| Solve the Most Common Joomla SEO Problem |
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| Wednesday, 21 February 2007 | |
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What's the one crucial Search Engine Optimization mistake made by many of the most prominent Joomla sites? Mistake: Mis-using Global Configuration metadata. In the last few weeks I've seen many websites harm their SEO chances by having the same description and same keywords for every page.
Its tempting to fill in those boxes, but think about it this way....Is there really a description and keyword set that can apply to every page on your site? Does you frontpage really contain the same information as your site map? Does your "Contact Us" page really merit the same description as your forum pages?
Every template club I visited made this mistake. One of them (no names) has 516 keywords, each one of them appearing on every page. 16 might be a better number. Needless to say, I couldn't find them ranking for even one important keyphrase. Oh - and Joomla.org makes this error throughout its Main, News and Help pages.
You'll be amazed how many times you see the following source code:
<meta name="description" content="Joomla! - Content Management System and Web Application Framework" />
Solution: Leave your Global Configuration Metadata empty. Apply unique metadata to each page.
Comments (5)
  written by steve, February 21, 2007
Hey Hummerbie - you beat me to it by about 3 months
 You're also dead right about the SEF Patch - it so essential it should be part of the core. Maybe we can lobby for a warning message to be put on the Global Configuration metadata page: "Danger! Stuffing this page can seriously damage your SEO health"  written by Anthony, February 21, 2007
Hey Steve,
This certainly saves a lot of time afer upgrading Joomla and having to retype the site global tags and keywrods. Just curious ... what are your thoughts on components like the met-keyword generator? Cheers Anthony. written by steve, February 21, 2007
Hi Anthony
On small sites, a generator is not a good idea because it is still worthwhile to do metadata data by hand. However - on large sites with lots of contributors addings regular fresh content, a generator might be the best solution. At least the pages will have some metadata, and the generators (for all their faults) do actually pull up keywords that reflect whats on the site.. Write comment
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I did a post on it some time ago:
http://www.pathos-seo.com/joom...-stuffing/
Mabye your post will bring more people to look at this issue...
Best solution to my knowledga is the SEF Patch, still hoping this will be resolved with the next release.