Joomla Jumpstart

Beginning webmasters often overlook the meta keywords and meta descriptions that can be used for a Joomla website and every article on it. Failing to use these two key search engine optimization (SEO) features can hurt the page ranking and "findability" of a web site. This brief tutorial will show you where to enter these key fields and also how to use the Missing Metadata module to help you add metatags to all the articles on your Joomla site.

 

To add metatags to your site, you should begin with the tags of the site itself. In Joomla 1.5 and 1.6, each article has a Metadata Information pane on the right rail in the Article Editor. If you expand this pane, you'll see a place for Description and Keywords.

Keywords are almost universally agreed to be ignored by the search engine spiders. Focus your efforts on the Description fields.  The Description fieldappears in the Google description when the site is displayed and used for keywords. Make sure the description properly describes the page.

The Metadata Information pane alsolet you set the Robots field that you can use to designate a page as non-indexabl and add other specific robot information that directs the search engine spider how to interpret the page.

Keep in mind that SEO is always a journey -- not a destination. Search engine evaluations change and you must be aware of the changes to keep your site optimized so that it has the best chance of being found.