The developers of Joomla are aware of the importance of good Web site ranking. They have provided a number of options for a Joomla site to make itself as SEF as possible. By spending a little time with configuration settings and a little due diligence when posting new content, you can use the Joomla features to increase the opportunities of your site and to obtain high placement on the search sites.

With the adjustment of only a few global options, Joomla implements the changes for all the rendered con- tent pages. As usual, implementing these features in Joomla requires only a few clicks in the Administrator interface.

Metadata
One of the most important unseen aspects of SEO is the use of proper metadata information. Metadata is information about information. In the case of Web sites, metadata is article descriptions, keywords, and site information that is invisible to site visitors but is picked up by the search engine spiders. If you’ve looked at the source code for the header portion of a common Web page, you may have seen tags like these:

<meta   http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html;  charset=iso-8859-1”>

<meta   name=”description”  content=”Filmmaking is a  site focused on  Nuts  and  Bolts

Filmmaking  including storytelling, shooting tips, motion graphics, film  technology,

3D  rendering, and   all  aspects of movie   creation.”>

<meta   name=”GENERATOR”  content=”Microsoft  FrontPage 4.0”>

<meta   name=”keywords” content=”filmmaking,  movies, DV,  MiniDV,   Hollywood,

low-budget,  guerilla, shooting,  production design,  cinematography, art  direction, cameraman, HD,  VX2000,  VX2100,  Sony, GL1,  GL2,  XL1,  XL2,  Maya,   3D,  design, film critique,  discussion, film links, free,  articles”>

<meta   name=”ProgId” content=”FrontPage.Editor.Document”

This HTML code is metadata information about the Web site. You can see that the description metadata provides a summary of the page. The keywords metadata details search terms that are most relevant to the contents of the page. The ProgID and Generator are the page construction information (which is seldom used for site ranking). All of this data is recorded by the search engine spider and used in various degrees to understand and rank the Web site.

Site Metadata
The metadata for the Web site itself can be set in the Global Configuration screen. In the Metadata Settings frame shown in Figure 13-2, the metadata properties for the description and keywords may be set. This metadata is included on every page that is not an article. Descriptively setting this metadata is important, since it will provide information about the home page.

Article Metadata
In Joomla, each article holds the metadata properties in the Metadata Information pane of the Article Editor. The metadata properties allow you to set the description, keywords, robot settings, and author acknowledgment. These items will be included in the section of the HTML rendered uniquely for each displayed article.

In the past, the text contained in the keywords section was very important because the keywords were used by the search engines to properly categorize the page. No more. Spammers have abused keywords so often and so extensively that many of the search engines almost entirely ignore this metadata today. Nonetheless, most search sites still record this information, so it is useful to spend a small amount of time including keywords relevant to the page.

The most critical metadata for each article is the page description. While the keywords metadata has diminished in importance, most search engines still mine the description for keywords that relate to the site. Almost equally as important, search engines often use the description metadata to provide a brief summary of the page in the results section of a search. For example, for the metadata presented in the earlier section “Metadata,” you can see that the site’s listing on Google uses that description metadata to describe the site. Therefore, the description field is an opportunity for you to sell your site to potential visitors.

Activating  Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are the links that allow the user to understand and navigate the Web site hierarchically. If the visitor has jumped into the middle of your Web site (did not enter through the home page), the breadcrumbs will allow the user to ascend to any organizational level above the current page. Since breadcrumbs provide internal site referential links, they aid the search engine spiders in under- standing the order of your Joomla site.

Joomla includes the Breadcrumbs module that will automatically create breadcrumbs for displaying on each Web page. Any template that includes this module will properly display the article’s location in the hierarchy.

You’ll find the breadcrumbs module in the Module Manager. It includes a number of parameters that will determine how it functions, including the Text Separator. If the Text Separator field is left empty, the default double arrow (>>) is used.

Sitemap
The more navigation aids that you can provide to the search engine spider, the more likely your content will be found and listed prominently on the search site. A sitemap is a tool that can help both your users and the spiders find everything on your site. Like a master index, the link to the sitemap is usually one of the lower items listed on the main navigation menu. Fortunately, there are a number of Joomla extensions that provide automatic sitemap generation.

Joomla Sitemap Extensions
There are a number of extensions on the Joomla site (extensions.joomla.org) that will create a sitemap of the Joomla system. Probably the most widely used and the most popular is an extension called Joomap. The Joomap extension uses the stylesheets from the currently selected default template to display the sitemap in the site style.

Joomap will create a sitemap that includes the normal menu structure, categories, sections, and even Virtuemart categories (if you have that extension installed). Joomap will also output a sitemap in the XML format that Google Sitemaps requires. There are also a number of plug-ins for Joomap that will allow it to index content from other Web applications such as Gallery2.

Google Sitemaps
Google offers an online sitemap service that will automatically create and maintain the sitemap for you. Most Joomla sitemap components (including Joomap) use the Google API to integrate the Google Sitemap into the Joomla system. The Google Sitemap will help optimize the page spider to understand your site.

You can access more information on the Google Sitemap here:  www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemaps