Joomla!® Bible

Chapter 27. Making a Site Search Engine Friendly

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating search engine friendly URLs

• Creating custom error pages

• Working with metadata and 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 you want to 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, 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 view 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 web site. 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 should be only one part of your broader search-marketing campaign.

This chapter looks at various SEO techniques that can be applied using only the default Joomla! features. Of course, if you want to do more — and those of you who really want to be competitive ...