Improve Joomla! 1.5 SEO side

This post has been originally published on my blog. If you note some errors they're probably due to the fact I merely copied the HTML source code from that post here.

Today I've decided to develop a simple but useful plugin, that somehow puts a medication on some Joomla! 1.5 SEO lacks.

It's been a couple-hours work and it's submitted to the JED ( so we need to wait a couple of weeks to see it into the JED ) but I've already released it in the site of my company.

Let me introduce you Custom Meta Tags for Joomla! 1.5 plugin, a brand new GNU GPL v2.0 Joomla! plugin.

The HTML title

A feature that I've always appreciated, in CMS, is the ability to display a title for the user and a metatitle for the search engine.

For example, this article has a title that you see ( "Improve Joomla! 1.5 SEO side" ) and a metatitle ( or HTML title, "SEO plugin for Joomla! 1.5: Custom Meta Tags" ) which you see at the top bar of the browser or in the SERP.

This is important for example, when you want to give your users a friendly title but also to the search engine an HTML title full of keywords:

title: They're back: grunge breaths again in Seattle
HTML title: The Nirvana will perform a reunion concert in Seattle the 11th February 2010

The title is aggressive, good for you users but the HTML title is even better: full of keywords ( Nirvana, concert, reunion, seattle, 11th February ) which give it the possibility to appear at the top of SERPs.

So, with Joomla! 1.5 you can't do that for single article, and that's a bid deal: but this plugin saves you!

You only need to type in your editor:

{metatitle:The Nirvana will perform...}

and in that article's page the HTML title is gonna be the one you defined in the edior with this syntax.

The same thing can be done with:

meta description
keywords

using

{metadesc:my decsription of the article in 160 chars...}
{metakeys:keyword1. keyword2}

Canonical URL

You can specify a canonical URL for the article using:

{metacanonical:www.mycanonicalurl.com/index.php...}

so you will be able to face better the problems related to duplicated content which affect some Joomla! installations or components ( due to webmasters lacks, moreover, than Joomla!'s ).

Generator

You can decide between 4 possibilities.

If you type

{metagenerator:Wordpress 2.9}

that custom generator will be displayed in the source code of that article's page or... ...from the plugin manager you have a drop-down option list in order to:

display an empty generator ( for [low-level] security purposes )
display automatically Joomla! 1.5's default generator metatag
display automatically a default generator metatag you can define in a text-form later.

Tags: joomla, seo

Comment by Ivo Apostolov on February 7, 2010 at 9:38am: I posted today a blog post here, that the meta descriptions does not have any impact on the SERP.
Why do you think they have?!?

Comment by Alessandro Nadalin aka Odino on February 7, 2010 at 9:54am: A good metadescription is the way to convince the user to click on that result. You are right, metadesc DON'T AFFECT THE SERP AT ALL, i subscribe it, but ignoring it is a very bad bad bad mistake that a SEM would define "criminal" :-)

Anyway, let's discuss about metadesc in the other post ;-)

Comment by Luca Scarpa on February 7, 2010 at 11:43am: I think that Canonical URLs should be added by default, they are very important, specially for sites that have anchors for comments, go to top page, etc..

Comment by Luca Scarpa on February 7, 2010 at 11:49am: What do you think to add param for default Canocical URL? I think that it will be a good adds for next release. ;-)

Comment by Alessandro Nadalin aka Odino on February 7, 2010 at 1:14pm: Ciao Luca,

what do you mean? To fill automatically the canonical URL?

Comment by Luca Scarpa on February 7, 2010 at 3:20pm: Yes, I think that you can add an option to insert a default canonical URL as meta tag, but if someone adds into his article {metacanonical:www.mycanonicalurl.com/index.php...} you remove default for the author's choice.

I thought to this option so if you install this plugin you have by default the canonical URL for all articles without add it for every one, like wp.

Comment by Alessandro Nadalin aka Odino on February 7, 2010 at 3:33pm: ok, this is smart. I'm gonna implement it as soon as i can, it's a few lines deal

Comment by Amy Stephen on February 8, 2010 at 9:05pm: Alessandro -

Have you thought about looking at Joomla! 1.6 from an SEO perspective and submitting a patch with those items you thought were missing/helpful? There is interest in that area if community members want to make improvements there. If you are interested, you might want to post in the Dev CMS List..

Thanks for considering!
Amy

Comment by Alessandro Nadalin aka Odino on February 9, 2010 at 4:01am: Hi Amy,

no, never thought about it.

However this plugin is a workaround, because we need some custom fields in the metadata configuration of the article, not to compile manually metadata for each article with a custom syntax {metatag:xyz}.

I was thinking how could be possible to add other metadata ( like SEF patch does ) but without hacking the core... as soon as I find a solution I'll submit a patch or write in the Ggroup.

thanks for your hints

Improve Joomla! 1.5 SEO side

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