Sometimes I get a question from a Joomla website owner.

Mostly its about using a Joomla SEF Component, like Open-Sef.

The website owner is often trying to get a better ranking for his website by using Search Engine Optimization.
But on some keywords they already have a good ranking, that they don’t want to loose!!
They sometimes have used a different SEF Component and they want to switch.

Open-Sef takes care of all those questions for you, but sometimes you have to help a little.

Transforming Joomla SEF URLs to Real SEF URLs

If you are already ranking high with the standard joomla url, that is without the SEO active, Open-Sef will easily pick up this url and bring your visitor to the right page.
And in the same process give that page a nice clean readably URL.
If you want too it will use the standard configured extension .html

If you had Joomla’s basic SEO active, so your URL goes like www.example.com/35/24/13/
That one is also picked-up and converted the right way.

Now most of the other SEF Components should be able to do this as well.
But what is your top-ranking URLl is like www.example.com/this-page-is-optimized-35.html?
And your new one is www.example.com/this-page-is-optimized.html.

In that case you first get the real internal linking, witch is the standard URL without seo enabled, and then you make a new friendly URL in Open-Sef, that picks up the old URL and links it to the right page.

So, without working with 301 redirects and messing around with .htaccess files,your let the Open-Sef component take care of all your ranking problems.
Just learn to work with the component and keep your high ranking and gain even more!

Ps. If your do the setup for your website right, or just use the /title/ option in the Open-Sef configuration, you can even emulate your old html based site URLs.

Want to read more? Check out Joomla & SEO Blog.