If you haven't done so already, you need to head to Joomlacode.org and download Andrew Eddie's presentation on Joomla 1.6. Its also on video at Vimeo. After reading, I'm more encouraged about Joomla's future than I have been for months.

The presentation has 39 detailed slides, so I won't try to recap them all - look for that in a blog post next week. Today, I'll focus on what's important from an SEO perspective:

Slide 9: URLs Will Change

No surprise. I can't say this enough - if you want to build your site for the long-term, you need to be using some kind of Search Engine Friendly URLs. If you don't, you'll always have problems when you need to upgrade or migrate.

Slide 33: Redirect Component

This allows you to find broken links and redirect them to a valid page. This has been fairly widely available in other components, but if done right it could be a useful addition to the core. A couple of suggestions:

• Allow people to search the errors by the number of times they've been visited
• Bring the 404 page inside Joomla so it can be edited easily

Slide 24 and 34: Metadata

Slide 24 shows an additional field in the metadata "Alternative Page Title". Brilliant! This was Joomla's major metadata weakness and it looks like its been solved. Essentially this should allow you have a human-friendly title on the page: "10 Reasons Why Joomla 1.6 Will Rock Your World" and have another keyword-laden title appear in Google's results: "Joomla 1.6 Improvements Metadata and SEF URLS"

Slide 34 promises "custom metadata solutions" but how that works wasn't shown in the presentation.

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