JoomPlaza templates

 

Meta Tag Page Titles

The first step in better SEO is to make sure the title tag contains some useful keywords that you might be found for. You can see in the example below that the meta title (in the blue bar) is "About Hope Chapel". This is much more useful and specific that if the title was just "About Us".

But where does this text come from?

It comes from the Menu Item that is linking to that page in your menu. If we look at the Menu Item Parameters, we can see that the article being linked to is titled "About Hope Chapel".

Unless we define otherwise, the page meta tag title will be generated from the article title.

If we are linking to a section or category, the meta tag title will be generated from the name of that section/category.

This why its critical to carefully choose the titles of your articles. Thinking hard about SEO and keywords when you do this makes everything else much easier!

If the page is reached without going through a menu item, for example, if it was a read more link in a blog, then the article title will again be used as the page title meta tag.

If for some reason we want to override this automated meta tag title creation, we can do so in the system parameters.

Initially the Page Title field is blank. This means the automated default is used as described above. If we enter in some text here, this will be used as the meta tag page title.

Internal Links

The second factor we initially mentioned was having keywords in links to a page. It doesn't matter whether its an offsite or an internal link, its still good for SEO.

We saw above that the link in our example was "About Us". There are not many keywords there, but, if we padded it out, the menu would look terrible. So what to do?

Your site has several modules that will output a series of links to various articles in your site.

• Latest news:
  Creates a series of links to the most recently created articles in selected sections/categories.
• Most Read Content:
  Creates a series of links to the  articles with the most pageviews in selected sections/categories.
• Related Articles:
  Creates a series of links to the articles that are "related". This relation is determined by common words in the keywords in Metadata Information for articles.

Use the Content Link modules as "fire and forget" link generation for your site.

Even better, the text in the link will be the title of the article, so if you have carefully crafted the article title, then you'll be getting more benefit out of these links as well.