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Joomla 1.7 SEO: Include Site Name in Page Titles

June 24th, 2011 at 1:20 PM CEST in Joomla 1.7

I just had a pleasant surprise after installing the first alpha version of Joomla 1.7. It seems one of my biggest wishes in terms of SEO in the core of Joomla! has been granted because Joomla! now allows you to include the site name after the page title!

Before and after

Image credits: tanakawho

Include Site Name in Page Titles for Joomla! 1.5

Joomla 1.5 SEO settings

In Joomla 1.5 there was no SEO setting to use the site name in the page title yet. However, given the code to handle the page title was quite simple in the Joomla! 1.5 framework, it was easy to write a small plugin to modify the page title back then.

A great tutorial on how to write such a plugin (with a full example you can download at the bottom of the page) can be found here.

Include Site Name in Page Titles for Joomla! 1.6

Joomla 1.6 SEO settings

Joomla 1.6 introduced two new SEO settings in the Joomla! 1.6 Global Configuration. One of these settings was 'Include Site Name in Page Titles' (and the other one 'Unicode Aliases'). The biggest concern I had with this new feature was that it was only possible to include the site name before the page title (a problem I discussed in the presentation found below).

Joomla 1.6 Core SEO and Best Practices

View more presentations from FinishJoomla

The reason for why I was unhappy with this is the fact that a site name before a page title only works for large brands. These well known brands can benefit from the improved Click-Through Rate (CTR) they get from visitors in the search engines seeing their brand name before their title. Lesser known brands will most likely not get this boost in CTR from having their site name in front of their page title and are therefor actually hindering their own SEO efforts as keywords should preferably be placed as much in the front of the page title as possible for maximum value.

"According to SEOmoz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results. SEOmoz"

Include Site Name in Page Titles for Joomla! 1.7

Joomla 1.7 SEO settings

Joomla 1.7 seems to have taken the best of both Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla 1.6. As you can see in the image it is now possible (at least in this alpha version) to place your site name either before or after the page title (or to hide it entirely). Apparently there was a tracker item in Joomla Code for this problem since the end of March of this year, which got closed about five weeks ago (after it was included in the latest SVN build). I somehow must've missed that when I wrote about the proposed new features and patches for Joomla! 1.7 a couple weeks ago.

Now that we can put the site name behind the page title, I'll most certainly start using this option again. How about you?

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User Comments (6)

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Anna

July 29th, 2011 at 3:05 PM CEST

hey hello how have you edited the file to put | instead of - for the title in joomla 1.7?
pls let me know,
thanks in advance ;)

Theo

July 29th, 2011 at 5:10 PM CEST

I don't think it is possible to change that character in (any version of) Joomla.

Our corporate website on www.finishjoomla.com isn't built with the Joomla CMS, but is custom code on top of Zend Framework. Therefore we can choose any character we want in the title tag.

Les

November 9th, 2011 at 8:42 PM CET

Thanks for this guide, the slideshow was particularly useful. I think I'm still making a basic error somewhere though; whenever I search google for my site www.danddcleaning.co.uk it lists the home page with the title 'logo' and I've no idea how to change it. Any ideas? Sorry if this is a really stupid question.

arslan

December 28th, 2011 at 6:57 AM CET

it adds a - between title and site name. I want to add a | instead. How can it be done?

sam

January 19th, 2012 at 3:47 PM CET

But adding site name does it really help in seo ? Because as per seo.aboutus .org, we should remove it.

MPH

February 16th, 2012 at 5:47 PM CET

Ok, so I love this. For every page except the homepage. I want "Page Title - Company Name" on every interior page, but not on the homepage. I want just "Company Name" as the home without the suffix. I don't want "Home - Company Name" or "Buy My Product - Company Name", I just want "Company Name". Best I came up with is making the page title a space, so I get " - Company Name". That's not good enough. Does anyone have a suggestion, answer, or workaround?

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