Getting sh404SEF was easy. You could download it from http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/sh404sef/frs/, but now it is on http://dev.anything-digital.com/sh404SEF/ and you need a valid download subscription available for 35 USD a year to get the latest version for Joomla! 1.5. You still can use it for unlimited number of sites.
Don't be scared due to the fact that it is still in beta, I am using it on several web sites and have not had any problems.
Installation of the components is similar to any other component. Simply install it using the normal installer, but this time, read the screen after installation or even print it.
This screen has a lot of information on how to make sure the SEF URLs are as clean as you want them to be. If you closed the screen and missed the information, you can read it again in the documentation of the component, which can be reached from the component's control panel. Most important information is the .htaccess content. For now, you can go ahead and read the information is this chapter.
If you want a URL without /index.php/ in it, you need to run your web site on a Linux-or Unix-based hosting platform with the Apache mod_rewrite module active. If that is the case, check the information on how to construct your .htaccess file in the Appendix B of this book. You can find the information from your hosting platform in the Joomla! administration menu under Help | System Info | PHP Information. You will find some extra information and examples on .htaccess files in the Appendix B of this book.
The basic configuration of sh404SEF exists in two parts. One is the control panel, which we will be looking at in detail later.
The second part is the sh404SEF Plugin that is enabled after the installation. Please check that as it sometimes fails to start. If it is not running you won't be able to use the metadata control option. You can activate the sh404SEF plugin using the plugin manager. A simple click of the button is enough to publish this component. There are no extra parameters in the plugin.
The plugin is needed to enable the component to place and change the meta tags description and keywords in the source code of your site pages.
If you haven't used an SEF component before, don't worry. The standard Joomla! URLs and even the Joomla! core friendly URLs will be picked up by sh404SEF and will be redirected to the new and improved URL with a 301 redirect.
Note
If you have pages ranking very well in the search engines with SEF URLs, make sure you keep the URLs as they are or redirect them to the new URL. If you change any settings in sh404SEF, you are advised to clear the cache. This will delete all your previous URLs and build new ones. If you did not change old article titles, URLs, or moved them to new sections or categories, you should not have any problems. However, it's better to check them before than to fix afterwards.
I will take you through the basics of the standard configuration options that you need to change, or at least consider changing. Some of the possible changes are affected by what kind of web site you are building, so read carefully and consider the options that meet your site model.
We will be going through some basic stuff where you need to go to your Components menu and click on sh404SEF from the drop-down menu. The following screenshot shows the main settings, the basic configuration and the settings that you have to look at more closely:
Now let's look at each setting:
- Enabled:
This is pretty clear, whether you want to use the sh404SEF component or not. Of course you want to use it, you installed it—right? But sometimes we need to disable it to get the standard Joomla! URL, so sometimes this option needs to be set to No for a short while.
- Replacement character:
This character is used to replace the blank spaces from your title. Joomla! converts your Title to an Alias once you save the article you write. It is best if the blanks in your alias are filled with characters such as" ". Some hosting platforms change blanks to "%20%". As you saw before, that is not good for Search Engines Optimization.
Tip
How to further improve your URLs
Once you have published the article, go and strip the stop words and small text from your Alias. You can also change the Alias by hand directly when writing the article. In the above example you can change the Alias from a-quick-guide-to-landscape-gardening to quick-guide-landscape-gardening.
You might want to do this with your old articles as well, but I strongly advise you not to! If those pages are indexed by Google or other search engines, it would lead to an Error 404 page. Therefore, think carefully before you change them.
- Strip characters and Character replacements list:
These are options that you don't need to change unless you have a special need for them—for example, if your site is written in certain foreign languages. For most web sites these settings are fine. Strip character strips out all characters that are not allowed or wanted in your URLs such as— ,~!@%^()< >: ;{}[ ]&`"‹'' " " •›"'"°
Character replacement changes the special language characters that are not allowed in a URL and replaces them with the one that is allowed. For instance, if you have a German site, you can have a ''ü'' in your title which is then replaced by a ''u''. However, if you prefer to replace it with ''ue'', you can change the behavior in this field. From a German perspective it might be better to change ''müller" to "mueller" instead of "muller". So, look at this option if you have a site that needs these replacements.
