SEO Banners is our new plugin for Joomla 2.5 that makes your Joomla banners more optimized for search engines. Instead of pointing to internal banners component and redirecting to external URL when clicked, your banners will now link directly to external URLs while updating the counters on click in the background. This makes your banners more valuable to search engines as they are now able to recognize the sites you are linking to. If you've ever used Joomla's built-in banner component, you noticed that it's not very useful from SEO perspective. Instead of linking directly to the sites your banners point to, it's displaying an internal link address like http://your-site.com/component/banners/click/4

Only when clicked on, you would be redirected to the banner's real URL address. Joomla is doing so in order to update the click counter and track other statistics. The only problem with this is that the search engines are not seeing the addresses you are linking to from your site so your banner links are of no real value to the sites you advertise.

Many go around this problem by simply making a custom HTML module that displays banners with direct hyperlinks, avoiding entirely the banners component. This works fine from SEO perspective but then you can't track impressions nor count clicks on your banners.

SEO Banners plugin offers best of both worlds: it lets you use the banners component to track impressions and clicks while it displays your banners linked directly to the sites you advertise. The search engines can recognize the addresses you link to and update their page rank or credit them accordingly. When clicked on, the banner click counter and other stats will be updated in the background, just like before.

Demo can be viewed on Joomla.ba. You can see that the banner displayed at the bottom is linking directly to the site it advertises while the stats are updated in the background after it's clicked on.

SEO Banners plugin is free to download and use and you can get it here: download SEO Banners plugin.
It's installed normally through Joomla 2.5 Extension Manager.

NOTICES FOR CORRECT USAGE:
• After installation, enable the plugin.
• If you use a 3rd party SEF component, make sure the SEO Banners system plugin is ordered BEFORE any SEF plugin.
• The plugin forces opening links in new window (required), your module settings for this will be ignored.

Enjoy the free SEO Banners plugin by Sakic.Net!