Joomla Tutorial – Creating a Custom Page Title (Title Tag) to Improve SEO
In a previous blog I mentioned that your page title (Browser Title or Title Tag) is one of the most important aspects to rank your website for keyword searches. For example, “About Affinity Web Solutions, Web Design in Caerphilly” is better than “About Us” because it not only shows the search engine reader the company name but additional keywords which is important for ranking (see previous blog about 10 basic search optimisation techniques to improve your website rankings).
The problem with Joomla 1.5 is the form to set this title different to what the actual page is called is hidden away in the depths of the Menu Manager, and not in the page editor itself. This blog gives an overview of how to set the page title different to the page name in Joomla 1.5.
Method
- Choose the menu item that the page is linked to by going to Menu -> Your Menu
- Click on the Menu name to edit it
- On the right hand side of the page, choose the tab “Parameters (System)”
- In the drop down you will see “Page Title”
- Enter your custom page title here
- If you do not want this page title showing on the page (which you probably wont because you would want the actual page name to be displayed), choose No for “Show Page Title”
- Click Save or Apply
Your page Browser Title should now show the custom title you have entered with your chosen keywords.
Remember to use important keywords and location based keywords in the title. Read the blog 10 basic search optimisation techniques to improve your website rankings to find out more about using keywords and other techniques to use.
Hope that helps.
Hi, cool post. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for writing.
That works fine if you have an article linked from a menu but if the article is linked from a category listing then how do you get the the meta title to show an article title?
@Nick Joomla 1.5 has much improved article linking, in that no duplicate pages with different URLs should occur as they did with Joomla 1.0.x , and the Title should be maintained. If you see my News page wich is a category listing (http://www.affinitywebsolutions.co.uk/news ), I have added a link to the Contact Us page using the insert hyperlink button in the editor (I use JCE Editor http://www.joomlacontenteditor.net/ ). Clicking this link shows the custom title I have added for the Contact page as per method above.
Alternatively try hyperlinking to the Menu item and not the Article. JCE provides this facility.
If it still does not work perhaps this is a JCE feature and not Tiny MCE that comes with Joomla? Or perhaps you have a SEF component installed that can control Titles (like sh404SEF). I turn this off in my sh404SEF component.
Hope that helps.
This does not work. The Meta “title view source” is controlled by global configuration “SITE” then site Name
Hi Gordon. It is possible you are referring to Joomla 1.0.x but in Joomla 1.5 the above process controls each page browser title if you want the title to be different to the name of the page. The process is used to control the Browser titles on all our Joomla sites. If you have Joomla 1.5 please give it a go.
hello i may have been very hasty in my judgement. I am using 1.5 the latest Joomla .My problem was “seo simple” or “SEF” plugin as soon as i “unabled” both of them (after going back and reading the article further) it clicked in my brain your solution does work my humble apologies to you regards Gordy
I use sh404SEF for SEF URLs and this also manages page titles I think, so I disable the title management in this so I can use the Joomla one, but of course keep the SEF functionality turned on.
Hi,
I tried your way. But it is not working for me. Can yo please give me some suggestion on this?
@Manish Hi Manish – sorry for late reply been on holiday… can you email me as it could be one of many issues, then I can post the solution we made for you here. Email me on info@affinitywebsolutions.co.uk and let me know what problems you have with the above not working. Thanks.