- File suffix:
This is the extension you want to set at the end of your SEF URL. The best option for you is to use the suffix .html, but some people like to end the URL with .php or .htm. My advice is to use .html because I feel some people who look at the results in search engine results page see other extensions as a directory of articles instead of the page they are looking for. This can have a negative effect on the click-through rate of your site.
- Unique ID:
This is a unique ID added to the URL, and is made up of date such as 02-09-2009 and the internal ID from the database for that article. The ID added will then be 2009090200000, which of course is not good for a standard web site.
However, if you want to set up a news site that is also focusing on getting your articles included in news search engines such as Google News, this is the way to go. To get into Google News, your site has to have a minimum of three numbers in the URL. With this option set to active, you are ready to get into the news.
The plugins tab in the default configuration gives you three options:
Here are the settings I normally use on my web sites:
Use Title Alias is set to Yes. You have seen how to change the title Alias to create shorter URLs. Therefore, that one is definitely set to Yes to give you the possibility to work with the option shown in the previous screenshot about using the title alias.
If you set it to No, your title will be used as the URL. Here is an example for use of alias in articles:
We will continue with the sh404SEF plugins configuration. Show section is set to No because I want short URLs. If you set it to Yes, the section of your article is also included in the URL. It is then built like www.example.com/section-name/category-name/article-alias.html, instead of www.example.com/ category-name/article-alias.html.
Depending on your section name that can be a much longer URL. If you think your web site still needs it, go ahead and use it. However, make sure that your section name is short. For example, you might want to build a site about WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal and create categories for each system with names such as installation, themes, and plugins. In that case you can have URLs such as /wordpress/themes/introduction.html and /drupal/themes/introduction.html. Think about that before you set up or change the structure of your site. My choice is to create category names such as drupal-themes and wordpress-themes, which gives me the advantage of having the keywords wordpress and theme in the URL instead of wordpress/themes.
This may sound like a minor issue to you, but it does make your site rank slightly higher and that is what we are aiming for. All the minor subtle changes that you read about here, add up to better performance of your site. Set Show Category to Yes, this should be obvious if you read the previous paragraph, as you want to have your keywords in the URL and using the right category names works great.
You don't have to set an option here, it is there and active already. You might have noticed that I skipped the META tags option, but that is because we will be looking at that once we get to the advanced section of sh404SEF.
But this 404 page. What do you want to do with it—just leave is as it is? After all it's just an error page that you get if something goes wrong. Is it? Or is it an opportunity to help your visitors and Search Engine Robots, and to draw them in to your site? Let's look at that later, as I have a special section about 404 pages for you.
What you need to know right now is that sh404SEF helps you find the errors and resolve them next time. If you look at the basic control panel, you only have the option to purge the 404 errors and not to look at them. Therefore, you need to switch to the panel overview, which is just one click away at the right side of your screen.
Using the icon View/Edit 404 Logs, you can select the option to view and edit the URLs that came into the 404 logs. This will give you the opportunity to set it right, but you need to know the Non-SEF URL to point the wrong URL to the right article. If you want to find that Non-SEF URL you have three options:
- Deactivate sh404SEF and SEF URLs in the Global Configuration. Note that if you do this, your site will not be reachable using the SEF links in the search engines, so you need to have this re-enabled as soon as possible.
- Look into the SEF URLs of sh404SEF and find the article you want to link to
- Use the module from http://www.joomlapraise.com/free-joomla-extensions/praiseurl-module.php. We will look at this option in the last part of this chapter.
This means a lot of work which does not always pay off, but if you are changing your site or restructuring it, this is the best option to keep your rankings and still be able to change your URLs.
Keeping a close look on the 404 errors after your changes will give you the opportunity to redirect your old URLs to the new ones without having to put all kinds of 301 redirects in your .htaccess file. The sh404SEF sends a 301 redirect from the error URL to the new one, which is really nice as the search engines will drop the old URLs in favor of the new ones. In time you should see fewer 404 errors from search engine results page coming to your site. So, we are done with the basics and had a taste of the extended control panel. Now it's time to get even more advanced and dive deeper into those extended settings.