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 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.

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.

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: Heading to this:

  Heading

  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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hira kumar January 02, 2009 Votes: +7	This artical touch my mind and pleased to write some words about this artical. I am web developer I have my own website visitinepal.com of Joomla CMS. Joomla CMS is so easy to use . As I am a designer . I always disappointed with the search engine and accessiblity feature in Joomla . Still in Joomla 1.8 I did not got any difference than before. As you defined early that header is not used on component heading, content heading. Customize meta tags on the page of section category blog and section category list . Using div based design is more better than table based design. report abuse vote down vote up
PC NET WORKS March 15, 2009 Votes: +4	Joomla CMS is the most easy way to build a complex site, but it has some problesms with the SEO, especially when somebody use "exotic" languages like Greek. The SEF url's has no meaning with Greek language. The headings are not so strong for SEO as long as you have rich contents. Heading tags are relative to the template you choose every time you build one site with joomla. report abuse vote down vote up
Pierre August 27, 2009 Votes: +0	I know I am way late to the party, but I wanted to throw my two cents in here... One thing that I think is absolutely crucial, is the ability to set the separately from the article title. There is a plugin that does this for J1.5(using the key reference field) but it doesn't play nice with sh404sef. BTW I just found your site via Teeman's blog, and I love it! Great content. report abuse vote down vote up
Mark Reynolds September 01, 2009 Votes: +0	Now that sh404sef's future is uncertain, bringing more advanced SEO features to Joomla 1.6 is critical. I think it's critical that SEO features should be easy to use for the majority of users (i.e. those with no SEO knowledge). There's usually not a lot of discussion of this. We need to make sure the interface is easy to use for companies without an employee with great IT/SEO skills. Bringing all meta info fields into the actual article/category is crucial. If I was an editor with little knowledge of SEO and redirects, then manual 301 redirects would be a feature that I would likely neglect; I would assume that this would be the case for many small business website owners. I think there should be a serious warning to a user who wants to change the content of the filename/alias field. Changing the filename is potentionally serious and having a warning is a great way to educate web editors. If the field is changed then the automated creation of a 301 redirect would be the only way to go for a user with no SEO/technical knowledge. We wouldn't want to present Google with 301 redirect after 301 redirect from the one original page, so hopefully any warning would discourage the multiple changing of filenames. report abuse vote down vote up
Life insurance November 23, 2009 Votes: +0	Is there any SEO tool or general records to find downtime of a host? report abuse vote down vote up
Affordable Web Design December 03, 2009 Votes: +0	I agree with all the recommendation however there is one important thing that seems to be missing and thats the www adn non www conelesation (i think thats how its spelled..)I found a good plugin that fixes this in the core without having to add it to the htaccess file..Wordpress has this built in the default install and i think joomla should also. I have been fighting for top rank position under google for about 6 months now and i think there is simply something i am missing...I just recently added a user friendly html sitemap hoping this give me more favor with the Google Gods and so far it has not..I do not when I checked my site on website grader.com and checked it with the www and without the www i got differnet scores and backlink count so i know google and other search engines were seeing them as to separate sites. The plugin has fixed this..I also installed the seo patch which has given me more control over meta data and I think they need to just make that part of the next release, but again i still think something is missing. I set on the 2 3 and 4th page of some crazy volume keywords and are on the front page for the same keywords on bing, yahoo and altavista, but i can not no matter what i do hit the top on google and I really think there is something important missing in my joomla site. If anyone knows of anything please let me know..There could be a good finders fee in it for you. report abuse vote down vote up