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SEO Showdown
Being an SEO obsessive has led me to use a number of plugins on Joomla websites. Some have worked while others leave me frustrated and angry! This blog will review and compare two SEO components and plugins that I have used in conjunction with Virtuemart.
The first is the Ace SEF component from Joomace and the second is the Yagandoo Virtuemart Plugin and Component. I have tested both components and plugin on a website www.shop4glasses.ie. Enough with the small talk.. let the battle commence!
URLS
You have a lot of control over the URLs with Ace SEF. You can re-write URLs and the component will tell you if you have duplicate URLs. This is very handy if you want to prevent duplicate content on your website. There are many options in the back end of Ace SEF such as using .html at the end of your URLs and where or not to use a trailing slash. When you install the component you can spend a full day just reading up on its features and there would still be more to be learnt. But to be honest, all I wanted was SEO friendly URLs on my website and the amount of features in the component feels OTT.
With the Yagandoo Virtuemart SEO search engine friendly links plugin it was an extremely fast and productive experience. You simply upload the plugin and BANG your done. You have 3 options to choose from in the back end which makes installation a breeze.
“you can enable/disable the deletion of the IDs from the URL. The same applies to the generation of UTF-8 links. You can also call all fixed areas (e.g. Account/Downloads/Check-Out) just the way you want.”
This plugin did exactly what I wanted it to do. The URLs in the website were all SEO friendly and it only took 5 minutes to achieve. If you were going to use this plugin I would recommend having your Keywords researched and ready on the site. Use Keywords in your product categories and menu items.
Note: Yagandoo Virtuemart SEO does not store URLs in the database which increases performance. This will be discussed later.
Meta Data
The second part of having your product pages optimised is having somewhere to add Meta Data. With Ace SEF you only need the component that has both the URLs and Meta combined. I needed to get a Meta Data Plugin from Yagandoo.
I really liked the Yagandoo Meta Data Component. It was really easy to navigate, pleasant on the eye and best of all, a star appeared beside your Meta Data when you had the optimal characters in your Meta Tags. This was a really good feature to have. Ace SEF does not have this feature. Also, it took a lot longer to insert the Meta Data into the Tags in Ace SEF. Overall, I definitely preferred using the the Yagandoo Meta Data Component.
Speed
This was a deciding factor for me in choosing the SEO Extension Champion for Virtuemart. Ace SEF felt like a lead weight on the website and slowed performance down. Using the Yagandoo plugin and component did not have any noticeable effects of the websites performance. Speed is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm so naturally this was another consideration I had to take into account when judging these Joomla extensions.
The victor would definitely be the Yagandoo Virtuemart SEO plugin and component. It was interesting as a neutral observer to see the pros and cons of each extension. But for me if you want a fast, lightweight that does exactly what it says on the tin, I would choose Yagandoo all the way.
Here are the websites for each products reviewed:
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