Working With Joomla Meta Tags

I have now been at Just Search for three months and in that time I have had a number of projects involving making changes to sites using Joomla.

Having been previously unfamiliar with this CMS platform I have now got to grips with the way it works. One difficulty I often found was being able to change the Joomla meta tags such as the title, description and keywords for the home page only. These meta tags were often set globally and were therefore the same on every page. I found that I could change the meta description and keywords for each individual page but these would only be bolted onto the global meta details, making the word count too long.

After searching Google for possible solutions I came across the Joomla variable itemid. As the variable name suggests it holds the value of the page ID. After determining the itemid value of the home page I was then able to ensure that my meta tags appeared for the home page only, allowing the remaining pages to take the global setting.

Obviously the site would be much more SEO friendly if it had unique meta descriptions for every page rather than having them set globally. During my Google search I came across a plugin that would do just this. This plugin, called SEO-Generator, automatically creates keywords and descriptions by pulling text from the content of each individual page. Unfortunately this plugin is only available for Joomla 1.5.

Gemma Neesham
Natural SEO Programmer