Good Page Titles & Clean URLs in Joomla

OK so you have a Joomla site, your server has got .Htaccess support, you have turned on Search Engine Friendly URLS (SEF) and you’ve successfully installed and activated sh404sef so you can start automatically converting dynamically generated urls into something that is more ‘readable’.

Now your Joomla site produces nice clean url names that humans and Google can make a bit more sense of. But sometimes your urls can still get a bit long, and still get a bit messy, because Joomla will automatically use the all the words your page title to create a URL for the page.

A tip I use is to take out ‘Stop Words’, common words that Google encounters everywhere, and that can be of limited use. For instance, see the example below.

Easy Joomla Urls

In Joomla you have two options immediately when creating a new page in the CMS.

* Title - The actual title of your new page ie ‘Website Design in Glasgow’ with the important keywords being ‘website‘, ‘design‘ and ‘Glasgow‘, not ‘in‘. See here for ‘how many words in the title tag for Google‘.
* Title Alias - This is the actual URL you will create, otherwise Joomla will use the Title of your page as the url (much the same as Wordpress does in ‘Permalinks’, too)

….so as you can see, in the file name, I often remove the stop words in my title if it suits my purposes, and leave only my keywords in the URL.

Of course, on many pages, this is all you need to do to ensure a good page title and a clean, Google friendly URL, but of course, on some pages, you’ll want to over-ride these basic options using sh404sef and create titles for your page that don’t exactly match the article headline in the ‘Title’ field.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds to create clean urls you have full control of in Joomla.