Joomla is a very powerful content management system with the capability to create just about any kind of website. It also has some features that allow you to perform search engine optimization on your pages quite easily. Specifically, you can quite easily edit the meta description and meta keywords for each page (article) within your site.
However, they overlooked the most powerful change needed in SEO – the ability to change the “page title” or the title that appears at the top of the browser menu. This is the text that Google uses (in most cases) to display the link to your page. It also uses this text as one of the factors it weights on calculating importance for the person performing the search.
Here are a couple things that I found that allow Joomla to change page titles for you:
Home page - You would think that this one would be obvious but it’s not. To change the page title on your home page follow these instructions:
- Open your Joomla administration site.
- Go to “Menus” and select your default menu (should have an * next to it).
- Click the default menu item (the one with a star next to it).
- Open the “Parameter (Systems)” link on the left.
- Input your page title into the “Page Title” field.
- Save your changes.
Now you should see your updated page title showing on your site.
All other pages – This is where Joomla swings and misses. All the other pages in your site do not allow for you to change the page title without adding a plugin to do so. Follow these steps to change the page title on all the other pages within your site:
- Download the Tag Meta plugin
- Install the plugin – Go to “Extensions/Install/Uninstall”. You will need to unzip the downloaded file and install the 2 .zip files separately.
- Enter each page that you wish to change the page title – Go to “Components/Tag Meta/Items” and add each page individually.
This method works but is not the most time efficient method. It would be nice if someone allowed us to have a Page Title field in the same place as the meta description and meta keyword fields in the “Meta Data Information” section of each title.
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