One of our Joomlashack members asked this question:
How do I control the meta title on my Joomla homepage?
They wanted to have a meta title for search engines that would have a similar format to the one on this site: "Joomlashack: Joomla Templates, Tutorials, Free Joomla Templates - Joomlashack".
In this tutorial, we'll show you two options for controling the metadata on your Joomla homepage.
Video guide to changing the meta title
Option #1. the Joomla core
- Go to the "Menus" link in your Joomla site.
- Find the Joomla menu with the gold star. This indicates that this menu contains the link to your homepage:
- Find the menu link with the gold star. This is the link to your homepage.
- Open the menu link with the gold star and click on "Page Display Options":
- Put your homepage title into the "Browser Page Title" field.
- Set "Show Page Heading" to No.
- If you want to control the rest of the meta description and keywords for the homepage, click the "Metadata" tab.
- Save the menu link.
- Go to System > Global Configuration.
- Make sure the Site Name is entered correctly.
- Change the "Include Site Name in Page Titles" setting:
The settings we've shown you in this tutorial will produce a homepage title in this format: "Browser Page Title - Site Name".
Option #2: the OSMeta extension
If you want more features than the Joomla core provides, we recommend the OSMeta extension. What we are going to do inside the OSMeta is change the default Joomla homepage metadata to our custom values.
- Go to Components > OSMeta.
- Click "Menu Items" and scroll down until you see the "Home" link. In this example 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".
