Is Joomla SEO Friendly?

I’ve always been a fan of the Joomla CMS system, well, for as long as it’s been around anyway. However, having more recently become more involved with SEO I’ve come across many individuals, Search marketing specialists and developers who claim that Joomla isn’t very search engine friendly and that other CMS systems, WordPress in particular, are more effective. As usual when faced with this sort of conflict of opinion, I decided to do some research and have a look what others have to say. Here is what I found out…

The fact is, when a Joomla website is used correctly, it is just as effective SEO-wise as any other CMS or regular website. Yes, in its most simple state it is not very effective, but this can be overcome by simply installing the Joomla sh404sef which effectively deals with clean URL’s and URL re-writing. It is extremely important though that you correctly use the SEF module from day 1 as this Joomla module does not re-write existing links to a web page that has recently changed its URL.

I found this article at easysiteguide that brilliantly explains how to install and configure the Joomla sh404sef module for optimum search engine results in Joomla. I also recently found out that there is a new Joomla module being released soon which promises to be even more effective than the current SEF module. Find out more information here.

Once you have undertaken the simple task of setting up your Joomla installation for SEO compliance then there really isn’t much difference between the search engine effectiveness of Joomla websites compared to WordPress. I personally prefer using Joomla for setting up actual websites as I find most Joomla templates to be more “website-looking” and less “bloggy-looking” than WordPress sites. Obviously, if you’re a PHP expert you can tweak these templates to look the way you’d like them to look, but for someone like me who has limited coding and design experience, I find Joomla to be a bit more flexible and easier to customize than WordPress. For simpler blogs however, I do still enjoy using WordPress as it’s just a little more mainstream and many bloggers who will be using the system are already familiar with the CMS.

It really is up to you though whether you decide to utilize a Joomla website or WordPress, or any other CMS out there. Just be assured that you do not need to believe all the rumours you hear about Joomla’s SEO effectiveness as it is really is to optimize.