Top 5 Free Joomla SEO Extension Unleashed

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system, which is used in over 30 million websites, with over 200,000 community users and has endless amounts of extensions. This renowned platform offers a vast array of easy-to-use and free extensions that will enable you to optimize your website quickly and make it search engine friendly, faster. In this blog post, I will introduce you to five free and remarkable Joomla extensions with which you can improve the search ranking of your website easily.

1. JoomSEF

An Overview

• Developer: ARTIO
• Latest version available: f4.4.4
• Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, Joomla 3.x
• Last Updated: Aug 29, 2013

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JoomSEF is a powerful SEO extension that helps you to generate search engine friendly (SEF) URLs for your Joomla website with great ease. Search engines prefer to those web-pages, which have simple and keyword-rich URLs but not those with URLs consisting of meaningless words and phrases. This extension not only makes your URLs search engine friendly but also makes them comprehensible to humans too that boosts your visitor numbers. The JoomSEF extension is an absolute must-have for anyone running a website based on Joomla platform.

Main features:

• Advanced SEF URL management
• Keywords management
• Generate and manage metadata (component- based)
• Can override default metadata generated by component or Joomla (title, meta-tags)
• Duplicates management
• 3rd level domain support
• UTF-8 URLs support
• URL caching
• 301 Redirections management
• 404 Page Not Found customization
• Online upgrades and extension installations

2. Tag Meta

An Overview

• Developer: selfget.com
• Latest version available: 1.7.2 Community
• Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, Joomla 3.x
• Last Updated: Mar 20, 2013

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Tag Meta is a powerful extension, which is widely used to manage the meta-information of a website efficiently, in this way it greatly improves website positioning in searching result list. With the help of this tool, users can easily set title tag and meta tag description, keywords, author, robots, content rights and external reference. In addition to this, this extension also supports for macros that means the user can generate meta-information dynamically for each webpage. This extension comes with support for an ontology database of synonyms, which allows generating and adding new synonyms of existing keywords automatically in any webpage.

Main features:

• Support for Robots options Index, Follow, Archive, Snippet, Odp, and Image Index
• Case-sensitive option on the matching source URLs
• Use of regular expressions into matching rules
• Request only option to match the full URL or just the REQUEST_URI part
• Last rule option to break application of matching rule
• Support for placeholders
• Use of macros to specify meta info (dynamic meta info, 33 macros)

3. SEOSimple

An Overview

• Developer: Dao By Design/Ryan McLaughlin
• Latest version available: 2.2
• Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, Joomla 3.x
• Last Updated: Apr 2, 2014

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SEOSimple is considered as one of the best Joomla SEO extensions and it automatically generates description meta-tags by pulling text from the content to help with SEO. For the best SEO results, it is quite important that your meta-descriptions, which are the snippet that appears below the blue link in Google search, contain text that is relevant to each webpage’s contents. Filling in descriptions for every page can be a tough task, which is why Joomla experts incorporate this extension into every website they build. This extension automatically uses a chunk of text from the top of each webpage as its meta-description. In addition to this, downloading and installing SEOSimple takes no more than 2 minutes, but it could save you hours in the long-run.

Main Features:

• Helps to arrange the positions of the Site title and Custom title so the keywords will be in the positions you want
• Gives the ability to set different title configurations
• Ability to customize how the front page meta-description is handled
• Ability to set ROBOTS Meta “noindex, follow” for category pages
• One can easily customize the front page of site’s title tag in a number of different ways

4. Xmap

An Overview

• Developer: Guillermo Vargas
• Latest version available: 2.3.4
• Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, Joomla 3.x
• Last Updated: Nov 10, 2013

Statistics have shown that a website that contains sitemap has a higher ranking on various search engines as compared to the one that lacks it. Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website and creating it helps any search engine to know about all the pages on your website, including URLs that may not be discoverable by search engines’ normal crawling process. After installing Xmap, you can stay stress-free about the generation of a well-defined sitemap for your site. This Joomla extension automatically generates an easy-to-interpret sitemap for your website based on the structure of your website’s menus. Further, this extension also shows some statistical information for each sitemap such as last visit date, number of links generated on the last visit and number of visits.

Main Features:

• Capability to create more than one sitemap with different preferences for each sitemap
• Generation of XML sitemaps that are compatible with Yahoo, Google, Bing and others
• Cache system to allow a fastest sitemap generation
• Ideal for large or high traffic sites
• Easy to enable or disable this feature independently for each sitemap
• Option to compress the XML sitemap
• Better presentation of the XML sitemap on browsers

5. EFSEO – Easy Frontend SEO

An Overview

• Developer: Viktor Vogel
• Latest version available: 2.5-8 / 3-2
• Compatibility: Joomla 2.5, Joomla 3.x
• Last Updated: Feb 13, 2014

Download

EFSEO is an SEO extension (consisting of a backend component and a system plugin) for Joomla that helps you to control all important metadata. Metadata is descriptive information about a particular object, data set, or resource, including how it is formatted, and by whom and when it was collected. EFSEO extension makes handling of the metadata quite easy, as with this extension you can change and add meta information (description, title, keywords, generator and robots) without difficulty at the front end. The best part of this extension is it remains active on every page of a Joomla installation and may be used correspondingly. Further, this extension does not change or delete given Joomla data and the original data is used until you alter them with the extension.

Main Features:

• Automatic Mode- Metadata are generated automatically for certain extensions or via the global settings
• Data may be assigned to every given page, regardless which extension is in use
• Two different styles: Modal window and Top bar
• Define a global title attribute, global generator attribute and global robots attribute
• Word and characters counter
• Set maximum number of characters for title and description
• Meta data is assigned using internal URLs – independent of SEF URLs
• Its backend component allows you to edit and add entries directly in the backend

I recommend you to analyze your website prior to installing a Joomla SEO extension. An organized extension installation will definitely work in your favor and immensely help you to improve your visitors count and sales. Last, but not least, do keep in mind that website search engine optimization is not a one-time activity; it is a constant work in progress. If you want your SEO efforts to be a success than you should measure it on a regular basis.