User Documentation Search engine optimisation (SEO) covers everything that helps people find your site through a search engine and have a good experience once they arrive. This section covers general SEO practice in Joomla alongside the server-level configuration needed to enable search engine friendly URLs.
SEO Practice
The day-to-day side of SEO: structuring content and pages well, keeping track of how the site is performing in search, and helping search engines find everything you've published.
- SEO Basics – Structuring content, URLs, titles, and meta descriptions well, and avoiding duplicate content and other common issues that hold a site back in search results.
- Monitoring SEO – Using tools such as Google Analytics to track a site's search problems, performance, and prominence over time.
- Using A Sitemap – Generating an HTML sitemap for visitors and an XML sitemap for search engines, so both people and crawlers can find everything on your site.
Search Engine Friendly URLs
Turning Joomla's default parameter-based URLs into clean, readable addresses, including the server-specific setup Apache and Nginx each require.
- Search Engine Friendly URLs – Enabling SEF URLs and URL rewriting in Global Configuration to turn Joomla's default parameter-based addresses into clean, readable ones.
- SEF URLs on Apache – Enabling .htaccess and mod_rewrite on an Apache server so Joomla's SEF URLs work correctly.
- SEF URLs on Nginx – Configuring an Nginx server's location directive and try_files setting so Joomla's SEF URLs work correctly.