Joomla SEO Tutorial - sh404sef Configuration

Key Takeaways

hey guys this is going to be another jumla tutorial and this video is going to be on jumla SEO and optimizing your URLs um we're going to be we're going to be using this site DJ social network um which is basically just it's a Juma 2.5 site that uses John social so it's it's a um small social network site um but the site really doesn't matter it's this is um Global no matter what site you you're using um and what we're going to do is first of all enable clean URLs um with jumla and then we're going to install sh 404 SEF which is a a great SEO component for jumla uh it'll allow us to edit our URLs and it'll allow us to um add metad data and and Page titles to any page we want really um so so the first thing you want to do is you want to go into your back end like I said this is Juma 2.5.8 so we want to go to Global configuration and by default we have search engine friendly URLs enabled so if we go to let's say DJ videos now the URL is clean there's no queries or anything but we still have this index.php uh and we don't want that we want it just be/ DJ videos so what we want to do is enable URL rewriting but in order to enable this we need to have uh mod rewrite enabled on our server um and if you have GoDaddy or HostGator or one of the big hosting companies um chances are you can do this you you most likely have a an Apache server so what you need to do is actually log into your site through FTP and this is filezilla uh if you don't know too much about this kind of stuff you should have got a welcome email from your hosting company which has your cpanel login um and possibly an FTP login but usually you can use your cpanel login as to log into FTP so you would just put your site here in the host and then your host at your cpanel or FTP username and password portch 21 but you can leave that blank so now I'm in the in the rot of DJ social network um and we want this H this HT access. text file we want to rename this we want to take the txt off the end and we have to put a dot at the beginning if we don't do this the URL the URL rewriting won't work and your site will probably break so now we want to check yes and we'll save it and go back to the front end now if we go to DJ videos you can see the index.php is gone and it's like that for all pages DJ Directory Group uh discuss okay so that's what you can do to have cleaner URLs with the core system but now when I want to do is I want to um install sh 404 SCF and I believe it's a premium extension um I don't remember exactly how much it is um but I'll put that information in the description so I mean you would ex you would install it like any other extension I mean if most of the SEO extensions cost something they have they're not free most of them the ones that I've worked with anyway um and Sh 404 SEF is prob is definitely act it's definitely the best I've ever worked with I use it on pretty much every Juma site I build unless the client wants something different so the version I have right now at this time is 3.5 so I'm going to install that and it was installed successfully so now we want to go to components uh sh 404 and then we'll go to the control panel and by default it's not enabled you have to well I guess it is enabled uh usually it isn't maybe because I had this already installed and then I reinstalled it but if this is set to no you want to set it to yes and here we can see the rewriting mode uh yeah def this is definitely um pre-selected yours will most likely say without HT access so what you want to do is change it to with HT access and then click Start so now we should be using the component instead of core jumla and if we go to our front end again and let's go to DJ videos you can see the URL is changed uh and not in a good way it it it capitalized some letters and it also um put this videos at the end what we want to do is just take this middle po out and just have it djo network.com svideos so how we would do that is we need to go back and we want to go into configuration sh 44 configuration and let's just go through some of these settings um I'm not exactly sure what we're going to do here because I haven't planned this out but I'm just going to look at them real quick and see what we want obviously we want to enable URL optimization we already did did that and we can look at some of these this right here all lowercase I I always select yes because it's just I don't URL shouldn't have capital letters uh in my opinion so I'm going to select yes for that and you can also change your say your space character uh so if you you can have a hyphen or you can use an underscore um I suggest leaving it at at hyphen just because domain names have hyphens they can't have underscores so um just keep that and shurl I don't think we need anything here no languages okay URL cache that's fine we can see we have the with HT access mode okay so that that all looks fine and you can actually change settings um for different components you can see that we have the jum social is the community um the login extension all all the modules and and components that you have installed all right so that should be it all you need to really do here is enable all lowercase so we can go test that out and that didn't work uh I'm going to do a control F5 to clear the cache huh oh that's I forgot to purge the the URLs we have to go to the URL manager and in order for it to change the URLs you can see these capital letters we have to actually clear them out um and generate new ones so you want to click Purge up in the top right hand corner it's going to give you this confirmation box and just click delete all right so now if we go back let's go to DJ videos and now you can see it's all uh lowercase because it's not going to just change it on change the URLs on the Fly you have to actually Purge it so now what we want to do is go back to the control panel and I want to see if we can get rid of this double this DJ videos and then videos again and we can actually let's see management extensions configuration that's where we want to go and we want to change this show category let's let's change that to none we don't want to show the category in the URL uh show category and categories links let's do we can keep that uncategorized [Music] items insert content table name no activate multi-page article smart titles insert article ID no okay so what this is is you'll see this jumla this is this pertains to the standard content component that jumla has which is the Articles basically the article manager so now that's jumla that should be good um for your site but we can also this site has jum social so we can also look at um certain options for for the actual jum social component so insert name main page will be pre-t okay I'm going to click no for that I don't want to insert that short URL to user profile yes insert user short name yes insert group category no because I'm pretty sure that's where that DJ videos came from insert discussion ID I'll leave that at yes video category name no insert video category no video ID that's fine all right so that should do it for this site so let's save that and go back to the URL manager and Purge all right so let's see what's changed all right so now we got rid of that DJ videos and we just have videos now if I want this to actually be DJ videos we can go to the URL manager and let's search um we'll just search for links with the word video and you can see right here is the videos link so we can actually click on that and change it to DJ videos save that and then Purge again all right so let's go back and now it's DJ videos so you can change any URL on your site that you want very easily just by using the URL manager um something that's not you can't do anything like that with jumla cor so you need an extension to do to do stuff like this and the last thing I want to show you guys is how to change metadata and Page titles uh we'll see you see this DJ videos page the title just says videos so I want to change that and if we look at the source you can see we have have no keywords and no description for for this page and technically if you're just using jumla and jum social without the the SEO extension there's really no way that you can add as far as I know there's no way you can add metadata to a page like this um I'm pretty sure I'm not going to say that that's a fact but when I want to you when I want to use metadata on pages like this um I install uh an extension so what we want to do is we can actually do it from here from the URL manager if we click on let's now search for DJ's DJ videos so we want to click on that and we can easily we just click on this title and metat tags and we can change let's just say uh we'll just change it to DJ videos and the description uh and keywords we'll just say DJ video DJ videos all right so we'll save that and if we go back and reload the title has changed and if we look at The Source um right here description and keywords all right so very easy this URL manager is great you can do so much from here um so if you're going to use an SEO extension I definitely suggest this sh 44 SEF and I'll put the the URL to it in the video description so that's it for this tutorial and I will see you in the next one