Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You may have heard that Google and other search engines prefer that you use dashes or hyphens (-) instead of underlines or underscores (_) as word separators in your URLs. Google actually recommends that you use dashes or hyphens when creating search engine friendly or search engine optimized URLs instead of underscores. Here's why. 

Joomla's default URLs, like the standard URLs of any CMS, are terrible for Search Engine Optimization purposes. They have several querystring parameters, they are not human readable, they offer search engines no keywords or insight into what content the page holds, and they use the Itemid parameter to create multiple URLs for each content item. Luckily there are Search Engine Friendly URL components available for Joomla that solve all these issues for us. 

Here's a cool SEO tip that will automatically bring you more traffic from Google and other search engines:  Put a Random Content module on your homepage. It's better to have it on as many pages as possible, but the homepage is key. I discovered this trick while experimenting with a few different ideas over at http://www.patrickswesey.com.