Right now I'm writing this blog entry through the Joomla! administrator backend of our website. In the article editor on the lower righthand side of the screen is a tab labled "Metadata" information. This is a very powerful tool that Joomla! makes available. Website users don't see the metadata in a page, but search engines do. As our other entries have made clear, search engines are looking at many different things, but it is often the metadata that gets pulled up on a search engine listing for the description of the site or the page that's being listed. So you're helping searches, search engines, and yourself out if you put a short description and eight to 10 keywords in the metadata for each article you write. As long as the description and keywords are appropriate for the page, they will help search engines categorize your page and give them something to display in their listing.
Joomla! also has metadata entries for your frontpage and overall site in the "Global Configuration -> Site Settings" Page.
This is our final post in this Search Engine Friendly section for Fall 2009. It does take time and work to apply all of these suggestions, and, while it's hard to guarantee that your site will maintain a certain place in search engine rankings, every site that I have applied these suggestions to has moved its rank up considerably.
