My Favourite components: OSMeta

There isn’t much that I don’t like about Joomla, but its “out of the box” management of Meta data is one of them.

If you’re not sure what Meta data is, it’s the title and description text that appears in your google search results, and they’re very important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Natively Joomla allows you to add a Meta Description for each article in your website, but it insists that the title of the article by default also be used as the Meta Title – and you don’t always want that, especially when you’re trying to use keywords in the Meta Title.

Now you can also add Meta data at the menu item level in Joomla, but not every page in your website will necessarily have a corresponding menu item – think about the blog on your website where each individual article doesn’t exist in the menu, but is accessible by a single “Blog” menu item.

Enter OSMeta – a must have component on any Joomla website that will make managing your Meta data so much easier.

Firstly it adds an additional field to the article publishing tab which allows you to set a Meta Title that is different to your article title – a simple addition that should be core to Joomla.

Secondly, it provides the ability to manage your Meta data in a single location so you don’t have to go and edit each individual article to edit its Meta data – this is very useful for the initial build of a website, but also when you need to do mass updates of your Meta data.

The other good news is that the free version of OSMeta is perfect for the majority of websites. They do have a paid premium version, but I’ve yet to find a site that requires it.

You can find out more on the Joomlashack website.