RSJoomla! Blog - tutorials, tips & updates about seo

Let’s take the following scenario: suppose you’re a Joomla! webdesigner and you create websites on a daily basis. When finishing the website, the most important on-page seo factors - meta descriptions, titles, headings are not well optimized.
Moreover, the site has duplicate content issues.

The website isn’t Joomla! seo ready.

Let’s see what are the common seo problems with Joomla! websites and how can you solve these issues.

1. No unique meta data

By default, all Joomla! pages have defined the same metadata in the Global Configuration “Joomla! - the dynamic portal engine and content management system”, causing duplicate meta description and keywords.

Best practices:

Each meta description must be unique and accurately reflect the page’s content.

The last 2 RSSeo! revisions have brought among new functionalities, some important crawler changes: the ability to use RSSeo! without loopback connections.

What does it mean?

To be able to analyze site pages, RSSeo! must first crawl your website. In order to perform this task, it requires at least one of the following functions to be enabled: cURL , fsockopen , fopen , file_get_contents. Most hosting providers impose some restrictions in using these, only allowing one of them and loopback connections. The last one (loopback), basically implies that a script can't get the content of page if the call to the function is made from the same host. You can imagine that this seriously affected the RSSeo! functionality, preventing the proper meta data management.

Beginning with RSSeo rev. 7 and 8, there are 2 more options available to run RSSeo!, besides using the loopback connections: connection via a configured proxy server and PHP exec function.

Recommended workflow:

Option 1: Loopback connections via cURL , fsockopen , fopen or file_get_contents

(available for all RSSeo! revisions)

This is part of the RSSeo! minimum requirements: to be able to run RSSeo! you must have enabled at least one of the following functions cURL , fsockopen , fopen , file_get_contents.
In case your hosting provider doesn't allow loopback connections, then head to the second option.

Wondering why in the search engines index, your Joomla! links appear both with and without "www" ?
Until you set the preferred domain to tell search engines how to display URLs in their index, the website will have issues with duplicate content.

SEO disadvantages:

The pagerank will be divided to both versions of the website.
Not to mention that spiders will have a harder time to discover the fresh content because they will be forced to index both versions of your Joomla! website. (spiders have limited bandwidth when crawling a website).

This duplicate content issue can be eliminated easily:

1. choose from Google Webmasters Tools the preferred domain
2. set a 301 redirect

Yes! the Joomla! SEO revolution has just started with RSSeo! The most advanced SEO tool for Joomla! is born and it's ready to increase your website traffic.

RSSeo! has all the features that you need to optimize your Joomla! website and to monitor it and your competitors.

First, it will crawl your website and index all the pages. Then you'll be able to immediately improve each page.

Also, say hello to the first Joomla! Google and Yahoo! sitemap generator. Yes, RSSeo! has that too!

You can quickly set each page title, meta description and keywords and you'll get a real-time report on what you should change to make the page SEO friendly.