There is something about Content Management System that is fundamentally not friendly with Search Engines. That is the default URL of the CMS contains dynamic variables. What I mean is that for a normal webpage say www.mywebsite.com/about_us.html, what would appear for a CMS would be www.mywebsite.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=2.
What the hell is that long string of weird stuffs!?
Oh well, you can look at it this way: www.mywebsite.com/about_us.html is actually referring to a file called about_us.html on the website www.mywebsite.com. That's how traditional websites are built. One file by one file.
Onto the modern technology highway, CMS does not really create files for its web pages. It stores its web pages in database so there are actually no files for your web pages. Therefore, when you are requesting a web page from the CMS, the URL is a weird string of www.mywebsite.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=2 where the string actually translated to load up the web page id number 18 from the database to show to the user.
Ok so what does this has to do with SEO? There are two things that matter. Firstly, the words in the URL contributes to your ranking in the search engine! For example, if someone is searching for "dog diet", the URL www.website.com/dog_diet.html will have a higher ranking than www.website.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=18 (all things equal). Oh no! CMS is really going to have a hard time in SEO.
The second thing is that bots and spiders might not go to links that contain dynamic variables as they could be an endless loop of inter-links. You can don't care about the technically of it but just know that the search engines dislike URL like this www.website.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=18 and may not even index your web pages! Now CMS is really really going down in SEO.
So what's there to talk about for Joomla SEO? Oh well, technology is always such that if there's a problem, there's a solution. =) You can solve the URL problem easily by using this component called NuSEF. You can check it out here. Download the component and install it. This component does a very neat thing of rewriting all your URL from the ugly www.website.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=18 to www.website.com/dog_diet.html! How this component work can be quite technical and not much point to discuss in here. The point here is to let you understand the importance of a nice and meaningful URL and how to achieve it in Joomla.
Now Joomla websites can compete with other websites and you still get to enjoy the benefits of a CMS! Best of both worlds!
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