Joomla SEO Checklist

If you want to rank high in Google with your Joomla website, simply read the different articles in this checklist. It describes all phases in the SEO process, from keyword research to SEO audits and everything in between.

You can read the tutorials in sequence, or simply skip to the lesson that interests you most. Whether you are a beginner in Joomla or an experienced administrator, these tips should help you bigtime.

Keyword research & SEO copywriting

Keyword research is very important in SEO. Knowing your audience and which words they search for is key

Headings and paragraphs

Make sure your content is structured with paragraphs. Split them into readable chunks using headings

URL structure

Priority one before you start filling your site: decide upon a proper URL structure for your site!

Internal link structure

Linking internally is the practice of creating links within the same website, building a hierarchy between the pages

URL configuration in Joomla

Creating easily understandable URL's for both humans and Google is very important: SEF URLs

Metadata: Page Title

The page title defines how your page looks in the Google SERP, making this an extremely important SEO parameter

Metadata: Meta description

The meta description, if set up correctly, is used by search engines as the snippet found in the SERP pages to describe a search result

Optimize anchor text

Optimizing your anchor text is important, especially for your own internal URLs

Optimize images for SEO

Google can not 'see' images, but it can read all its properties and can use them to establish rankings for pages with images

www / non-www URLs

If your Joomla site is accessible both with and without a www-prefix you may suffer from duplicate content

Avoid duplicate content issues

Like, the www or non-www issue, any kind of duplicate content on your site could be a hazard for your search engine rankings

301-redirects (Joomla core vs .htaccess)

Make sure you create redirects for Google when individual URLs change, or even your entire site

Avoid 404-errors

Make sure you do not have dead links on your site that cause people to end up with a Page not found message (a 404 error).

Google Search Console

Once a site is published, you should always register your site with Google Search Console. It gives you a lot of feedback about your URLs

Joomla sitemap setup

Once your site is populated with data and pages you should create a sitemap AND submit it to Google / Bing, etc

Robots.txt + meta tag

The robots meta tag and the robots.txt file are 2 different mechanisms to pass information to search engines

Structured data in Joomla

With structured data, you can enrich the HTML of your Joomla site so that bots can understand the information better. It may lead to increased visibility in search

Local SEO / Google Mybusiness

In Local SEO, you use your Google MyBusiness profile together with structured data to optimize local visibility in Google search

Linkbuilding & social media

Links are still a great way of earning SEO value, but things are not as easy as they used to be

SEO audit

After all your work, it is a good thing to verify that you did a good job by performing an SEO audit for your site