Seo for Joomla - Making Joomla Search Engine Optimized

Please make sure that You use your Metatag Description the right way.

Looking at Metatags, lots of people think that the metatags aren’t that important anymore, so they tend to ignore them.
Now it is a fact that, due to spamming the keyword metatag in earlier website ages, this has lost a lot off relevance for your position in the search engines.

But, and this is really a big but, this is not true for the Description Metatag!!
In fact this description tag is one of the most valuable assets you have on your page, just after the pagetitle.

Why you should use the Description Metatag 

Why indeed? Because if you look at the Search Engine Results pages, there is almost every time the Description tag content of the page displayed.
Google does sometimes give you a part of the page which it thinks is more relevant, but otherwise you get the content of the Metatag Description.

Try it yourself first, just search on your keyword and be aware of your natural selection process.
What brings you to favour your click to the page of your choice?
Most people read the title, and the content just below to see what fits their need.

Improve the Content of your Descriptions 

So what does it mean for you?
In fact it brings you some kind of free ads in the SERPs… well not really of course, but you should be able to work this.
Fill your description tags with a good description of the page, use your keyword in it.
Most off all, you should write it like a little advert, try to write it so that people who read it, are attracted to your page instead of your competitors.

Make sure however that there is the content you promised on the page you “advertised”.
You don’t want user to have a bad experience, they should be wanting to read more on your website.

P.s. You can write your Description always directly after the article, it than takes about two or three minutes to come up with a good description.
The content of the article is then still fresh in your mind…
And I still put in five to ten keywords in the Keywords Metatag that are in the page content.

Tools to check your descriptions in Joomla pages

If you have your Joomla site all ready and filled with lots of content, it is a pain to check every page for the description tag.

But help is here…. If youd use the OpenSef component, then there is a Metatag Generator build in within the SEO assistant.

If you work with an other SEF Component, you can also download the Free Metatag Generator from www.ijoomla.com

Both Component work similar, they show you the page, and the keyword and description field for thet page.
So you can see very easy where you have soem work to do.
And You can change it from within that overview as well.

Both can generate the content of the fields for you…. please don’t use this feature if you are truly working on getting the best out of your Joomla! website….
But give it a try, just to see what comes out, then you will see what I mean, it is not that bad, but you should aim for the best. 

There is even a Commercial product from JoomlaEquipment that works on the Metatags, and more.
But I am Dutch, so I always check out the free once first to see if they fit my needs