This may appear quite a bold statement, but it's true - a totally standard joomla site will often suffer poor rankings in comparison to a flat html file competitor. This is down to the fact that with joomla it's hard to polish the seo basics such as title tags, SEF urls, meta descriptions and 'noindex' robot tags.

It's fair to say that of the four problems I've mentioned three of them can be handled using alternative components to sh404SEF. The point I want to get across is that sh404SEF can do all of these, far easier, and also allow you to control your title tags - the single most important factor in SERPs rankings.

Control over title tags is lacking in joomla, severely lacking. If you want to invest some time in your site today, install sh404SEF. Once you have properly configured sh404SEF, and gained some key inlinks, you will see a marked increase in traffic to your site.

Here are some quick steps to configure sh404SEF on your site:

• 1. Note down the urls of your main pages in your site, the ones you want to rank well - not just the homepage. If you have a relatively small site you could do all pages.
• 2. Note down a second list of urls, these are ones that you don't want to be included in the SERPs - contact page, terms and conditions, privacy policy, lost password pages etc etc.
• 3. Use free keyword tools to create some optimized page titles and meta descriptions for the chosen pages. This is something that shouldn't be rushed - the more time you can afford to spend researching keywords the better.
• 4. Find the urls in sh404SEF, if there are any duplicated urls use the function to select the main url to be used. In all duplicate urls the only difference will be the itemid, ensure you chose the correct itemid for module display.
• 5. Select the urls you want to rank in turn and add the new titles and descriptions to each. Ensure you keep titles to the magic 66 characters that Google displays.
• 6. Select all of the urls that you do not want to include in the SERPs in turn and add 'noindex, follow' in to the robots tag. This will ensure that you do not leak pagerank unnecessarily and thus strengthening your other pages.

Now all you need to do is gain links to your site, both to the homepage and deep links to the sub pages.

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