JoomlAtWork's SEF Patch Extended does wonders for Joomla 1.0's SEO abilities.

SEF Patch Extended

SEF:PE is filled with great features to make you salivate inexcitement and really is a must have for any commercial Joomla 1.0x website, couple that with the fact that it's a mere £8.33 (+TAX) for asingle domain license or get a server wide license at the cost of 10licenses and well, I am sold!

It should be noted that SEF Patch Extended is the commercial upgradefrom JoomlAtWork's free SEF Patch and includes all of those functionsplus the Extended features.  For more information on the free patch,please go to Joomla Search Engine Friendly Patch.

Installation

SEF:PE is fairly easy to install, it just requires a lot ofpermission changing of core Joomla PHP files so that they can bemodified/replaced by SEF:PE.

This concept may be a little worrysome for some people out there,but no worries, SEF:PE also has a function to reverse the changesshould you want to uninstall it or more likely want to upgrade to anyfuture Joomla 1.0x version.

There are patrches going back to Joomla v1.0.9 but seriously, thereshould be no reason why you are not running the current 1.0.15 versionof Joomla and of course SEF Extended Version has a patch for that.

Features

SEF:PE includes all of the features from JAW's Free SEF Patch plus much more.

• Additional field to put in the HTML title field, separated different from the page title and page header
• Add 5 custom META tag fields to the Joomla content and menu items;
• Theability to control the settings of the title field (for example if youwant to include the site name within each title it's now possible)
• The ability to add the META title field into the html head section
• Better control over the standard META fields: robots, keywords and description
• Control over the Google Cache setting (this allows you to prevent that your documents can be retrieved from the Google Cache)
• Control over the Google snippet settings (this allow you to prevent that Google can show a summary at the search results)
• The ability to dissallow Google to index images on your search for the images search
• The ability to display the Joomla meta generator tag (if you like this)
• Now support static pages
• When no title is available the sitename can be used as the default title.
• Theability to set http-equiv settings of the documents dates: Lastmodified settings of document and expires settings for the http cache
• The ability to assign META data to any Joomla URL: thereby supporting third party components with GOOD titles and META data
• Keywords and multi keyword phrase suggestions for Joomla URL's when you assign META data to URLs.

Settings

Page title settings allow you to set the default settings forhow Joomla should use the title tag, by default Joomla uses the formula"sitename - page title", the preferred formula is "page title -sitename" and with SEF:PE it is also the default settings but you canuse a wide variety of variables in your page title.

META tag description and keyword settings is where you decidewether or not to use the global meta ketword settings if no META textis given for the specific Joomla item.

META tag generator settings allow you to turn off the generator tag that says this page was created by Joomla (recommended).

Google settings allow you to change the default googlesettings to allow or prevent Google from caching, grab images for imageGoogle image search and wether to use Google snippers to grab a summaryof your document within the search result list.

Content date settings (HTTP-EQUIV) is by far the king daddyof SEF:PE's features as it changes Joomla's default http header thattells a browser (or Search Engine) that the page expired at Mon, 26 Jul1997 05:00:00 GMT, that is ANY page, so the header says that the pageexpired over 10 years ago and it also uses the last modified date ofwhen the page is retrieved.

With SEF:PE the header removes the expiration header as it serves nopurpose anyway and uses the documents actual creation date or lastmodified date and time as the last-modified header.

Custom Fields

You can add up to 5 custom META tags with a default value if none isadded when writing the article, sample tags could be: copyright,author, abstract and other less used tags.

URL Fetching

SEF:PE allows you to define the settings for META fields that youcan assign to any Joomla URL, and you can also retrieve the 'content'from the URL. When you retrieve the content for the specific URL,keyword suggestions are automatically made and you can define thesettings for the META keyword suggestions.

NOTE: some server configuration, even if they use CURL for URL retrieving will fail and require you to use a CURL proxy server.

Repository

When you want to change the meta tags, page title or some otherattributes of static pages like your Contact page or your menu pages,you can use the Repository.

All you need to do is enter the relative URL (the page url minus thewww.sitename.com portion) and enter the information that you want touse instead of the default settings.

You can also use fetch URL which require for the most part a serverthat support CURL and possible also a CURL proxy.  You can manuallyenter the information however and it is just as easy and fast asfetching and editing the pulled data.

Actual Usage

Ok, so you have installed, setup defaults and features to your liking, now what?

Well, it could not be any easier, you get additional fields underthe meta tab when creating or editing an article where you can changethe default features like robots settings, Google cache and snippetcontrol JUST for this item over riding the default settings.

You also get the additional META fields that you added in the Setupsection, change them, update them or just leave them be.  Like I said,it could not be any easier.

Verdict

I am very sold on this product, I think it should be the staple ofany commercial if not any Joomla site out there that runs Joomla 1.0x(There is a free Joomla SEF Patch 1.5x also), it is priced just right and is a great value.

The META functionality coupled with a SEF correct page title tagsand correct http headers being sent to browsers and search enginesalike, I am highly recommending this software but I also want to stressthat SEF:PE does not change the URLs of your site to be more SearchEngine Friendly.

If you are currently running several Joomla sites, it is very muchworth to consider the server wide license for the cost of 10 licenses,as a pretty affordable solution.