Tag Meta is a Joomla native extension that allows you to efficiently manage site meta tags. Tag Meta allows to set the tag 'title' and the meta tags 'description', 'author', 'keywords' and 'robots' on each page, which is identified by the URL or a part of it. Also other meta information like the rel ‘canonical’ are supported, and there’s a customizable database of synonyms for each group of keywords, that can be used to enrich pages. This provides a powerful tool to improve site positioning in SEO optimization.

It was initially created because many Joomla extensions didn’t provide a way to set meta info on their pages, and in these cases Tag Meta helps you to do this. With the introduction of macros and placeholders that allow complex data manipulation now Tag Meta can be also used to improve site's SEO ranking and get some other advanced "things".

For best SEO results, remember to always use meaningful text for title and description, concerning content of the pages, and also remember to insert comma separated list of keywords (no spaces needed). Finally, it is recommended to enable native Joomla SEF routing to generate friendly URLs and simplify the site structure, improving both SERP positioning and meta info management.

How it works

Tag Meta package includes a component for managing list of rules for site's URLs, and a plugin that analyzes all requests and sets the meta information as defined by rules. These are the main steps to start using Tag Meta (for the impatient):

1. Install the package using Joomla Administration interface;
2. Enable the plugin "System - Tag Meta" and set its ordering and other parameters;
3. Use Tag Meta component to manage rules for meta info and synonyms database.

Detailed instructions on each step are described in the following paragraphs. In this section we just want to focus on some basic concepts related to Tag Meta and how it works.

The first important thing to understand is what a "rule" is. With Tag Meta Manager (the component interface) you can create as many items as you want, and each item is a meta info rule. But not necessarily an item corresponds to a single page (i.e. matches just a single URL).

A rule has a "URL" field that can be full URI or just a part of it. For example, if the "URL" field is "/home.html", then this rule matches both the URL http://www.mysite.com/home.html and http://www.mysite.com/orders/home.html?view=status. So, it means that with a single rule it is possible to match multiple source URLs. But the content of the "URL" field can be a regular expression, and this provide a powerful way to specify complex search patterns for matching URL. In the next paragraphs will be shown many regular expression examples.

For any request on the site, the Tag Meta plugin compares the requested URL with all the rules enabled. All matching rules are applied in the sequence defined with rules ordering. The "Last rule" flag controls if the current rule must be the last or not, so when multiple rules are applied the process ends if a rule has this field set to true. This provide a way to "pile" meta information from multiple rules for each page (e.g. some values come from the "category rule", other from the "single item rule").

The first thing to do is to enable Tag Meta plugin. To enable the plugin go to menu "Extensions" -> "Plug-in Manager", find a system type plugin named "System - Tag Meta Community" or "System - Tag Meta Enterprise" in the plugin list, and click on it to access to plugin settings. Set "Status" to “Enabled”, and set other parameters on the right side according to your needs. Look at "Plugin settings" paragraph for detailed information about each parameter. Click on "Save & Close" button and check that the plugin is now enabled.

Remember that is the plugin that "does the work". The Tag Meta component is just the administrative interface for managing meta rules an other features, but is the plugin that checks site requests and performs meta enhancement when needed. So, the very first thing to do is to enable the plugin. Note that if you need to disable Tag Meta, just disable the plugin.

Another thing to check is the plugins order that can be very important, especially if there are some other plugins that mess with page's meta information. In most cases it is better to set Tag Meta as the last system plugin, so it will be the last to be executed and to madofy page content. Now Tag Meta is ready to work! You can now create your first meta rule, and test the result through the web browser. Be careful that you could get a cached page. To avoid this just clear server-side cache from backend (menu "Maintenance" -> "Clean Cache"), and client-side cache from your web browser.