
DIY SEO: Two Top Joomla SEO Extensions
Posted on 02.12.2009
I took some time out today and I did a bit of research at the old Joomla extensions site. To my surprise, I noticed that the number of extensions being served had increased from 3,600 odd extensions to 3,754 so I was hopeful that I’d find something new to help with some of the search engine optimization work that I do for my clients. There are two main sub-sections in the extensions index that I spent a lot of time in, the SEO & Metadata category and the SEF category. After only a few minutes, I came across two extensions that I suggest all Joomla small business website owners add to their repertoire.
The first extension that I recommend is the SEO Canonicalisation Plugin from courtesy of Sam Moffat. To date, I have been using a bunch of custom Apache rewrites in my .htaccess file to get the site redirect to non-www version of the site to automatically redirect to the www version of the site. This is important for preserving pagerank which I explained in an older post about htaccess, canonicalisation and Joomla. This plugin does all of that for you so if you don’t understand or want to mess with your .htaccess file, this is your solution. It looks really promising and has great reviews so I’m going to install it on a few future clients’ sites and see what happens.
The second extension that I came across was one that I actually discovered many moons ago but which I forgot about – JoomSEO. This extension makes life a breeze for dealing with all of the metadata, tags, keywords, headings, page titles and so on for your site. You can set it to auto-populate this SEO data for you based on the article content. And then, if you don’t like it outputs, you can override it with ease.
Anyway, the best thing about both of these extensions is the time it will save you and the results they deliver with ease. As usual, if you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to comment.