Headings marked up with the html element <h1> should appear only once per subpage. Every single subpage needs an H1 headline containing the relevant main keyword. Think of your Joomla website's main heading like the headline of a newspaper article. Would you give several articles in the paper the exact same headline? No – the headline should be unique, not too long, not too short, expressive, and inviting enough to keep reading. Emotional, high-impact headlines have proven effective. From there, continue with headings marked up as <h2>, <h3>, and so on.

Keep the order correct, because the html tags form the structure of your content. Imagine marking up a text in your word processor, for example in Word. You wouldn't use a Heading 3 before a Heading 1 in your text.

Well – the same rules apply on the internet. If your Joomla page was set up correctly, you can control and enter the H1 in the menu item, under the "Page Display" tab, in the Page Heading field. On pages where only a single article is shown, the article title is used as the H1 heading.

Your subpages should offer enough substance that visiting them is genuinely worthwhile for the visitor.

"Not wanting to scroll" is a thing of the past. These days, visitors are used to endless "swiping", and clicking tends to fall into the category of an unloved action. So avoid too many clicks to the goal, and avoid pages that are too short with too little content.

Of course, you don't need to pad out your texts if there's nothing more to say. To find the right content and topics for your target audience, tools such as a WDF*IDF analysis are useful. The meaningful, informative text we then develop together, tailored to you, brings us ever closer to the goal.

The browser title is called that because the text you use for it is displayed as the page title in your browser window. If you bookmark a page, the title is also automatically used to describe the bookmark.

And the most important place the title appears? That's the headline of your entry in the search results. For that reason, the browser title needs to be engaging and fresh, and should motivate the visitor to want to click through to your page. Since Google only provides a certain amount of space, the browser title shouldn't be longer than 55 to 58 characters. Every page needs a unique browser title. In Joomla, you set this in the menu item.

Meta descriptions are the blocks of text that appear below the browser title in search engine results. I often see the mistake of simply summarising what awaits the visitor on the page.

Instead, entice the searcher to your page, promise that they'll find what they're looking for with you, and include a call to action.

And again, this all needs to happen within the right length: currently, 120 to 175 characters are recommended. Here too, you should write a unique text for each page. You enter the metadata in the menu item as well. If there's no menu item for the content, you can also store the metadata on the article itself. By the way, you don't need to fill in meta keywords – they haven't been used by search engines for over 15 years. I'm happy to set up your Joomla metadata and get your concept across clearly.

The website address (URL) in Joomla is generated from the so-called alias of the menu item or the article. If the "Search Engine Friendly URLs" option is enabled in your configuration, Joomla automatically displays the aliases, and therefore "nice" addresses. A descriptive URL pays off, sticks in the visitor's memory, and brings noticeable SEO benefits. A URL should be short and to the point.

It's not just search engines that access your website's structured content – social media does too. From this specially marked-up data, Facebook, for example, pulls the title image, title, and description prepared specifically for Facebook. You're not even on Facebook? That doesn't matter in this case. If someone shares a link to your website on Facebook, representative content should still be shown – not "just anything". That's what Open Graph data is for.

Structured data works similarly and gives search engines concrete clues about what the content is about. Sometimes the effort pays off and an image, a rating, or instructions from your website is shown directly in the search results page.

Use my free Joomla plugin to assign Open Graph and Twitter data to your website's subpages: To the plugin

The most important technical factor for your website's search engine optimisation is, quite simply, that your website is reachable at all. For that, you should use a reliable web host with low downtime for your website. Reliable hosting also means the website is hosted on a server with a low response time. The best programming is no use if the server doesn't respond.

In the technical area, the quality of your website's programming is especially important too: this includes the right caching and compression settings, correct configuration of the htaccess file, submitting a sitemap to Google, and efficient programming of the website and its template with few scripts and few style files.

The website should load quickly and be responsive, meaning it adapts to different screen sizes. If this foundation isn't right, any amount of SEO voodoo is wasted effort. Figuratively speaking, you'd be cycling up a mountain in the heaviest gear and constantly risking falling off.

Which exact technical weaknesses your page has can be determined through an on-page analysis.