(SOLVED) Big trouble with Home page and seo/sef

[blacksheep]

Hi to all,
I'm setting up my own shop and really can't find a solution for two big related problems.
I use joomla 2.5.7 and vm 2.0.10

1) In the main menu I choosed as home , "category list" and "top level category" so I can see a nice page with all my shop categories and related pics. The trouble is that when I try to test online the seo for my shop, it says "no description found" and it gives very bad results...and (I say) it is right since you can find description and meta tags only in the "about us" page that is the second menu item. What can I do?? Can i have categories on home page along with description/meta tags ?

2) I checked "yes" for "sef url actived" and "rewrite url sef" in joomla configuration, unchecked "disable seo" in virtuemart configuration and renamed htaccess.txt to .htaccess. No problems with joomla menu items but I got problems with virtuemart categories and product pages. This is what I see:
Joomla menu
sitename.com/pagename
but...
VM Categories
sitename.com/component/virtuemart/7/categoryname
VM Products
sitename.com/component/virtuemart/7/categoryname/productnamehtm?Itemid=0#.UIAY2meKhIg

and i guess this is not the best for sef urls...Please could you help me? Many thanks in advance.

[jjk]

1) "Category List" ist a Joomla category. If you want to have your VM2 categories including VM category images on your homepage, choose "Virtuemart Categories Layout" as the 'Menu Item Type' and set 'Parent Item' to "Menu Item Root" and choose "Top Level Category" in the 'Required Settings' dropdown list.
2) looks correct to me.

[blacksheep]

1) "Category List" ist a Joomla category. If you want to have your VM2 categories including VM category images on your homepage, choose "Virtuemart Categories Layout" as the 'Menu Item Type' and set 'Parent Item' to "Menu Item Root" and choose "Top Level Category" in the 'Required Settings' dropdown list.
2) looks correct to me.

Many thanks JJk for your reply!

1) I meant i choosed VM categories layout and VM top level categories, this is the link : index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=categories&virtuemart_category_id=0 and i guess it's correct but the problem is that this way I got bad results with seo (no description/meta tags in home page), how can fix it?
Anyway, where i can find "parent item" to set "menu item root"?

2) How come? Sorry i'm new to virtuemart but is it correct having component/virtuemart/ + all the rest (htm?Itemid=0#.UIAY2meKhIg) for sef urls?? I thought the best was only site/category/product...

[jjk]

SEF urls are normally: sitename.com/categoryname/productname-detail. You can change the '-detail' in the VM2 SEF configuration i.e. to '-htm' if you like, but you can't leave that field blank. Since a product detatail page can be accessed through several different urls, VM2 uses a suffix to determine that the url is pointing to a product product page. It doesn't hurt your SEO. Search engines don't need a suffix.

If you see "/component/virtuemart" in the url, then you probably have not set a Joomla menu item for each of your VM2 categories. For your homepage you can use "Virtuemart Categories Layout". For the individual categories you need to set each category menu item to "Category Layout".

What is your "...UIAY2meKhIg"? Does your website use non-latin characters?

[blacksheep]

If you see "/component/virtuemart" in the url, then you probably have not set a Joomla menu item for each of your VM2 categories.

Please can you explain it better? How to do it?

What is your "...UIAY2meKhIg"? Does your website use non-latin characters?

I don't know...where can i check it? My site is in italian.

[jjk]

I don't know...where can i check it? My site is in italian.

Do you have a link where I can see it?

[blacksheep]

I don't know...where can i check it? My site is in italian.

Do you have a link where I can see it?

Oh, thank you!
I'm sending the password for logging in by private message.
Hope you can give some good advices.

[jjk]

BTW - you can access your products i.e. through the url you are looking for:
yourdomain/seitan-mix-naturale-detail
and
yourdomain/component/virtuemart/seitan/seitan-mix-naturale-detail?Itemid=0
both work. So I assume that you just need to complete your categories so that the router (which converts the long url into the SEF url) can work correctly.

