Joomla SEO review: SEO Friendly Links and Images Plugin
If you're done your homework regarding Joomla and SEO, you know by now that a part of doing Joomla SEO is making sure you links have a title tag and images have both a title and alt tag.
Now, this is something that's often overlooked as you can see in Joomla SEO Mistake #6, because it's just one of those things that are a bit boring or mundane to do.
So today I'm going to review a little free Joomla SEO plugin called "SEO Friendly Links and Images Plugin". This plugin has a simple premise: to add title and alt tags to links and images.
Video Review
How it works
- Install the plugin
- Enable it
Activate automatic title tags for links
Now you can set the plugin to add a title tag to links, it will take the anchor text, for example "Joomla SEO" and create a title tag with the same words "Joomla SEO", this is useful however, you must make sure that the anchor text has keywords, other wise it's useless, for example, if your anchor text says "read about it here", it will show that as the title tag, which has no use for search engines.
Activate automatic alt and title tags for images
The second thing you can do is add an alt and title tags to images automatically. In theory it sounds great, but the drawback is that it's taking the image file name and uses that as the title and alt tag. Now, if your images are very optimized and have the keywords inside the file name, this can be useful, but let's be realistic for a second, are yours that optimized? So this feature for me is not useful.
Now let's take a look at how iJoomla SEO handles this.
First, the alt and title tags for images are taken from the keyword tag or the title meta tag, not from the image name. You can also choose how many keywords/phrases to use. This is done automaticlaly, you never have to think about it ever again.
As for links, iJoomla SEO allows you to set up automatic keyword linking. For example, if the word Joomla SEO shows up on the page, it will link to the iJoomla SEO home page automatically, and will have the title tag you specified when creating the keyword link. You set it up ONCE and you never have to worry about it ever again. You can set up title tag that' different than the anchor text and the linking is done for you automatically.
So iJoomla SEO is clearly handling this in a much better way than the "SEO Friendly Links and Images Plugin".
So sum this up, "SEO Friendly Links and Images Plugin" is a nice little plugin and it's free. It can be useful if used correctly:
- Make sure all your links have keywords as the anchor text
- Make sure all your images file names have the keywords you're optimizing for.
If you don't have a budget for a real solution for Joomla SEO, like iJoomla SEO, then this plugin can be useful.
