By P.J. Swesey

Joomla’s default URLs, like the standard URLs of any CMS, are terrible for Search Engine Optimization purposes. They have several querystring parameters, they are not human readable, they offer search engines no keywords or insight into what content the page holds, and they use the Itemid parameter to create multiple URLs for each content item. Luckily there are Search Engine Friendly URL components available for Joomla that solve all these issues for us.

I used to use the JoomSEF component on my Joomla websites. It worked very well to create descriptive, search engine friendly, human readable URLs for my web sites, but it didn’t properly remove the Itemid URL parameters. This meant that each article still had several URLs. This was very bad for search engine optimization and for people visiting my sites. Search engines thought I was duplicating content and often indexed the wrong URLs, and visitors would get confused with different URLs pointing to the same article.

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By P.J. Swesey

Here’s a cool SEO tip that will automatically bring you more traffic from Google and other search engines:  Put a Random Content module on your homepage. It’s better to have it on as many pages as possible, but the homepage is key. I discovered this trick while experimenting with a few different ideas over at http://www.patrickswesey.com.

The website originally had several hundred thousand inlinks as a result of free software and Joomla extensions I had offered. Pretty soon I started up JoomlaDigger.com and moved all the free extensions from PatrickSwesey.com over to here.

Since the move, most of the traffic on PatrickSwesey.com had died down. The content left at PatrickSwesey.com was free software for Windows XP and a blog of stupid dreams I have. It wasn’t a terribly exciting website and its traffic reflected that. I didn’t really care if the site got traffic or not so I decided to experiement a little and see how I could affect its search engine traffic.

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