[jjk]

I did switch your default language to english in order to be able to read your Joomla/VM2 settings. Doing this, all VM2 products disappear. This means that you have been entering your italian products into the english language database tables and you should correct this. There are a few forum posts about how to do this (it's pretty easy - you can use phpMyadmin for this). See here for example: http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=91664.msg317238#msg317238

Next problem is that you are using the Module "VirtueMart Category" ("Compra Online" - Displays a 2 level categories list. To use as menu with choice of accordeon effect) as your frontend menu in Joomla. The Joomla router which converts the long URLs into SEF URLs doesn't recognize this as a menu. So you need to set up a normal Joomla menu at your left module position with menu links to all your VM2 categories and unpublish the VirtueMart Category module.

[blacksheep]

I did switch your default language to english in order to be able to read your Joomla/VM2 settings. Doing this, all VM2 products disappear. This means that you have been entering your italian products into the english language database tables and you should correct this. There are a few forum posts about how to do this (it's pretty easy - you can use phpMyadmin for this). See here for example: http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=91664.msg317238#msg317238

I will try and let you know

Next problem is that you are using the Module "VirtueMart Category" ("Compra Online" - Displays a 2 level categories list. To use as menu with choice of accordeon effect) as your frontend menu in Joomla. The Joomla router which converts the long URLs into SEF URLs doesn't recognize this as a menu. So you need to set up a normal Joomla menu at your left module position with menu links to all your VM2 categories and unpublish the VirtueMart Category module.

Sorry I'm a bit confused, I don't know how to link a joomla menu module to all VM2 categories, I'm tryng but  in "select menu" I only see "main menu", How can i choose VM categories?

[jjk]

That's Joomla Basics. You might search for"joomla 2.5 menu tutorial" in Google/Youtube or have a look here: http://docs.joomla.org/Help15:Screen.menus.edit.15 and here: http://docs.joomla.org/Screen.modules.15 (There are quite a few more tutorials like this)

Basically you need to create a new Joomla menu module in your left template position and then add i.e. a "Shop" menu with your VM2 category links to that module position.

[blacksheep]

As you suggested I ve created a joomla module linking it to shop menu but as you can see the product url is still the same (but the category url is ok) and by the way i can't list all the categories in the module...

[blacksheep]

Sef urls are now fixed but now there is a strange problem with  meta tags description, I don't see it in my source code and, seo test can't find it too (but can see keywords). anyway I wrote description and keywords in my joomla configuration panel. 

Code Select Expand



  <base href="http://www.lavitacongusto.it/" />
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
  <meta name="keywords" content="La vita con gusto,lo shopping economico etico e vegan,prodotti tipici pugliesi,pane di Altamura, olio extra vergine di oliva," />
  <meta name="title" content="La vita con gusto" />
  <title>La vita con gusto</title>
  <link href="/templates/greenlab/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/components/com_virtuemart/assets/css/facebox.css" type="text/css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/components/com_virtuemart/assets/css/vmsite-ltr.css" type="text/css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/modules/mod_menulinelab/linelab.css" type="text/css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.lavitacongusto.it/modules/mod_itpsocialbuttons/style.css" type="text/css" />
  <style type="text/css">

[jjk]

If that's your homepage it looks ok to me. You could enter a description into Joomla site description, but that is poor SEO. See here:
http://docs.joomla.org/Making_your_site_Search_Engine_Friendly
Instead enter Meta descriptions into your VM2 product descriptions and Joomla articles.

[blacksheep]

If that's your homepage it looks ok to me. You could enter a description into Joomla site description, but that is poor SEO. See here:
http://docs.joomla.org/Making_your_site_Search_Engine_Friendly
Instead enter Meta descriptions into your VM2 product descriptions and Joomla articles.

Thanks again for your help.
Can I use something like this for a faster way?:
http://extensions.virtuemart.net/index.php?option=com_sobi2&sobi2Task=sobi2Details&sobi2Id=328&Itemid=
http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=102251.0