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Metadata is data that is listed in the header of a page’s HTML. When search engines first began appearing in the 90’s, they heavily relied on this meta data to figure out what pages were about. Modern Search engines, such as Google, no longer pay much attention (if any), to your meta data. Still, it can be a good idea to edit your meta data information. For example, your meta data description is what Google uses most often as your page’s description in the search results.
In this Joomla 2.5 tutorial, we will show you more about how to customize your metadata options within featured articles menu item types. These items control specifically your meta description, your meta keywords, index and follow settings, and whether the page should use SSL or not.
To access the Metadata Options for Joomla 2.5 featured articles menu items:
- Log into your Joomla 2.5 admin
- In the top menu, hover over Menus and click on the menu you would like to work with
- In the list of menu items, click on the featured articles menu item that you would like to edit. In the right menu, you will see a set of options labeled as Metadata Options.
Meta Description
With no Meta Description set: | With a custom Meta Description set: |
|---|---|
| If you don’t set a Meta Description, no meta description will show in your page’s HTML code. | If you set your Meta Description to: This is my custom Meta Description … your HTML will include a meta description, which will look like this: <meta name=”description” content=”This is my custom Meta Description” /> |
Meta Keywords
With no Meta Keywords set: | With custom Meta Keywords set: |
|---|---|
| If you don’t set any meta keywords, your HTML code will not include an entry for meta keywords. | If you set the Meta Keywords to: … your HTML will now include a meta description value such as: <meta name=”keywords” content=”joomla 2.5 testing, metadata options, meta keywords, learn joomla, joomla 2.5 tutorial” /> |
Robots
When setting the Robots value, you have the following options:
- Index, Follow
- No index, follow
- Index, No follow
- No index, no follow
Index vs. No index | Follow vs. No follow |
|---|---|
| When you set any option that includes Index, you are telling search engines to index the page, so that others can find the page in their search engine. No index on the other hand tells search engines that you don’t want them to index the page in their list of available websites on the internet. | If you add no follow, you’re telling search engines not to crawl any of the links that you include on your page. Setting it to follow will tell search engines that they can follow the links on the page. |
If you set Index, Follow, for example, Joomla will add the following to your code:
<
p class=”code_block”><meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />
Please note!
Just because you tell a search engine to not index or not to follow doesn’t mean they will follow your directions. Trusted search engines like Google will understand these tags, but other search engines either don’t understand the code or don’t care.
Secure
If you set the Secure option to On, the actual menu item will be called over SSL using https. This does not affect any links within your content, it simply sets the SSL value for the menu item itself.
