Be wary of Joomla metastructures

Over the forthcoming weeks I am going to be  concentrating on the different SEO issues you should consider if you are using the Joomla Content Management System.

I am an admirer of Joomla if it is used in the correct manner, but sometimes there is a fine line between Joomla working effiiciently for your search engine rankings, and not performing at all. Below is an example of the way Joomla can sometimes incorrectly structure your meta tags.

<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword ” />
<meta name=”title” content=”title” />
<meta name=”author” content=”author” />
<meta name=”description” content=”description, description, description, description, description, description, description, description, description, description, description” />
<meta name=”generator” content=”Joomla! 1.5 – Open Source Content Management” />
<title> Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword </title>

The example above has few errors within the metastructure. The metastructure simply needs tidying up as Joomla creates unnecessary tags such as ‘<meta name=”title” content=”title” />’ which has the same content as the title tag but will not be read by Google. All that needs to be done here is to reorder the metastructure so that it is more efficiently laid out for Google.

Below I have detailed what the metastructure should look like:

<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<title> Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword </title>
<meta name=”description” content=”description, description, description, description, description, description, description, description, description, description, description” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, Keyword ” />
<meta name=”author” content=”author” />
<meta name=”generator” content=”Joomla! 1.5 – Open Source Content Management” />

Dave Stopher
Natural SEO Programmer