Joomla Yoast SEO Integration using Route 66 extension
- Written by Lefteris Kavadas
Joomla Yoast SEO integration was for years a big desire for everyone in the Joomla community. In this blog post, we will show you how you can add Yoast SEO to Joomla using Route 66.
Yoast SEO
We will make a short introduction or those who don't know what Yoast is. It is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. It counts around 5 million active installations and it comes in two versions the free and the premium. What this plugin does is analyze the content you write and rank it, based on keywords. In short, let's say that you want to write a blog post about sports shoes. You just tell Yoast that the keyword you are interested in is "sports shoes" and it analyzes your post's content, title, and other parts to determine how good this post is in a matter of SEO.
Joomla Yoast Integration - A Perfect Match
Looking at the Joomla ecosystem you will see that there are several SEO plugins. However, none of those includes content analysis. The latest version of Route 66 comes with the Yoast SEO content analyzer. All you have to do is download and install Route 66 as you would do with any other Joomla extension. The free version works with Joomla articles while the PRO adds support for K2, EasyBlog and also allows you to analyze any URL of your Joomla site. Despite the fact that this is a piece of code coming from the WordPress ecosystem, the library has a great API which allows tight integration with Joomla (and actually any other CMS/system). Great job by the Yoast team!
How It Works
When you install Route 66 the SEO content analysis is enabled by default. So let's see how it looks like in the Joomla article edit form:
Route 66 will add an extra tab named SEO in the article form. This tab includes a Google snippet preview and an SEO analysis. Those two elements are updated in real time while you edit the article. Route 66 will also detect if the specific article is linked to a menu item so you know when some of the SEO properties are overridden by that menu item.
Final Words
Joomla Yoast integration is one more great feature of Route 66. When combined with beautiful SEF URLs, Google PageSpeed optimization, and XML sitemaps it can improve drastically your Joomla site's SEO. Please let us know your opinion about it by leaving a comment. Enjoy!
