If you wish to update titles or descriptions of your Joomla content items, you normally need to open up each of them one-by-one. The more content items you may want to edit, the more time-consuming this process becomes.
A Joomla extension called "OSMeta" will make this task much easier for you. I'm going to show you how to use it to quickly update all the titles and descriptions for your Joomla content items in one screen.
For the purpose of this tutorial, I am using "OSMeta Free".
Step #1. Install OSMeta
- Click here to visit the OSMeta page and download the extension. You are going to get the OSMeta installation files onto your desktop.
- In your Joomla site admin, go to Extensions > Manage.
- Click on the "Upload Package File" tab.
- Click on the green button called "Or browse for file".
- Find the OSMeta installation file on your computer and click on its name twice. This should initiate OSMeta installation on your Joomla site.
- In a few seconds, you are going to get the message that the installation was successful.
Step #2. Use OSMeta to edit multiple meta titles and descriptions
- Go to Components > OSMeta and see an overview of all the metadata you have on your site. This is one single page that allows you to drill down and easily and quickly update meta titles and meta descriptions for all of your content.
- Let's look at our Home page. At the moment at our site home page, we simply have OSTraining - Home.
That title is not descriptive enough for our needs.
What we are going to do inside the OSMeta is change these default values to our custom values.
- In the OSMeta control panel, click "Menu Items" and scroll down until you see the "Home" link. My new title will be "Welcome to OSTraining, the best place to learn Joomla!"
I can enter here the description for my Home page as well. I can enter much more characters for the description than for the title.
- The Title is described as being shown in search engine results.
- The Description is shown as not being seen by users but is shown in search engine results and should be about 320 characters.
In this case, I can write "This is a wonderful site to get support, videos, books and much more to help you climb the Joomla learning curve."
I realize that I won't see the description of my Home page but if I click on Save, hopefully now I will be able to see that now I have a much more descriptive title for the front page of my site rather than simply "Home".
Let me take an example from our own website OSTraining.com where we use OSMeta extension. Let's take a look at our page at https://www.ostraining.com/joomla-training/.
This page is about different ways you can learn Joomla here at OSTraining. We have a video club. We also have a book club. Then we have an outline of online classroom training. A whole variety of methods.
On the page itself, we have the "You can get Joomla training here at OSTraining" title.
It is enticing for humans visiting this page. It's also specific to the website. You can learn Joomla here at OSTraining. However, and this is a very common trick amongst people that are familiar with SEO, we actually have a different meta title.
The title on the page says "You can get Joomla training here at OSTraining". The title for the search results is different. It is more keyword-rich and more specific.
It reads: "Joomla Training - Free Joomla Online Training". Those are phrases that people are more likely to enter into search engines.
In our example site, we have our "Getting Started" article. It is visible inside our OSMeta.
It's perfectly fine to leave "Getting Started" as the page title for people visiting the site but to have a different meta title for people, who are seeing the site in the search results.
For example, I might change the actual title to "Get Started with OSTraining - Learn Joomla Quickly".
Now I should see that the default title that I had has been replaced with much more specific and keyword rich title that I just entered there.
No matter how much content you have on your Joomla site, you should find it quite easy to drill down in OSMeta and edit a large number of meta titles and meta descriptions quickly.
If you need to, you can copy your articles' titles over into their Search Engine Title boxes in one go and quickly edit them there.
Just check the boxes for the articles first.
Then click the Copy item title to search engine title button at the top of the page and you are ready to edit them.
OSMeta Joomla extension allows you to control your meta titles and to control your meta descriptions.
Additional Reading
- New Feature in OSMeta: Meta Description Limit Increased to 320 Characters
- The Absolute Beginners Guide to Joomla's Metadata
What's Next?
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