As part of a my goal to review every SEO tool for Joomla, I’m moving on to mambots this week.
We’ve previously reviewed Search Engine Friendly URL components such as Open-SEF, SEF Advance and Artio SEF and patches such at the Joomlatwork SEF Patch.
Mambots (or plug-ins) are generally much smaller extensions, often just two files, but they can have a dramatic effect on site’s operation as we’ll see with JoomSEO.
What Does JoomSEO Do?
- Adds real semantic headings. We earlier posted a hack to core files that enabled you to add <h1> and <h2> tags to content titles. However this mambot allows you to do that without requiring any core hacks. A word of warning – you may need to rewrite your CSS. Quite a few off-the-shelf templates come with a very, very large <h1> or <h2> size.
- Generates metadata automatically. It allows you to create dynamic meta keywords, dynamic meta descriptions and dynamic titles, with quite a few options about which items you do and don’t want included. I found the keyword extraction to be pretty accurate. It comes with a long list of excluded words (a, the, it, and etc…) so your keyword list is actually pretty useful.
What Are JoomSEO’s Limitations?
- It can’t be turned on and off per page. This means that if you’re using the "keywords in page title" option and you do have a page with a form for example, you’ll need to add some text or your page title will contain something like "| html, , generator , , ,|"
- It only works with content items. It won’t work with Content / Section lists, Contact pages etc. or Third Party Components.
What Sites Will Find JoomSEO Useful?
Overall, I’d recommend JoomSEO for larger sites with medium-to-large amounts of content. If you have a small site, I’d still suggest using the Joomlatwork SEF Patch and writing your page titles and meta description. However, if you have lots of content, especially user-submitted content, its hard to justify the time need to write descriptions for article. If you’re in that situation, you’ll find an automatic metadata generator useful and JoomSEO in particularly.