Help me set up my JOOMLA site for good ranking?

This is a very complicated question, and a very specialized field. I doubt anyone will post here a complete SEO course and training.

What you want to know requires much research and knowledge with a quite good learning curve.

Best reagrds,

Andre Foisy

Well I just want to know the basic, like the SEO settings tab in joomla, I've got:
Search Engine Friendly URLs - set to Yes
Use Apache mod_rewrite - set to NO
Add suffix to URLs - set to Yes
thats all I need to do? And ofcoarse add the meta tags settings.. Could anyone advise please?

but when I do that, my other pages don't work..

That is very likely because you created these "other pages" before setting up the Friendly URLs feature.

Stay away from Joomla and Go with wordpress if you really want to Rank well well

Thank you all of you guys for helping me here. I'm just wondering if mod_rewrite is really that important for ranking? And in my html page I already have a folder thats named .htaccess and I also have a folder thats named .htaccess.txt.. why do I have 2 of them? Should I change the one with .htaccess.txt to .htaccess? And why is it harder to rank joomla sites then wordpress? Is everyone having the same difficulties getting them rank? Thank you very much in advance..

Use Google.
Go to bigest Joomla plugin site you can find.
Choice SEO plugin with highest number of downloads.
And follow the instructions in it.

i have joomla sites ranking #1 in google (just did a check up on one: over 2 milions (2,240,000) competing pages & 7 adwords commercials) & yahoo, so if pana decided to go with Joomla, please stop asking him to change to WP... it really makes no diference

and all the SEO i did was to be sure i have the keywords on meta, on front page, on menues, on the 1st page article title & on the tile of every page (there is a free plug in for that). I didn`t used neither the meta inarticles, nor the keywording feature, nor did I do any external linking. Joomla IS good at SEO, with the human friendly links.

no, about Joomla SEO... yes, that .htacces file is needed. please note that ".htaccess" is actually the extension of the file. It is not allowed to have a ".txt" extension. it will not work that way. the entire file name must be just that extension: ".htaccess"

so, once that file exists on you root folder, check all those 3 radio buttons.
then all you need to know is that no matter how you atually name your pages & articles, the frindly url will be overwritten by the text you put in the "alias" field. If you write nothing there, it will be auto generated. But whatevere you write in there, that is how your link will show up. That is the thing that will help yu the most

good luck!

Thank you guys for responding, I just got lost question. So I have two files one named .htaccess and other .htaccess.txt so do I need to delete one with htaccess or just remove the .txt but then I will have two files named the same? And when I change the Apache mod_rewrite to Yes without deleteing any files it gives me an 404 error on my sites pages, I have only 3 pages on my site and it gives me 404 error.

And one more thing do I need to adjust anything in the html files like the <h1> <h2> etc for better ranking? Like I have mentioned before I have build few hundred quality links to my site but few articles without any backlinks are outranking me? I've gotten one of my other sites to rank with no problem but not a joomla site so I was wondering if the issue is with the joomla? Thank you all in advance, I really appreciate your help.

thank you for respond, I'm hosting with TMDhosting.. Yes I do have one file name .htaccess so I don't need to delete the one with .txt extension? Correct? But when I set mod_rewrite to Yes my other pages give me an 404 error?

you dont need to delete the one with .txt, it won`t be noticeable
but if activating mod rewrite gives you 404 error.... it might be some server configuration that is not proper. maybe ask your hosting if they actually have the mod_rewrite installed and if they allow the use of it..

also, if you heard that the articles titles are not treated as h1 and that is not the best seo friendly method... you heard right. But for that, you can go inside code and wrap the content titles between h1`s..but that usually messes a little with the css of your template. And not sure you should go in there..

a good alternative i found is to actually add a sub-titles to the articles, keyword rich & user frindly, wrapped as h1, it helps...

@ Andre... i understand your point, is just that most ppl really have no answers fro joomla and they just write in a "just move to WP..." That attitude is not helping the one looking for answers. he chosed joomla for some reasons, and swithing CMS is not the even the "easy way out", if you already planned the way your ite should look & act, or even bettre, if you already started working on it.... The user just ends up beig confused & frustarted that on thing that worked in a way on its 1st choice works totally diferent or not al all on the other.
i`m not talking about prohrammers that constanly work on x cms at once... i`m talking about the normal site owner that wants to build its own site...