New to Joomla

We would all like to have thousands of unique visitors to our websites - there wouldn't be much point in building the sites if we didn't, but despite our best efforts there are subtle, often hidden pitfalls to search engine optimization that can thwart our efforts.

A very useful list of factors that are believed to influence Google's ranking algorithm has been assembled by seomoz.org.  It has been estimated that Google's search ranking algorithm contains over 200 factors that affect search rankings, but in this instance a panel of 37 leading specialists in search engine ranking voted on the factors and ranked them. It makes very interesting reading.

Equally interesting as the top factors that are thought to influence a site's ranking by Google are the factors that are thought to have a negative influence, in other words the things that will penalise your Google ranking. These are of course speculative, but here is the list with some personal observations and comment . . .

1. content that is inaccessible - pages that can't be reached
2. very similar or duplicate content - pages that are not very different to others, possibly having been copied with only minor alterations
3. external links to poor, or known-spam sites - basically if you link to rubbish sites then you may be tarred with the same brush
4. duplicate title or meta tags on pages - this suggests that the pages have been mechanically generated
5. overuse of keywords - repeating the same words over and over without good cause

What you can do to avoid these pitfalls of search engine optimisation

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account and include your site then you will have access to some excellent site diagnostics. These tell you about inaccessible content, so there is no excuse for not sorting out all the pages that can't be reached. The diagnostics will not tell you about similar or duplicate content, but let's assume that you're not in the business of copying content - few people are in reality. Let's also assume that you only link to relevant site of good quality. It's like a false promise sending your visitors to poor sites, you might get away with it once, but once bitten and most visitors will leave your site.

That brings us to duplicate meta tags and keywords.

Using Google's Webmaster Tools to spot and fix duplicate meta descriptions

First let's review what Google and other search engines do with meta descriptions. There is a good explanation on Google's Webmaster Central Blog it explains what the tags are and how meta tags are used by search engines.

The two important tags (in my opinion) are the page title and description. The description, where present, gets shown in the Google search results. Another clue to its importance is that in the Google webmaster tools, there is a whole section devoted to duplicate descriptions. If these were not important then this section would not be there.

The practicalities of avoiding duplicate meta descriptions

Here is the Google duplicate meta tags report for New to Joomla - embarrassing, but we need an example.

Let's look at what additional information we can get from the Google Webmaster tools by clicking the link . . .

Now we can see the actual text that is duplicated on the 4 pages, clicking the + sign on the left-hand side reveals a list of the pages themselves. Those pages are all in the clean Joomla installation that we have here at New to Joomla. Its purpose is to show exactly what a new, clean installation of the latest version of Joomla looks like. However, Google's found some minor issue with it and that has implications for other installations unless we take some precautions to avoid problems.

The source of duplicated meta descriptions in a Joomla 1.5 installation

First, visit one of the actual pages, then using a browser, view the page source, here is the section of source that was generated by Joomla and contains the description meta tag.

Compare the text in double quotes shown above with what Google's Webmaster Tools report showed - no surprises - they are the same, so where are they coming from?

The source of duplicate meta descriptions

Log into your Joomla back-end system as administrator, then view the global configuration from the site menu, you should see something like this .  .  .

Joomla has included a default Global Site Meta Description and Global Sire meta Keywords section. Whatever you put into these text boxes will appear on every page on your Joomla site, unless you override it when you set up the page.

As far as search engine ranking goes this could be a disaster, because all your pages will have the same description, so the search engines will have trouble telling them apart.

What to do about duplicate description meta tags in Joomla

Begin by clearing the global metadata settings; log in to the administrator's back end of your Joomla site, then from the Site menu select Global Configuration and then clear the two default settings, as shown below . . .

Save the changes.

To make sure that the changes have been done, preview the site, then view source and confirm that the meta data is shown empty.

How to put real Metadata information into Joomla articles

Having cleared the default metadata we need to know how to set some real, useful descriptions and keywords for Joomla articles as we add the articles.

Begin by adding a new article, then look to the right-hand side of the page where there is a heading Metadata Information, click that and it should open to reveal two text boxes, labelled Description and Keywords. This is where you insert the appropriate Description text and the keywords you would like inserted into the page. Here is what was typed for this page . . .

You can verify that these are the actual metatags by viewing the source for this page!

Conclusions

In this tutorial we learned how to prevent Joomla 1.5 from assigning the same description and keywords metatags to every page on a Joomla website. This is really important because search engines may penalise sites that duplicate tags. It's a good thing to have meaningful descriptions that are appropriate to each page - it helps anyone viewing search results to decide whether or not to visit your pages.