Gone are the days when having a business website was a big deal. Today, it’s all about getting noticed. The one who stays at the top of search engine rankings ultimately grabs a huge chunk of the traffic that laters turns into customers. That’s why SEO is given tremendous importance. Mind you, it’s not just about stuffing a bunch of keywords in the content, but SEO covers a broad spectrum of on-page practices and UX/UI. If you have a Joomla website, you need to focus on the following points to optimize your website for higher rankings.
1. Get Premium Hosting for Optimizing the Website’s Speed
Statistics tell us slow page speed can affect your bounce rate. A website that takes longer than 5 seconds to load loses 90% of its traffic. The ideal page speed is less than 3 seconds; the faster the better!
So if you have a Joomla website development in mind, your top priority should be optimizing the speed of your website. It ultimately improves the User Experience, which is another key ranking factor.
Fortunately, your job is half done if your website is on a good Joomla hosting server. So choose your hosting provider wisely, the few bucks you saved by subscribing to a cheap hosting would ruin your online reputation in the future.
2. Use Joomla SEO Plugins
If you have used best WordPress hosting convesio, you must be aware of the dozens of different SEO plugins available for use. Some are free while some cost you a few bucks every month.
The good news is, Joomla, too, offers SEO plugins that simplify your job. You can optimize your website for the basics, identify weak spots, and remove the vulnerabilities that may affect your rankings.
Some of the best Joomla SEO plugins and extensions to use are:
- RSSEO Joomla
- EFSEO Front end editor
- Route66 on-page analysis feature
- JSitemap control panel
- SEOBoss control panel
- OSMeta Meta Tags Manager
- Tag Meta.
- SEO simple plugin setting
3. Invest in Content Marketing
Irrespective of the platform, content marketing holds immense importance when it comes to driving traffic to your website. Create a year-long content calendar in advance, choose keywords that you think you can rank against.
Start a blog section and provide valuable information to your audience in the form of long-form blogs, infographics, QA sessions, etc.
And don’t just stick to high-volume keywords, find out potential phrases and queries that can put your business ahead in the search rankings.
Keep an eye on your competitors’ content and spot the gaps that you can address. This way you will attract untapped traffic that’s more likely to convert into long-term customers.
4. Use Joomla Categories & Menu Smartly
Google’s crawlers are not intelligent. If you expect them to make sense of the data/content on their own, you are mistaken. You must organize it in a comprehensible manner to simplify your job.
Fortunately, by default, Joomla organizes categories and subcategories to not only organize content but also lets you do internal linking that boosts your authority in your niche. Hierarchical structure helps both Google and the user itself in finding specific content on your website.
Once you have created categories for articles, you can create a menu structure that is optimized for passing link juice, so other pages too can reap the benefits of one page’s higher rankings. On the homepage, you can feature articles of all categories, each linked to a parent category.
5. Get Rid of 404 Errors
Well, this, too, is true for any platform. These 404 errors are poison to your website’s authority. Google hates these because they ruin the UX of a website.
But we have to admit that these become inevitable at some point. To encounter this issue, you can create a simple and pleasing 404 page that will help the visitors to locate the information they are seeking.
Joomla offers a few 404 page templates free of cost. You can review each, modify the best, and use it whenever required to ensure a high-quality User Experience from your end.
6. Create a Sitemap for Your Website
As we suggested internal linking above, we also recommend creating a sitemap to let Google know how the content on your site is interlinked. This way Google will be able to better understand each page and article on your website.
Don’t worry, it’s not as technical as it sounds. An XML site map is a list of URLs in a simple format that Google can understand. And the good news is, many Joomla components, such as JSitemap, can generate an XML sitemap on their own
Make sure the component you use for this purpose has the feature to automatically add new content being added to your website in the existing site map.
Final Thoughts
You can ignore SEO if you have a website, no matter what the objective is. After all, we all want to get noticed online, don’t we? So if you are struggling to optimize your Joomla website on your own, get in touch with an SEO agency in Dubai to make sure you are always at the top of your niche!
