Changing order of site title and page title

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Changing order of site title and page title

Joomla Tutorials - How To

Written by Tony Lindskog

Saturday, 29 March 2008

By default Joomla uses "sitename - page title" as the title tag for all articles.

This is for 1.0.15 only
What is the "Title Tag"?

The title tag is probably one of the most important things to a web site and how well it does in search engine rankings.

It is one of the main three things that search engines use in calculating the overall weight of your site and individual pages, the other two would be your page text and quantity and quality of incomming links.

Joomla and Title tags

Joomla out of the box (both 1.0x and 1.5x) will use the formula: Site name - Page title when creating the page title for each page.

This means that all your Joomla web pages will start with your site name in the page title (for our web site that would be Joomla Views - ), while we are proud of our domain name (Joomla Views), this does not do much for our search engine rankings. Sure, having Joomla first is a good thing but repeating the site name over all our pages does not give us much love from the search engines.

Examples

An example of this can be seen below:

Original title:	Joomla Views - Changing order of site title and page title
Fixed title:	Changing order of site title and page title - Joomla Views

Looking at the example above, you will notice that the original example uses the site name first and then adds the page title to the end. Unless you have a well-known brand that gets a lot of direct searches, what brings your visitors comming will be the content of your web page content and title.

This is what the fixed title does, it puts the important page title (which should be an abbreviated summary of the article) first and then adds the site name at the end.

The Solution

This solution is for 1.0x and has only been personally tried by me on Joomla 1.0.15.

You need to edit the source code in file: /includes/joomla.php; on or around line 507, replace this:

$this->_head['title'] = $title ? $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] . ' - '. $title : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];

with this...

$this->_head['title'] = $title ? $title .' - '. $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];

All this does is switch the order of the information in the title tag and nothing else.

Kudos and credit for this solution goes to: Chette.com

There is a 1.5x ONLY extension that does the same thing without source changing that looks promising Title Manager; however, I have no personal experience with it.

NOTE: Check out the JoomlAtWork's SEF PATCH Extended review that is a much more advanced option and very affordable.

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