Joomla! Documentation™

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Getting started with SEO What is Search Engine Optimisation Using a Sitemap Title Tag Meta Description Keywords

Troubleshooting SEO problems Removing the live site variable Problems with SEF URLs with websites in subfolders

Advanced SEO Microdata Google Updates Add static text in the title of pages How to enable RSS feeds to encourage traffic on dynamic pages

 

About Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (often abbreviated to SEO) refers to the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a Website from search engines. A site that has been optimised according to SEO practices is said to be Search Engine Friendly (often abbreviated to SEF).

The main article about SEO is Making your site Search Engine Friendly, which lists steps that lead to a better search engine ranking.

A somewhat important SEO technique that also helps your users is using Search Engine Friendly URLs. See Enabling Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs for more information.

See also: Beginners: Address Search Engine Optimisation

Dynamic MetaDesc in a list of articles by category

When you view a list of articles by category, joomla put into the page the default configuration metadescription, but perhaps we want write the category description into the metatag for SEO reasons.

For this we need open the file includes/application.php.

Search for this piece of code in the function &getParams:

$params->def( 'page_title'      , $title );
$params->def( 'page_description', $description );

Add this code before:

if (strcasecmp($_GET['view'],'category')==0) {         
   $description = $database->GetOne("SELECT description FROM #__categories WHERE id={$_GET['id']}");       
}

Now the metadescription is more dynamic when you view a list of articles by category.

Change default SEF suffix from .html to .htm

If you need to change default article SEF suffix from .html to .htm (for example, if you need to move static site to Joomla and keep existing urls with .htm extensions), you need apply following patch to includes/router.php (working on Joomla 1.5.9, should work on other 1.5.x versions):

Index: includes/router.php
===================================================================
--- includes/router.php	(revision 13023)
+++ includes/router.php	(working copy)
@@ -57,8 +57,13 @@
 			{
 				if($suffix = pathinfo($path, PATHINFO_EXTENSION))
 				{
-					$path = str_replace('.'.$suffix, '', $path);
-					$vars['format'] = $suffix;
+					if ($suffix == 'htm') {
+						$path = str_replace('.'.$suffix, '', $path);
+						$vars['format'] = 'html';
+					} else {
+						$path = str_replace('.'.$suffix, '', $path);
+						$vars['format'] = $suffix;
+					}
 				}
 			}
		}
@@ -93,7 +98,8 @@
 			{
 				if($format = $uri->getVar('format', 'html'))
 				{
-					$route .= '.'.$format;
+					//$route .= '.'.$format;
+					$route .= '.htm';
 					$uri->delVar('format');
 				}
 			}

Note: This patch only for bundled SEF plugin