With the Joomlatwork patch active, you could set the meta tags description and keywords within the Home link of your main menu. To move forward with the next item, save changes made in the Plugins option and go back to the main panel of sh404SEF. If you install sh404SEF, the meta tags description for your Home menu item doesn't work anymore as we let sh404SEF handle some of these items.
If you activate the meta handling option, you can set the options you want for your home page. Go to the Meta tags option and click on the link in the top right menu as shown in the following screenshot:
Just copy and paste the text you had inserted in your Global Configuration | SEO options.
You don't need to use the Robots tag for the home page as you want it indexed and followed. You only want to use the language tag if you write in a language other than English. So if you don't need them, why are they there? Simply because a large part of the screen layout used by sh404SEF is same. For the next option we are going to look at—the New Meta option—the only difference is the URL part.
You will get, or may already have, some components on your web site, for which there is no possibility to put meta tag keywords in the output pages of that component. With the New Meta option you can get those Description tag and Keywords tag for every article or page produced by that component. Putting that data in is hard work and if you have lot of articles in that component it will take a lot of time to fix it!
If you use this option directly after the installation, you need to be aware that you have to create new metadata for every article.
This screen is pretty easy to follow, but there is one snag to it that most people don't get. You really have to put the Non SEF url, which means a URL without the standard SEO and sh404SEF options active. Yes, that means a URL similar to:
You only use the part starting with index.php/ without the domain name and without the "/" before index.php. This is the case for most SEF components, they use this basic Non SEF url for the rewrites.
Recently, a module available at www.joomlapraise.com shows the Non-SEF URL in a module position. You can find the PRAISE URL module at http://www.joomlapraise.com/free-joomla-extensions/praiseurl-module.php. Before using this module you needed to deactivate sh404SEF and the Joomla! SEO options as described earlier, and to do that you needed to make your configuration.php file writable, and so on.
You need to install and publish the module so that it can be seen by only special access level users, and deactivate it once you are done with filling the SEF URLs for your special meta titles, descriptions, and keywords.
This module will also come in handy with the next option of sh404SEF that will take your Non-SEF URLs and transform them into any URL you like.
We looked at special metadata such as titles, description, and keyword in the last paragraph. You saw how this works for Non-SEF components and how to improve those pages. There is also an option in sh404SEF to create SEF URLs for those pages. Go to the control panel and click on View/Edit Custom Redirects and choose New. You will see the following screen:
Again we start with the New SEF URL because this is the URL that Joomla! will always build from the database. Use the URL without the root of your Joomla! installation and without the "/" before index.php/. Put that in the Old Non-SEF Url field. In the field before that you write the URL that you want. Make sure you don't create duplicate URLs. I have a sample screen from a Joomla! 1.0 site to show you the usage of that field.
You create a new URL that comes right from the root of your Joomla! installation. In this case it creates the URL such as www.example.com/bentley-arnage-rt.html. You could also create a URL that would say www.example.com/catalog/luxery-cars/bentlry-arnage-rt.html.
If you decide to do that later, you will see that sh404SEF will create an alias such as the bentley-arnage-rt (without the .html). The old URL, which might already be in the search engine indexes, will get a 301 redirect and will point to the new URL. That way you can improve your site without losing your old ranking results.
If you get used to reading from the Non-SEF URL of the component in question, you can duplicate an already created custom redirect and just change the item ID and some other ID values to create a new entry.