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 This blog post is a response to Alledia's open question: What SEO improvements would you like to see in Joomla 1.6?
We love Joomla here at Good Web Practices and are happy to be able to spend some time and energy contributing to the discussions surrounding Joomla 1.6. We would like this post to be considered in the white papers that are being submitted in the Joomla 1.6 development process.
As we are not hardcore coders, we have approached this question from a users point of view. We hope coders and developers will be able to shed more light on the issues we bring up.
Making Joomla 1.6 search engine friendly
We'd like to see Joomla become the most search engine friendly content management system. At the moment it's not quite there, but why shouldn't it be in the future?
Making
Joomla 1.6 more search engine friendly is important because it will
encourage people to develop with Joomla and reward those who have been
developing with Joomla over the years.
As it stands, it is
possible, with extensions, to make Joomla 1.5 an attractive CMS from an
SEO perspective. However, we believe that a search engine optimised Joomla should be available to the masses, not just those who know which extensions to install.
We'd like to do our little bit in encouraging the Joomla developers to
consider the responsibility they have to develop a CMS that can be easily spidered by Google and will give Joomla websites every chance of being well ranked by Google.
We hope
that this list of suggested features, some easier to implement than others,
will provide guidance to the Joomla development team and be useful to the Joomla community.
So without further ado, here are the functions we'd like to see...
Better SEF URL control
We recognise and are grateful for the improvement that has taken place from Joomla 1.0.1 to 1.5 in area of SEF URLs. In Joomla 1.6 we'd like to see this improvement continue:
- The option of having SEF URLs like the Joomlatwork component
and Sh404sef component
offer. These components produce URLS like the following:
www.site.com/section/category/page-name.html
- Each content item can only be accessed through one URL so that duplicate content is avoided.
- The possibility of redirecting pages if they move: e.g. if you move an article from one category to another you can add a manual redirect.
To realise this we suggest a new field on the article page entitled something to the effect of: "page name" (or alternatively the existing "alias" field could be used). This field would give the user control over the name of the page.
We think it would be useful to have a new sub heading in the "Global Configuration" entitled "SEO Settings" (This implies removing the "SEO Settings" section there is currently and making it into a sub heading). Inside this section there could be the appropriate SEF URL configuration (à la sh404sef with URL customisation features and the option of redirecting non-www to www) and also a section to add custom redirects. The custom redirect sub-section could just simply have two fields: "old URL" and "new URL".
It would be useful to have the possibility of adding manual redirects for when individual articles are moved. Adding a redirect in Joomla would be simpler for the user than adding a redirect to the .htaccess file.
Meta Tag Control
In addition to the SEF URL improvements we are eager to see, we'd also like to see more control over meta tags in Joomla 1.6:
- A new entry field entitled: "Html title tag" to go in the "Metadata Information" tab which gives the user the option of writing the page's <title> tag.
- Option of removing the generator tag in "Global Configuration" in the "Metadata Settings" box.
- Possibility of adding "Metadata Information" in every page including sections, categories and contacts rather than only in articles. (This for example requires the "Metadata Information" section to be included in the section and category manager alongside the "description").
- Ability to add different meta tags of the different page of an article created by using pagination.
The reason why it's important to have more control over Meta Tags is because they are an important factor that search engines take into consideration when evaluating web pages.
Empowering bloggers
We would like to see Joomla 1.6 be more blogger friendly. This is important because if Joomla were to become more blogger friendly it would have a wider reach. We think this can be achieved by:
- Making it possible to assign multiple categories to articles. Considering this in
light of the SEF URL component we suggested, the user would need to select the
category as they do now: the category that they select would be the
category that is included in the article's URL. We then suggest having
another field in the "Parameters - Advanced" section that enables the
user to select additional categories that the article appears in.
- Including a sitemap component in the Joomla core that generates a simple
html sitemap (example) and an xml sitemap (example) for search engine submission. This
could be done by integrating Joomap
into the Joomla core.
- Improving the RSS syndication module by adding support for pinging.
- Providing a comment system that is included in the Joomla core and works on installation. This comment system should work with trackbacks and have the option of a captcha.
- Including a simple social bookmarking module in the Joomla core.
The reasoning behind these suggestions is quite self-evident: we'd like to see a Joomla which has a broader reach.
Making writing articles easier
From an SEO point of view, it's important to have a website which is well internally linked, a change can be made to the article editor to facilitate this. While we're talking about the editor we've got a small suggestion to help make the Joomla writing experience more pleasant:
- When inserting an image using the "image" button at the bottom of the article text-box, the dimensions of the image should automatically be added.
- The ability to link to other articles on the website from within the editor. This could be done by a "link within website" button next to the "image, "page break" and "read more..." buttons, or simply within the format options by clicking on the link button within the Tiny MCE editor.
Proper use of heading tags
We are aware that this may well be a request that won't be addresses in
Joomla 1.6, that's why we kept it to the end. Nevertheless we really wanted to raise this issue as we
think it's important:
- Move from this: <td class="contentheading"
width="100%">Heading</td> to this: <h2
class="componentheading">Heading</h2> Basically we'd like to
see Joomla eventually using h1, h2, h3, h4 headings. If Drupal does it,
why can't we?
Are these suggestions realistic?
We recognise that making the suggestions is the easy part: the difficultly is turning these suggestions into a reality. Can these
functions really be included in a new release of Joomla? We believe
they can, however we accept that some of these features will more take
time to implement than others.
From the features we mentioned, we put a particular emphasis upon Joomla 1.6 including:
- SEF URLs
- Complete meta tag control
- Sitemap: Html and XML
- RSS syndication with ping function
- Easy way to link to other articles from within the article editor
- Possibility of assigning multiple categories to articles
If we were to see these features included in Joomla 1.6 we'd be delighted.
What do you think of the suggestions we've made?
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12
February 23, 2008
Votes: +1