The patch also gives you extra configuration settings for metadata. Optimal configuration of these settings is one of the key factors in further improving your site for SEO. The metadata of your pages is the data that is not shown in the content of the page itself. Metadata records are created for search engines to get more information about the page, such as who created the page, the title of the page, and more importantly, a short description of the content of the page that can be shown on the search engine result pages. Using these options in the correct way helps you to rank a lot better in most search engines.
Therefore, let's start with these settings and take action to put them right. Let's start by looking at the changes and options that are now available in the Global Configuration screen.
- Meta tag robots settings
This setting is used to tell the Search Engine Robots if they should index and follow the content of the article, or web site. By default Joomla! will tell the Search Engine Robots to index, follow every page, but you don't need to do that. Search engine spiders see the exception rather than the rule, and will index pages and follow links unless they are told otherwise, so just use those fields for special pages. Leave this field as it is, but keep in mind that you will be able to use this setting on page by page basis if you need to.
- Show Title Meta Tag
This field should always be set to Yes so that you can change the title specifically for the search engines. With the parameter set to No, the HTML Title is not shown in every article and menu link. You can see how this affects the page meta tags fields later on.
- Show Author Meta Tag
If you have a web site that is created by different authors, or you use Joomla! for blogging with different authors, you should set this to Yes. If you or the web site owner is the only one who writes articles, this is not really necessary.
- Show joomla generator tag
As you read before, it is best not to show the generator tag, so set it to No. The removal of the generator tag can also be done using an option in the sh404SEF component. Another option is to hack the Joomla! core files, which I don't recommend, as you need to keep track of every hack you make because you will need to do them again after each core update.
As for the other metadata settings, my suggestion is not to use them, as it will only provide duplicate content to the site.
Metadata is one of the areas where you can make a better site then your competitors.
There is a lot of discussion about metadata and whether or not you should use them, but in my opinion it is definitely worth the time you spend on them.
If you look at the search result pages from Google, you will see a snippet below the title of each page in the list of results.
Google creates these snippets from the content of your page unless you have provided a short, but most likely description for that page. This description is what you have written into the META tag description fields.
Based on what you just read, you can imagine that you have some influence on what is shown by the search engines.
Using a description is a great way to get people to click on your link that is shown. All you have to do is write a good short summary of the content of your page and make sure that your keywords are there.
Look at the description as a short advertisement for you page, and write keeping the potential visitors in mind.
For example, "building a pond in your landscape garden is not that difficult if you follow the right steps to make it, and choose the best place within your garden, read more here…"
You don't have a lot of space to write this description, as Google will limit the length to about 165 characters in two lines.
In the above example, you will find keywords relevant to the site, such as pond, landscape, garden, and building. If those words are also used in the title, Google will show them in bold if they are used in the search term.
Try it yourself, run a search and look at what is below the link you are most likely to click on. You will see that it's going to be the best description that catches your click.
Some webmasters and SEO specialists still use the keywords tag to stuff all the keywords they can find into that field. It is a great way to make sure that your rankings will drop like flies. Don't do that!
What you should do is, look at the content of your page/articles and choose somewhere between four to maximum ten keywords that you want to include in that field. You can write them as keywords or keyword phrases of two or three words, and separate them with a comma. You can write each word once and don't separate them with commas. It does not make a difference for the search engines because they use them as indicators for the content relevance only.
And here is the catch that most are still missing, make sure those words are used in your content! If the word is not there, don't use it!
Search engines don't like duplicate content, so you want to minimize any possibility to have duplicate content on your site.
Similar to the menu items issue mentioned before, Joomla! articles in which you did not fill the meta tag fields such as META tag description and META tag keywords could end up having duplicate content issues. You should always use the META tag description and META tag keywords fields on the pages you write.
If you haven't filled those fields, the default Joomla! installation will put the descriptions from the Global Configuration in each and every page you have created.
Of course it is best to use those fields in every article you create on your site, but sometimes you forget. The Joomla! SEF patch will prevent the Global Configuration fields from being attached to the content pages. In the normal Joomla! installation the Global META tag description and META tag keywords are used if there is no metadata article created. The SEF patch will prevent this from happening and will not show any metadata if you did not put it there.