advantages that we have with Joomla is that it comes with SEF component as one of its add on components.

When you install Joomla, this SEF feature is not enabled. What is this SEF feature all about? SEF stands for Search Engine Friendly and when you enable the SEF feature you will be able to generate search engine friendly URLs which is one of the crucial aspects of SEO. When you don’t enable SEF in your Joomla admin, your website’s URLs will be unfriendly and search engine bots may find it difficult to crawl your pages leading to poor indexing of your website. When you have an automatically generated URL that is not search engine friendly, then you will have URLs that do not reflect exactly your page’s content or your meta tags data. This will work against your website in terms of online performance.

Before you try to enable SEF feature in Joomla you must make sure that you have the required configurations in the hosting server. You need to visit the Joomla administrator console to enable the SEF feature. This feature puts you in better control of the your website’s Joomla created URLs. Once your SEF URL feature is enabled you can start having URLs that match your page’s content and URLs that are more relevant to your site’s content rather than random characters. You can also have number of controls to manage your website’s URL such as long URLs, URL alias and unique items, etc. You will be able to insert your main keywords in the URLs.

However, you should know that if you want to have the SEF Advance feature enabled, you would have to pay the free for the same. However, this can be considered a worthwhile investment and should be budgeted as part of your websites SEO expenses. However before spending any money on your SEF Advance feature, make sure that your hosting has all the required configurations and your hosting provider supports it.

Your SEO service provider should be able to advise you on the SEF feature even if you are not sure about its usefulness and importance. That is one of the reasons why you should hire an experienced team to handle your website’s SEO. They should have up to date information on all the latest SEO strategies and all the latest tools available in the market. As far as SEO is concerned you should go with an established company rather than hiring freelancers. Hiring freelancers will give you cost advantage but that may not be the best solution for your website’s SEO.

SubmitEdge