Chapter 25: Making a Site Search–Engine Friendly
IN THIS CHAPTER
Creating search engine–friendly URLs
Creating custom error pages
Working with metadata
Creating custom page titles
If I build it, they will come — or so goes the old way of thinking. On today's web, that sort of thinking is the recipe for failure. The amount of noise and competition is nothing short of spectacular, and it can easily drown out your site, even if the quality of your content is excellent. If you want to get traffic and be seen, you need to make an effort to create a search engine–friendly site and you need to engage in at least some basic search engine optimization.
Joomla!, like most content management systems (CMS), faces some challenges to create a truly search engine–friendly site. You will hear some commentators say that you cannot achieve good search engine optimization (SEO) with a CMS, but that is not entirely correct. You can create a search engine–friendly site; however, you may not achieve the level of optimization that a highly trained SEO specialist can get from a pure HTML website. That said, given the competitiveness of search marketing these days, your use of a CMS is not likely to be fatal to your SEO goals. Effective site optimization has an important role, but it should be only one part of your broader search-marketing efforts.
This chapter looks at various SEO techniques that you can apply using only the default Joomla! features. Of course, if you want to do more and if you really ...
