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Spent almost 3 days optimising my website for search engine optimisation (SEO).

It was a most tedious task, owning as I know only the most basic of HTML.

I am using SH404SEF, a free Joomla! extension, to create search engine friendly (SEF) URLs. It is able to automate the creation of metadata tags, keywords and descriptions for each article; able to insert h1 tag to every contentheading tag of titles of each article; has security component. Its other features are as follows: "It works with or without .htaccess file. Fully Joomfish compatible. Caching system for high speed and very small DB queries overhead. Support many components natively but uses also sef_ext from OpenSEF/SEF Advanced. VirtueMart, Fireboard, Community Builder, mosetsTree, HotProperty, Sobi2, Docman, myBlog, iJoomla Magazine,News Portal, Remository and more supported natively. SSL switch, automatic 301 redirection from non-sef to sef and from Joomla SEF to sh404SEF, insert Google news style numerical ID,.. Many backend parameters to control URL construction behavior."

Initially, I had trouble getting the SEF URLs to redirect to the actual article links. Lots of 404 errors. I tried tinkering with the configurations at the backend and redirecting the links manually through the directory in phpMyAdmin, which did not work. Eventually, I think what worked was enabling the default .htaccess file from Joomla, which is a strange solution as SH404SEF is supposed to work without .htaccess by default.

And then the sitemap, Joomap, gave me double entries for my categories. I had to experiment with the menus, sections and categories to finally fix it.

My Expose gallery did not work with SH404SEF initially. After tinkering with the configurations again, I "fixed" the problem by skipping default settings for SH404SEF for the Expose component.

The most difficult problem of all was the insertion of h1 tag function, which caused my website logo to disappear. Finally fixed it after a lot of trial and error coding of template html and css. At least I gained some perspective of how the html and css function to create the frontend display. Ultimately, my mistake was to include the SH404SEF option of converting h1 tags to h2 tags in a page which messed up code.