Metadata are data about data, for instance a description of a website. Metadata are important for search engines and are written in HTML. Exactly how important metadata are in the rating by search engines is debatable. However, metadata represent a good way to describe your website in short and precise words.

Note: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. See the following article for details.

If you check out the HTML source code of a Joomla! site, you will see the following meta tags in the top area:

<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5" />
<meta name="description" content="Joomla! - the dynamic portal engine and content management system" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="keywords" content="joomla, Joomla" />

Of these, the two attributes description and keywords can be set on an article-by-article basis.

description

This description of site content is often displayed by search engines. You should pay special attention to this tag, since the user who has entered a search term often uses this information to make a decision of whether to visit a site or not. You can add further information about every individual page to the global description.

keywords

Keywords are very important for a document. You should list the most important concepts of your website with them. Some search engines index keywords in particular. The individual words are separated by commas; several words can be entered between two commas with normal spaces in between. The keywords should be limited to a maximum of 1000 characters; more than that will not be read by the search engines. Note that the use of fewer keywords helps each individual word get a higher priority in the search engine. Deliberate carefully about which are the most often used keywords and which are likely to be searched for most. You can add more keywords to the global keywords for every individual page of your website.

Each article may also specify, in its parameters, whether to include a title or author attribute.

Show Title Meta Tag

This parameter will insert the following meta tag with the title of the article:

<meta name="title" content="Welcome to Joomla!" />

Show Author Meta Tag

This parameter will insert the following meta tag with the author of the article:

<meta name="author" content="Administrator" />