Compass Designs .net

Back in October there was a brief discussion about the all important page title tag in Joomla 1.5 and its importance for SEO. Essentially, in 1.0 your page titles would always get appended (unless you had a SEF component) leading to potentially long titles. In 1.5, the behavior was changed so that if there was a page/article title, the global site title would be ignored.

That's all well and good, but the reality of SEO is not so clear cut.

There is actually significant disagreement in the SEO world to whether branding should be first in the page title. That might be the name of your site or company.

Digging deeper though, the debate revolves around whether to have it appended or preprended to the page title.

The discussion got opened up again, but recently the problem was addressed and solved by the rich Joomlasphere of 3rd party developers.

There are now two simple plugins available for 1.5 that allow you to manipulate the page title:

• Title Manager by Ercan Özkaya
• Website Name by Nicolas Ogier

Both seem to work pretty well. With the new and improved default SEF in Joomla 1.5, you could well get by with just one of these simple plugin's rather than a larger SEF extension.

Are you looking forward to easier SEO and SEF with 1.5?