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Although the Joomla 1.5 release offers a very good application / CMS framework the basics of the framework is not optimized to perform optimal SEO. Although some improvements are made in regards to the page titles is still lacks of customized titles and other SEO settings. From SEO perspective you will have no full control over the SEO settings in the Joomla generated pages. This free patch solves this issues for the 1.5 release.
You can improve the SEO settings of Joomla 1.5 with this free SEO patch for Joomla 1.5 . This patch solves the issues in regards of the settings within the html head section of your html page. The patch allows you to gain fully control over the META and title settings in the http header settings in Joomla 1.5 generated pages.
To apply this functionality you must replace some core files, reason is that the core code within Joomla 1.5 doesn’t allow the implementation of a good SEO component and plugins.
How to use these SEO settings?
The usage of the settings is done through the standard parameter settings of the specific menu settings and the article settings. You can apply custom META settings and a custom HTML title for the following Joomla elements:
1. Articles
2. Joomla Frontpage
3. Menu -> blog category / section
4. Menu -> archive blog
5. Menu -> weblinks categories overview.
Additional SEO tab within the global configuration
Once you have applied the patch first take a look at your global configuration settings. You will see an additional SEO tab as showed in the picture below. From this tab you can control the settings of the SEO fields within your HTML settings. You can apply the following settings:
HTML title setting |
You will notice that when you open the SEO tab for the first time this field is empty. This is because the setting is not saved within the global configuration file. To display the title on your pages you should put at least the [TITLE] tag within this field |
Default title |
The value of this field will be showed once there is no title available for a specific page. You can either put a text string into it or apply the [SITENAME] tag to the field. |
META tag robots settings |
The standard setting of joomla is that the robot tag always contain the value ‘index,follow’ on pages which you can not set the robot meta tag. This field overrules the default setting of Joomla and you can either show no robots tag or you can assign another default value depending on your needs |
Show title META tag |
This field allows you to set a META tag title in the HTML head section with the value of the title. |
Show author META tag |
This field allows you to set a META tag called author within the HTML head section. This field will be set when an author parameter is available within the article or menu settings |
Show Joomla generator tag |
The patch will also remove the default generator tag that is included within each HTML page that is generated by Joomla. You can set an own value to the META tag generator in the field below in the configuration.
Although we are a big fan of the Joomla CMS and the community itself we encourage you to remove this meta name by installing the patch. First of all it will not have any effect in improving your search engine rankings and it will add content to all of your pages that is not in line of the content of your webpages self. Therefore it can have a negative effect on your rankings within search engines.
Beside this we believe that you must not advertise on this way that your site is realized with the Joomla framework. This in case security issues are discovered within the Joomla environment: it’s easy for others to find your website with the search engines available: Google, msn, yahoo… |
Metadata Settings section
In this section you can assign the default META tags settings for Joomla 1.5. With the META tag description settings and the META tag keywords settings you can set the default behavior of the global META tags field description and keywords. Default Joomla shows these values when no description / keywords are assigned to an article or a MENU element. With this value you can overrule this and the global settings will not be showed when selected.
Download SEO patch for Joomla 1.5.x
Additional information about SEO patch for Joomla 1.5.x |
