I Need Advice on SEO for Joomla and Plugins/Extensions

I normally work on wordpress websites a majority of the time. I landed a new offline client that has a joomla website. I was wondering if anyone can recommend me any plugins / extensions / tips / tricks for optimizing joomla.

3 main ones im looking for are:

SEO Plugin for Meta Data
Friendly SEO URLs
Google Analytics / Webmaster tools

... any others you guys can recommend.

I have heard joomla is harder to rank then wordpress, but I am up for the challenge! Plus his niche has very little competition so that's always a +

Thanks in advance guys!

Joomla is not a hard CMS to rank in search engines!

WP has a bunch of automated crap that is supposed to work.
But I'm not a WP expert, I'm a Joomla expert.

My suggestions:

Analytics - Iyosis Piwik (search JED)
SEO/Meta - Put your keywords in mata fields in articles
SEO Friendly - Joomla has this built in see the configuration page in the admin area

Remember the more components and plugins you install the more bloated your cms will become. This could result in slower loading time but not much.

There more components and plugins that can be used...

If you have anymore question shoot me a PM of just ask in the thread.

Best of luck with your new client!

ziaon said:

Joomla is not a hard CMS to rank in search engines!

WP has a bunch of automated crap that is supposed to work.
But I'm not a WP expert, I'm a Joomla expert.

My suggestions:

Analytics - Iyosis Piwik (search JED)
SEO/Meta - Put your keywords in mata fields in articles
SEO Friendly - Joomla has this built in see the configuration page in the admin area

Remember the more components and plugins you install the more bloated your cms will become. This could result in slower loading time but not much.

There more components and plugins that can be used...

If you have anymore question shoot me a PM of just ask in the thread.

Best of luck with your new client!

Click to expand...

Awesome you rock man, I appreciate it! I will be hopping in the site for the first time tonight, so I'm not all sure what to expect!

I've got couple of Joomla sites. Tag Meta 1.6 is a good extension.
It lets you take care of title tag, description etc of all pages in one place.
You only have to take care of Home page in main menu.
Other than that you can manage meta data for every other page in one place using Tag Meta.

And for canonicalization, you can either do a 301 redirect in htaccess file.
Or use System Canonicalization extension(Joomla 1.5 only)

And for Search engine friendly urls like Ziaon said go to configuration and
select SEF friendly URLs. And don't forget to change your htaccess file to .htaccess for Apache server.

I believe in joomla you don't have the pinger whenever you post an article.
I could be wrong, but I've never seen one. Just use the external pinging services or
profit instruments website pinger. Articles should index in a day or so.

Any more suggestions?