The following tutorial will provide you with a basic overview to enabling the search engine friendly URLs for the latest release of Joomla 1.5

The Joomla! project team have introduced a number of improvements in Joomla 1.5 from an SEO prespective.

The following outlined below are just some of the improvements.

• You can now enable search engine friendly URL's without using Apache Mod_Rewrite
• You can add a suffix (.html) to the URLs
• The Global site name, global site meta description or global site keywords are no longer automatically added to each content item
• Content titles, meta descriptions and keywords are unique to each content item

Xenu Sleuth is a very useful free application for crawling and checking internal or external domain web links on your Joomla! web site.  Xenu Sleuth will basically do a complete scan of your Joomla! Site and produce a report to highlight any broken web links which you can then fix to improve your search engine rankings.

After many months of hard work and development the Joomla community have announced the long awaited stable version of Joomla 1.5  Joomla 1.5 has been redeveloped from the ground up to include some major coding and architecture changes plus it includes a new API offering more flexability for the 3rd party component and Joomla Templates

For more information visit the web links below.

Joomla 1.5 Overview

Joomla 1.5 Download

Joomla 1.5 Installation Manual

We are happy to announce a number of Search engine tools which will assit you to optimize your Joomla! web site for a number of search engines including Google, Yahoo ( Overture ) plus MSN and more.

This tutorial will provide you with guide during the development and search engine optimization of your Joomla web site.

The information covered in this article may help you improve your search engine rankings.

The aim of this article is to provide you a basic overview to SEF  (search engine friendly URL's) for Joomla 1.x and to outline the benefits  of using SEF for the Joomla Open source content management system (CMS)

SEF - Search engine friendly URL's

By default the Joomla SEF functionality is not enabled which basically mean's the url's displayed via your web site will look  like this http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_weblinks&Itemid=23

There are a number of disadvantages in SEO terms  for not enabling search engine friendly URL's which include.

Joomla is recognized as one of the most popular open source content management systems ( CMS) on the internet today and is the ideal open source solution for individuals, small business or large enterprises who wish to take advantage of the benefits Joomla can bring.

Some of the benefits Joomla has to offer include the following

1) Active Joomla Support Community

Joomla is growing at a fast pace with one of the most active development communities in the Open Source arena who provide support via the official Joomla forum where you can contribute or post questions which get answered by members of the community. The forum currently has over 10,000 active members and there is always someone willing to help if you have a question.

2) One going development for Joomla

The core Joomla development team are very active releasing new and enhanced versions of the content management system. Over the past few months the core development team have released over 5 new version releases of Joomla to the community based on enhancements, security fixes and more. This mean’s you not only do you get a great CMS but you also have the knowledge that something new and exciting could be released making it even better.

3) Joomla Templates

As with components and modules you also install a Joomla template which can transform the look and feel of your web site with a click of a button. All you have to do it find a template you like, download it and apply it to your content management system ( CMS ). Many of the templates come with predefined module positions so you can display module’s in various different positions.

4) Joomla Components & Modules

Due to the popularity and flexibility of Joomla’s modular architecture you find a wide range of components and associated modules which are being developed by various 3^rd party team’s and can be downloaded for free under GPL or purchased for a small price to bring additional functionality to your web site. This is one of the big benefits and selling points Joomla has to offer, the fact that you can find nearly any component or module which meets your requirements and then just download and plug it into your content management system.