Improve Joomla! 1.5 SEO side

Today I've decided to develop a simple but useful plugin, that somehow puts a medication on some Joomla! 1.5 SEO lacks.

It's been a couple-hours work and it's submitted to the JED ( so we need to wait a couple of weeks to see it into the JED ) but I've already released it in the site of my company.

Let me introduce you Custom Meta Tags for Joomla! 1.5 plugin, a brand new GNU GPL v2.0 Joomla! plugin.

The HTML title

A feature that I've always appreciated, in CMS, is the ability to display a title for the user and a metatitle for the search engine.

For example, this article has a title that you see ( "Improve Joomla! 1.5 SEO side" ) and a metatitle ( or HTML title, "SEO plugin for Joomla! 1.5: Custom Meta Tags" ) which you see at the top bar of the browser or in the SERP.

This is important for example, when you want to give your users a friendly title but also to the search engine an HTML title full of keywords:

• title: They're back: grunge breaths again in Seattle
• HTML title: The Nirvana will perform a reunion concert in Seattle the 11th February 2010

The title is aggressive, good for you users but the HTML title is even better: full of keywords ( Nirvana, concert, reunion, seattle, 11th February ) which give it the possibility to appear at the top of SERPs.

So, with Joomla! 1.5 you can't do that for single article, and that's a bid deal: but this plugin saves you!

You only need to type in your editor:

{metatitle:The Nirvana will perform...}

and in that article's page the HTML title is gonna be the one you defined in the edior with this syntax.

The same thing can be done with:

• meta description
• keywords

using

{metadesc:my decsription of the article in 160 chars...}
{metakeys:keyword1. keyword2}

Canonical URL

You can specify a canonical URL for the article using:

{metacanonical:www.mycanonicalurl.com/index.php...}

so you will be able to face better the problems related to duplicated content which affect some Joomla! installations or components ( due to webmasters lacks, moreover, than Joomla!'s ).

Generator

You can decide between 4 possibilities.

If you type

{metagenerator:Wordpress 2.9}

that custom generator will be displayed in the source code of that article's page or...   ...from the plugin manager you have a drop-down option list in order to:

• display an empty generator ( for [low-level] security purposes )
• display automatically Joomla! 1.5's default generator metatag
• display automatically a default generator metatag you can define in a text-form later.