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Search Engine Optimization & Performance tuning for your Joomla website

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Readable (SEF) URL's

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Creating easily understandable URL's is very important. Joomla, like other CMS's often generates URL's that cannot be easily understood, like

https://joomla-seo.net/index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=117&id=10&lang=es&view=article. 

This is completely meaningless to both users and search engines of course, and it should be presented as something more readable, like

 https://joomla-seo.net/search-engine-optimization. 

In earlier versions of Joomla you had to manually adjust your settings to achive this, but happily this is not necessary anymore in newer versions. Still however, there is a lot of tuning that can be done. For your Joomla site, go to Global Configuration and check the SEO settings:

SEO settings joomla

The first parameter that you should allways make sure is switched on is Search Engine Friendly URL's. This will achieve the readble URL's we just discussed.

Secondly, we need to consider the Use URL Rewriting parameter. With this switched off (which is the default setting), your URL's are readable, but they still allways start with index.php/. Preferably, we should remove this as well: Set the parameter to YES, and at the same time, rename the file htaccess.txt (in the root of your Joomla site) to .htaccess. This needs to done at the same time. It only works on Apache servers, but 95% of the hosts run on these, so this should seldomly be a problem. If you are using a local site on your windows PC, you may notice that you cannot rename a file without an extension, so you should go to a DOS-prompt in the correct folder and type:

rename htaccess.txt .htaccess

Thirdly, you have the possibility to add a suffix to you URL's, like .html. For SEO this is useless, so leave it off.

Unicode Aliases should be better left untouched as well.

And finally we have the Include Site name in Page Title's parameter. If you have a site name that makes sense for SEO, include it, either before or after the description. Read this article on OS-training.com for some interesting reading on the impact of this parameter.

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