Joomla has built-in SEO functionality to optimize your website. Before going through the steps, you need to install latest version of Joomla along with proper configuration.

When you install Joomla, search engine friendly URLs are not on by default, you need to configure it. Joomla Search Engine Friendly URLs is for Apache server only. It uses mod_rewrite module for pointing server to the right file along with PHP.

There are a few popular SEF components like sh404SEF, ARTIO JoomSEF and SEF Advance that rewrites Joomla URL too. JoomSEF component will rewrite your Joomla! URLs not to be only Search Engine Friendly, but also to be human easily understandable. Provides support for multilingual sites using JoomFish. Native support for following 3rd party components like AdsManager,  AlphaContent, Community Builder, SOBI2 and more.

There are some good plugins that help improve Joomla SEO and content metadata. SEOSimple plugin takes the starting chunk of text from the page’s content and use it as the meta description tag in the page’s head. it is important that these meta descriptions have relevant text related to the page’s content. Search engines often use a Web page’s meta description in the SERPs.

If you’re not using automated metadata plugin describe above, then you need the Missing Metadata module. This module adds a panel to the Control Panel of the Joomla Administrator interface that lists any published articles that have empty meta description or meta keyword fields. Search engines use the meta description text as the summary text for site-listings displayed in search results. Any articles that fails to include this metadata will suffer in their web presence and search engine ranking. After installation, be sure to active the module in the Module Manager > Administrator modules pane and set the position to CPanel so the module will appear properly.

In modern day web marketing, having a beautiful website is never sufficient to attract hundreds of targeted visitors to your website. Search Engine Optimization helps your website to getting exposure to millions of users around the world. Therefore, the usability and benefits of this activity cannot be denied. Whether you decide to pay a company to promote your website or you choose to learn SEO on your own, search engine optimization is not optional.