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So you’ve chosen Joomla As your CMS of choice you’ve bought, or designed and developed a beautiful template and added all your creatively crafted content to your new Joomla Website and you are now ready to start open your website up to that hungry horde of customers hurling their credit cards at you.

One problem: If you’ve started with a base Joomla Installation, odds are that those thousands of people itching to get their hands on your products probably aren’t even going to be able to find your website in the first place. In contrast to WordPress (which is what you could consider Joomla primary competitor) Joomla Is simply not quite as search engine friendly right out the box. In fact, I have found that you actually need to go through a number of steps (8, to be precise) in order to get a Joomla Website into a position where it really performs satisfactorily when it comes to on-site SEO factors.

Having developed a number of Joomla Websites over the years, I would like to share with you the exact guidelines that I give to the junior web designers at Red Giant Design Studio to make sure that our websites compete admirably in the rankings.

1. Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess

Rename htaccess because you are going to want to enable URL rewriting to make those URLs a whole lot more attractive than they start out, you are going to need to rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess – which is the version used by Joomla and mod rewrite

2. Enable SEF URLs and URL Rewriting

Search Engine Friendly URLs is the setting that removes all the dynamically generated gobbledygook from your URL and replaces it with the alias of the menu item that you’re using on the page.

URL Rewriting is the setting that removes the /index.php/ from the URL. For this to be enabled must have mod_rewrite enabled and must have an .htaccess file.

The balance of the settings is really left more up to your discretion. I tend to prefer leaving the other three off. You may like to turn on the option to include your Site Name in your page titles, particularly if the site has a lot of content. Personally, I like to micro-manage everything and craft each title separately in most instances.

3. Remove “/images/” from your Robots.txt file

This is something about Joomla that has always left me bewildered. In the automatically generated robots.txt file that is created on installation, Joomla includes a disallow rule for the images directory, instructing the search engines not to search or index your images folder.

As you may well know, images can generate a sizable chunk of your traffic from Google and the search engines if you have them correctly optimized.

Because all the image optimization in the world won’t help you if you are telling Google not to bother with your images directory, I highly recommend that you remove the following line from your robots.txt file:

/images/

4. Install JCE Editor

Not only is JCE Editor free, but it provides a whole bunch of really cool features which will help you put together and maintain your site.

My favorite two things about JCE are the fact that you can instruct it not to strip code that you add through the editor and the fact that it provides a great interface through which you can add images, coupled with Alt tags and image dimensions.

It’s a really good component for Joomla and I highly recommend you use it.

5. Use Alt Tags and Image Dimensions

This tip is really not specific to Joomla but it is important nevertheless. The JCE editor allows you add the Alternate Text to describe your image as well as add the dimensions right within the image upload tool.

In case you weren’t aware, adding image dimensions to your images allows the “space” to load before the actual image does. This should help improve your load times a bit.

6. Manage Your Meta Data

Although Meta keywords tags are pretty much redundant these days, your Meta descriptions and title tags are still rather important.

I came across a pretty useful component quite recently, called SEO Boss. The only feature of this that I actually use is the Meta tag manager, but I have found this to be extremely useful.

To edit Meta data for your Joomla website normally, you need to navigate to each menu item/article and edit the descriptions and page titles manually. With SEO Boss, you’ll find a single screen that lets you edit all of your Meta data directly from that interface.

7. Be Consistent When Linking Internally

When it comes to CMS websites (especially Joomla ones) duplicate content can become a bit of a problem. The key to combating this is to ensure that you link consistently to internal content.

By this, I mean only creating links to either the www. Or non-www. Version that you chose above, only linking to pages using a trailing slash or no trailing slash, or pages with a suffix (.html) or no suffix only link to a single version of a page, ever.

Remember, it’s not duplicate content if nothing is linking to it for Google to find it.

You can’t really control the way others link to you, but you can set an example. If people are linking to you incorrectly, you can add further redirect rules to 301 redirect to the correct links.

8. Install Xmap

Xmap is quite simply the best sitemap component that I’ve found for Joomla thus far.

It seamlessly generates XML and HTML sitemaps for your website and there are many plug-in available for popular Joomla components such as Virtue mart and sh404sef.

Simply navigate to Xmap and create a new sitemap. Choose the menu items you want to include, set their priorities, click “Save” and voila! You can then create a menu item for your HTML sitemap and grab the link for your XML sitemap to add to Webmaster Tools.