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Home / Joomla News / Final SEO Whitepapers for Joomla 1.6

Apr

2008

Final SEO Whitepapers for Joomla 1.6

Written by Steve Burge

Whitepapers for Joomla 1.6 Last month we mentioned that Joomla was asking for whitepapers suggesting improvements for Joomla 1.6. So we got together some smart folk and came up with some SEO proposals.

Thanks to everyone involved, and please head over to the Joomla forums to post your opinions about these various ideas.

1) Page Title and Site Name

Joomla currently arranges the page title as site name first and article name second. An option to toggle this option would be good, even the option to not display site name at all or use the Title Alias.

2) Table-less HTML Output

Joomla should output table-less html for its regular content display. Currently, this is only possible through template override feature, which means every template author has to redo the job for every new template.

3) Sitemap

Option of an automatically generated XML and HTML sitemap. The location of the sitemap.xml to be included in robots.txt.

4) Metadata Control

Give the site owner full control over the META data settings as is currently the case within the SEF patch for Joomla 1.5. This also includes full control over showing the generator tag and the content of the generator tag.

5) Canonicolization

Making sure that Google doesn't treat www.example.com and example.com as different domains.

6) Rename Global Configuration Metadata

Alter the name and usage of "Global Site Meta Keywords" and "Global Site Meta Description" from Global Configuration, because by its very definition, the same metadata cannot apply to each page. Its like giving the same title and description to every book in the library.

7) Numerical IDs in URLs

Neccesary for inclusion in Google News, the URL should be optionnaly prefixed with a numerical id, consisting of a creation date number, plus a unique id. Example : mysite.com/20080309/212/page-title.html. This URL should not vary when the page content is updated, to keep the url consistent.

8) 404 Pages

Ability to create custom 404 pages as content items.

9) Semantic Pages

Improvement of the default output markup generated in order to comply with W3C (X)HTML recommendations (both in terms of validation and of semantics). Also, the addition of more high-level semantics such as Microformats

10) Concept of "Pages"

The idea is to introduce the concept of Pages into the administration of a Joomla! site. From the backend, an administrator would be able to manage the structure of the site using the page manager.
The page manager would link into the menu manager, module manager and content manager, and present the administrator with a single place to go to manage the structure, behaviour and content of the site.

11) Multi-Page Article Heading

Multi-pages articles are created using the "page break" button. A single article is divided by Joomla automatically in several pages, with a nice Table of content also automatically generated. With such an article:

Each page should have its own sef url, including the current page individual title
The html page title should also be different on each individual page, reflecting the title entered by the user in the backend

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Your Comments (15)

Ulas ALKAN

April 02, 2008

Hi Steve;

All the list looks great but dont you think that section/category/title-contentID.html can be a better alternative for joomla sites.

Regards

guido

April 02, 2008

If you look at today's GSoC projects article on joomla.org, these seem priorities for J! developers:
SEF URLs, URL Migrations, Transliteration, and 404/403 Error Handling
In my opinion, a good sitemap extension already exists (it only lacks popularity among users, maybe...), and semantics would require an entirely new version (2.0?), it is far too complex!

Herbert-Jan van Dinther

April 02, 2008

@Steve: Great Job on publishing all thise Joomla SEO Wiki items on the Forum, in my opinion these options are all great.
But if we could only get 50% of it in the new version (think Joomlatwork.com Patch) Joomla could be one of the most flexible SEO CM System today!

Steve Burge

April 02, 2008

Thanks guys for the positive words.

This was the work of half-a-dozen people all chipping in, and if we could get 50% of this done, it would be great.

Guido - I think you're right. We may see the simpler tasks complete in 1.6 and the more complex left for later.

Willebil

April 02, 2008

We appreciate the effort that has gone into this, but it was easier for us to receive a fully written white paper, we know need to select all the individual proposals and with more then 150 whitepapers that is an enourmous job.

we currently are processing all feedback, and there is way more then can go into a new minor release. As soon as we have processed the feedback we will communicate this asap.

Cory Webb

April 02, 2008

For Table-less HTML output, honestly, I like the template override. The template designer should be overriding the HTML output for every site because not every site will use the same HTML structure. I like to remove the column feature in the content component in some templates because it adds complexity to the HTML and is unnecessary for the design of the template.

I agree though that the default output should be table-less, but I don't think that should take away the need for template designers to have complete control over the HTML output.

Steve Burge

April 02, 2008

Hi Wilco - thanks indeed for coming over and posting here.

Over 150 whitepapers sure requires a lot of effort. Even in this small SEO list there are certainly some things here that are too big for 1.5 or not suitable for the core.

Best wishes for 1.6!

Affiliates

April 04, 2008

When is 1.6 due to be released?

Steve Burge

April 04, 2008

I believe we're looking at around 2 to 3 months for 1.6.

eric

April 04, 2008

Looks to be a lot of improvement in 1.6! Can't wait for it!

Will it be possible to upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6 even with all the new SEO features?

Jason Boyette

April 04, 2008

I like #1, 3, and 5, and they all seem pretty easy.

Mark Simpson

April 07, 2008

Amazing work Steve and the others who contributed to this white paper. Thank you.

Highest on my wishlist is the tableless output If Joomla was tableless but still with the option of overriding output at the template level, that would be a dream.

Looking forward to 1.6 and beyond :

Stephen Moseley

April 29, 2008

Hmmm,

Was looking at this thread on Table-less HTML on the forum: http://forum.joomla.org/viewto...&sk=t&sd=a

Seems like there is some resistance to flipping around the status quo - default to standards compliant XHTML and have overrides for tangential cases. It seems like the work is done for the Beez template so it is a bit puzzling to me.

I guess it is the designer in me talking, but I guess that it would be high on my priority list to get Joomla completely table-less by default. I would think the list of "table-less" CMSes would be pretty short. It would be great to get Joomla on that list.

I'm sure there are other priorities they are focusing on though....

Steve

Yannick Gaultier

April 30, 2008

Hi Stephen,
I just added the table-less output for Joomla regular content to sh404SEF (activated by a param). Test release will be out today or tomorrow. If it works well, I'll probably extract it and make an independent plugin.

Rgds

Yannick Gaultier

April 30, 2008

And I removed the need for Legacy plugin as well

Rgds