The HTML Title will be shown in the title bar of your browser and is used by the search engines. Make the best title you can and place it in the HTML Title field.

The META tag description is the place to write a small advertisement for your page. If done correctly it will show up under the title in the search engine results pages. The best way to write a description is to write it like an excerpt of the content of your article using the same keywords that you have used in your HTML Title.

The best time to write this is right after you have written the article. The article is fresh in your mind and you can write the description in less than five minutes. The best placement of your keywords in the description is at the beginning of your excerpt. Don't write long descriptions as they will be cut short by the search engines. Keep them short and sweet. You have only one second to get the click you want, make sure you get it! Writing good descriptions will help you get that click, even if you are not number one in Google.

The keyword field was used in the early days of the search engines to help get rankings. You just needed to stuff that field by repeating your keywords over and over again to get good rankings, even in Google. That was not the actual intention of that field, and search engines eventually started to give less importance to it.

Some search engines don't even use it now, and most give lesser importance to it. You can even get penalized for overuse of keywords in that field. Search engines don't like such keyword stuffing and will look at it as spamming. The best use of this field is to put in the most relevant keywords that are also used in the content of your page. Don't choose more than five to ten words to put in there. Whether you want them to be separated by a comma or not is your choice. I haven't found any difference between the two options.

The page we looked at earlier is now done, with some images added and the paragraph introduction headers displayed in bold. The overall view of the page is a lot more readable now, and with the proper use of images (see this in Chapter 8), we even have the possibility to rank better for the keywords in the page.

In the backend we also changed the HTML Title, added a META tag description, and some META tag keywords.

Looking at this chapter it should be evident that you need more than just a better written, keyword-rich title to outrank your competitors.

If you want to enforce the great title you wrote, make sure you accompany it with:

It is the force of these combined efforts that will give you better results in the search engines.

Another way of improving your page SEO is to use the "read more" option if you use introduction items, for example, in blog layout pages. In Joomla! there is a separate field where you can change the text of "read more" into a more keyword-rich link. This can be done by using the Alternative Read more text field in the Parameters(Advanced) section. Your template should support this, but not all of them do.

For example, you can change it to Read more about Showing First Class Flowers or even Click to read more about Showing First Class Flowers.

Using an article list layout when you create your menu link, instead of the blog layout gives you good keyword-rich links. I personally like this kind of layout especially for sites about technical topics, where there is little possibility to work with images. If you write about processes that need to be executed in a certain order, it makes sense to use a content table as you can simply order the pages into a certain sequence. If you create a web site such as the example site, people expect to see images, in that case a blog layout should be used and along with the "read more" option, to encourage users to click through from the introduction and to read the rest of the article.