After installation you have to change the global configuration.
The following screenshot shows the familiar Joomla! default configuration page:
Take a look at the Global Configuration after the patch is installed. One thing that stands out is the new SEO tab.
One of the new additions is the Metafields Settings tab that contains several items. The following list explains options under Metafields Settings:
- HTML Title setting
This field must be filled. You can use [TITLE] to display the article or menu title that you supplied when you created the article content.
You might want to add site's name— with the hyphen in between ([TITLE]-[SITENAME]).
If you choose both, make sure your standard site title is not too long. Search engines don't show very lengthy page titles, so it will be cut off after a certain number of characters.
Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask use different lengths for the number of characters that they will show in the search engine result pages. Therefore, it would be a good practice to keep your title below the shortest length permitted by the major search engines. Here is a short list of the major search engines and the number of characters they show in the title field:
- Google 66 characters
- Yahoo! 72 characters
- Bing 66 characters
- Ask 67 characters
I always use the [TITLE] field only, but I can understand you might want to use the [SITENAME] option to get some branding in the title.
- Default title
Default title means that the [TITLE] of the site is used if there is no other title defined.
However, you could also use this field for separately branding the site title. Simply change the [SITENAME] according to your own choice. The [] is used to get parameters from the configuration file.
For example, you could set the title to [TITLE]—Gardening Ideas, which could give you an HTML title in the search engines such as How to build a pond—Gardening Ideas.
In the Menu Item there is a field called Title and you have the option to Show it or Hide it. From the menu bar in your administrator panel, choose Menu, then select Main Menu, and click on the menu link you had created earlier from the Menu Items. After that select the option Parameters (System) on the right side of your screen as shown in next screenshot.
The title shown in the screenshot is on the page that is created by that menu item, so if you use a table or a blog layout, you will see that title on the screen.
But the title shown in you browser's title bar is the one that search engines will pick up and display on their results pages.
If you have a menu item called "landscape garden" then that is displayed as the HTML Title of your page. You may want to use a longer title for SEO, but you don't want a long title in your menu.
For example, in this menu item you want to set the HTML Title to Landscape Garden Design services and realization
The same goes for your content articles, although there you have more space to work with.
Let's look at some of the changes created by the patch:
- The possibility to use different HTML titles for menu and content items
- Meta tags such as description and keywords for menu items
If you create links to menus without the patch, you have very little control over the metadata such as description and keywords for that item.
However, the link does show up in Google and other search engines, so do you want more control over it than just the Page Title.
The field Page Title is not the HTML title, which is shown in your browser's title field.
The title shows up on the Menu Item page if you have selected Yes in the Show Page Title option.
You can see in the following screenshot that after the SEF patch implementation there is a new item called MENU item meta data, which you can now use as described.
Once you have the extra MENU item meta data tab you can add your own HTML Title, your META tag description, and META tag keywords.
You can also use the simple Robots meta tag drop-down menu to get values such as index, follow, index, nofollow, noindex, follow, and noindex, nofollow. These options are explained in the Appendix.
The other Google settings that you can use are, for example, noarchive to prevent search engines from saving cached copy of the page in their cache.
Cache means that a copy of the page is stored on the search engine servers until it is refreshed. The frequency for updating depends on the timeframe set by the site, or by the time elapsed between two article appearances.
The more you write, the better the chance your ranking will improve.
As we saw earlier, not only menu items are affected by the patch, the fields related to the content of the articles are also affected.
Although there was a Metadata Information tab present, it now contains some extra fields that are basically the same as you have read before.
Please keep in mind that these items are what you need to get your site in better shape for search engines.
The fields added to both menu and content pages are:
- HTML Title
- Google Settings
- Copy right
The only changed field is the Robots meta tag field.
This is very important for getting better rankings; you can improve your ranking a lot simply by changing the keywords used.
What is the HTML title? The HTML title is the text that is shown at the top of the browser window of the Internet Explorer.
But it is also the title that Google and other search engines use in their index, and is shown on the search result pages.
Without the patch, this title is the one you give to your menu item or your article in Joomla!
For example, in the following article, the title is How to build a pond.
If you want to include extra keywords or completely change the title for the search engines then you can use the HTML Title field.
In the following screenshot, I changed the HTML Title to How to build a great pond in your landscape garden.
I also added the Meta tag description and Meta tag keywords.
If you look at the following screenshot you will see the effect of this small change.
The page is the same and starts with a short title. However, the content for search engines is now better optimized with more keywords, and a better description of the page's content.
You can also see that the title in the Internet Explorer's title bar is now different from the page title.
In the next chapter, we will look at how to write keyword-rich articles. You will also get some tips on how to write effective titles.