I work on a site that is built in Joomla and I need help with the SEO.

The site already had the SH404SF component installed when I inherited it but it was necessary to control the meta data and title tag info by installing the SEF Patch extended mambot. This however caused problems as the two worked against each other and caused the URLs to redirect. I therefore had to switch off the SH404SF mambot off for this to stop.

The problem is now that the site generates very SE un-friendly URLs which cause constant errors in Webmaster Tools. It shows 404 errors and unreachable URLs constantly as well as sitemap errors. I have corrected them but it still shows up in errors. The SEO is proving a great challenge for this site.

I was wondering if anyone knows the best way to control the SEO for Joomla and also if there are any suggestions as to how I can get the SE friendly URLs back? The Joomla forums don't seem to offer any help.

Cheers 
Stu

I use sh404SEF on all of my Joomla sites (dozens and dozens of sites). It is the best SEF component out there, but it can be a pain to work with until you get the hange of it.

If you want to get rid of sh404 SEF you need to do more than remove the component. You'll need to go in to the database and delete all of the tables (or at least purge the data from) all of the tables related to that component.

BACK UP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE ATTEMPTING ANY CHANGES!


It takes all of 15 seconds to login to login to PHPMyAdmin and back up a database. Don't skip this step.

BTW, controlling the metadata and title tags are easy with sh404SEF. First off, I suggest that you also use the Missing Metadata Module so you can quickly spot the pages where you don't have description and keyword tags completed. It's always easier to enter the meta KW and description in the article or page itself.

If you want to control the title tags and / or edit the KW and description tags in sh404SEF in the component go to:

1. View / Edit SEF URLS

2. Select the URL you want to change by checking the appropriate box

3. Click the 'New Meta' button at the top of the page

The big thing about using sh404SEF (and and SEO component) is you have to watch the paths you create to each page. If you create more than one menu path you create more than one SEF URL, and depending upon how yuor site is constructed that could cause problems with modules displaying on those pages.

which version of joomla are you running? i think one of the more recent updates had the equivilent of an seo patch added to it and you really can control a lot from each article and from the menu items.

try re-building your menu, turning on sef should be the first thing you do basically, then build the menu