Joomla 1.5 SEO Extension Comparison

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Aug

2009

Joomla 1.5 SEO Extension Comparison

Written by Steve Burge

One of the confusing things for anyone optimizing a Joomla site is that there are so many options out there.

We ran a Joomla SEO class in Atlanta last week and one thing became clear ... it was easy to grasp that there are several SEO extensions available and several issues that they fixed with Joomla.

The problem was ... which extensions fixed which things? This chart is an attempt to make that much more straight-forward:

Joomla 1.5 SEO Extensions

	Ace SEF [-]	Artio SEF [-]	SEF Advance [-]	sh404SEF [-]	iJoomla SEO [-]	SEF Patch [-]
SEF URLs
Metadata
No-Follow
404 Pages
Cross-Linking
h1 tags
Alt tags
Price	Free with link, $19 without	Free with link, ?29 without	?40	$37	$99	Free or ?14 with extra features
Unencrypted
Overall	Very robust. Easy-to-use and has a medium number of options. Numerous plugins for other extensions.	More features than SEF Advance, easier to use than sh404SEF.	Less features but easier to use than the other SEF URL components.	The most features but also the most complexity of all three SEF URL extensions.	Useful for creating masses of metadata quickly, for example if you didn't do it while building a large site.	Good for creating metadata easily each time you add a page.

Guide to the Chart

Yes, the extensions have other features, but these are the ones that we consider to be most important:

SEF URLs: Turn Joomla's long and winding URLs into /about-us/ or /services/
Metadata: Get more comprehensive control over titles, descriptions and keywords
No-Follow: Block selected pages from being indexed by search engines
404 Pages: A clear error page from where visitors who arrive at broken links can browse to other site pages
Cross-Linking: Linking between pages with keyword text
h1 tags: Surrounding the article titles with
tags to indicate their importance
Alt tags: Automatically applying descriptive titles to images
Encrypted: Is the extension code hidden or locked to one domain?

Conclusion

SEF Advance, Artio SEF and sh404SEF can control your URLs and 404 pages. However, their metadata options are often fiddly and difficult to manage.

I often recommend that people use one of those extensions for their URLs and then manage their metadata via iJoomla SEO or the SEF Patch, both of which are specifically designed for handling metadata.

Comments

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#1 cheryl ampel 2009-08-24 15:17

Steve, this is just what we were looking for! This helps tremendously. Thanks.

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#2 Cory Webb 2009-08-24 15:55

Great article Steve. Thanks for the comparisons.

For "Encrypted", you should replace the icons with the words "Yes" and "No". The check makes it seem like being encrypted is a positive attribute and not being encrypted is negative. I would even consider putting "Yes" in red and "No" in green.

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#3 Brian Teeman 2009-08-24 16:04

Interesting that you find sh404sef the most complex. Always seemed very obvious to me. (But then I've never tried the rest)

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#4 John B 2009-08-24 16:16

I think the security features of sh404sef should be mentioned personally!

I always put sh404sef and the joomlatwork sef patch (paid version) on every site i build.

They are great.

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#5 Joseph LeBlanc 2009-08-24 17:16

I agree with Cory. You could possibly change that category to "Unencrypted" if you wanted to stick with icons.

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#6 Merav K 2009-08-24 17:38

Hi Steve, thanks for including iJoomla SEO. It's important to understand that iJoomla SEO is not a SEF extension like the others on the list. It's meant to help you SEO your site quickly and easily (meaning - creating the metatags, monitoring them and keywords, etc.). In addition to the features listed here, I believe the strongest new feature we have is Keywords monitoring - you can see how your keywords are doing on Google (are they up or down?) and what's their rank on Google. There are tones of other cool features that you can find out more about on our site.

Also, we do have "no follow" feature if you use the redirects feature to create redirect links

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#7 Bill Watkins 2009-08-24 17:57

Great chart. Thanks for sharing!

I'm curious on all your thoughts: as far as encrypted vs. unencrypted, which is better? And why?

Thanks.

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#8 Steve Burge 2009-08-24 18:04

Thanks guys - I've flipped the chart so that unencrypted get the thumbs up.

Merav - great work in iJoomla SEO, its really coming along wonderfully.

Bill - unecrypted, absolutely no question about it. Imagine driving a car and having the hood soldered shut. Something goes wrong, you can't get in there to fix.

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#9 Rick Blalock 2009-08-24 19:58

good article.

I personally like Artio.

Maybe another feature worth noting is JoomFish compatibility. Not sure the others come with it but some of the JoomFish integration with Artio is nice.

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