It’s common knowledge that Joomla lets itself down when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Limited and slow, there’s precious little you can do, SEO-wise, in Joomla core.

To boost your unique visitor numbers, get seen on Google, beat the competition and, ultimately, make more money, you’re going to need to fortify Joomla with the right extensions. We explore 10 of the best SEO extensions for Joomla below.

1. SEOSimple

For the best SEO results, it’s vital that your meta descriptions contain text relevant to each page’s contents. Filling in descriptions for every page can be a real chore, which is why many Joomla experts incorporate SEOSimple into every site they build. It automatically uses a chunk of text from the top of each page as its meta description. Downloading and installing this plugin takes no more than 2 minutes, but it could save you hours in the long-run.

Price: Free

2. ARTIO JoomSEF

ARTIO JoomSEF is designed to make your URLs perform better. Not only will this extension make your URLs search engine friendly, it will make them comprehensible to humans too, boosting your visitor numbers. It provides support for multilingual sites (thanks to Joom!Fish internationalization), letting you format your URLs differently for different languages.

Price: Free

3. Missing Metadata Module

Missing Metadata Module is a fantastic tool for making sure that every article you publish has appropriate meta description text. Once installed, this extension adds an extra panel to your Joomla Administrator interface, listing any articles lacking appropriate meta info. You’ll be shocked by how many of your pages are suffering from a lack of meta data.

Price: Free

4. Joomap

Joomap, an extension that’s really simple to configure and use, lets you create a sitemap and submit it to all major search engines. Suitable for both beginners and experts, it displays the normal Menu Structure, Content Categories, Sections and Virtuemart Categories in a hierarchical tree or a Google sitemaps list. We’ve heard no reports of errors with this extension, but there’s no general forum, so help is a little hard to come by.

Price: Free

5. Auto-Frontpage

Auto-Frontpage ensures that your site is updated regularly, which Google and other search engines love. It automatically publishes all of your new articles, saving you time and effort. When there’s nothing new to add, it republishes one of your old articles, keeping both visitors and search engines happy. If you’re not changing the content of your site on a regular basis, you’ll never achieve the best page ranking results.

Price: Free

6. Website Name

This extension lets you display your website name in the title on each page, which is vital for effective SEO. Simple, but effective, it can be installed within 30 seconds and set up even more quickly. You can even configure it so that your website name is displayed to the left or right of your page title.

Price: Free

7. JoomSEO

This great extension automatically puts all the right keywords in all the right places for superb SEO. It’s highly customizable, letting you decide exactly how you want your meta keywords, descriptions, titles and heading tags to appear. Show or hide your site name, change the number of keywords in a title, change the length of a title or specify bad words to be excluded from your keywords list.

Price: Free

8. SEO Canonicalisation

Once installed, SEO Canonicalisation redirects all users to your chosen hostname, regardless of the domain name they used. It completely negates the need for fiddly .htaccess redirects. With relatively few bugs reported and an inbuilt Check Settings option, this extension comes highly recommended.

Price: Free

9. Title Manager

Like Website Name, Title Manager makes it easy for Joomla users to customize their browser titles, adding their site name to the right or left of each page name. Available in Turkish, Dutch and German besides English, this extension is easily accessible to everyone.

Price: Free

10. Unicode Slugs

With Unicode Slugs, you can easily add accents, capital letters, glyphs and foreign characters to your Joomla URL, making it easier for users, the world over, to get to grips with your domain name. Rest assured, Google has absolutely no problem deciphering Unicode Slugs-generated domain names either.

Price: Free