JoomlaEXPO: Search Engine Friendly URLs - Azrul.com

Creating search engine optimized url for your component Azrul Rahim www.azrul.com

Why Bother ?
Search engines analyze your URLs for keywords, and will highlight it in the result
avoid duplicate content issues
Default Joomla SEF url are very common
URL should be friendly to us, HUMAN.
Better click through rate
visitor know what to expect
Make your site looks more professional!
http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-urls/in-defense-of-search-engine-friendly-urls/

Joomla 1.0 approach to SEF-url
3 rd party component required
SEFAdvance
OpenSEF
sh404SEF
Each one uses different approach
Need to maintain separate plug-in for each component.

Joomla 1.5 and SEF url
SEF-url engine comes built-in with every installation of Joomla !
Works with/without mod_rewrite
Nice human-readable url
Not as flexible as 3 rd party component
No url caching

sef-url in Joomla 1.5
Backend config
Specify menu title alias
Some limitations
No choice over url suffix. One will be assigned automatically.
Potential multiple link to the same content
If multiple menu item use the same link title, only the first will be accessible

2 approach in SEF rewriting
No caching, logic-based syetem.
create and resolve url on the fly
Cached url system

1. Non-caching
(my preferred technique)
Able to resolve url that has never been used before
Twice the amount of work to develop the plugins
Example
OpenSEF
sefAdvance
Joomla 1.5 default
SmartSEF

2. Cached url system
url are created and saved
Little overhead to parse the url, need a single database call
Normally require only the code to ‘create’ the url
url has to be created first, otherwise it cannot be resolved
Can break your site, damage your SEO ranking when cached cleared
sh404SEF
smartSEF

Creating sef-url for your component
Plan your url
List down all your required normal url
List down how they should look like, SEF-ed
Tips
“ Human readable!”
Meaningful, with a hint of the content
Contain targeted keywords

Create a file ‘router.php’ in your component folder
Create 2 function within router.php
function [Com name]BuildRoute( &$query )
function [Com name]ParseRoute( $segments)

… BuildRoute(&$query)
Take a reference to an array
$query is built from JRoute::_(…) function call, split-up into array
Return value should be an array,
$segments = array() $segments[]=‘path1'; $segments[]='path2'; $segments[]='file';
Will create path1/path2/file.html
Need to unset all variables that you have assign a segment

Notes & gotchas
Do not add ‘.html’ to your SEF url, Joomla will add this automatically if required.
Create a menu entry to use component ‘alias’ . Otherwise, it will show as ‘/components/com_name/…’
Alias has to be unique. If there is a duplicate, only the first link will be accessible

… ParseRoute($segments)
Called to resolve the segment-based url to their original url
Given an array with url segment
Return array of actual $_GET values

Notes…
Joomla convert the first dash ‘-’ to ‘:’
There is no reliable way to encode/decode url that might contain combination of dash and double colon
Where do we specify Itemid ? . Don’t worry, menu alias will take care of it!

Other alternative
SmartSEF ( www.smartsef.org )
Each sef plugin can have their own params
Sitemap support
Some security check
SEFAdvance
Sh404
H1 tags
SEF Patch (joomlatwork.com)
(metadata/no-follow)

Questions & Discussions
Please ask questions…
www.azrul.com

JoomlaEXPO: Search Engine Friendly URLs - Azrul.com

by John Coonen on May 22, 2008

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