Joomla 1.5 SEO Extension Comparison

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:

{moschart id=28}

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.

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