Improving Joomla’s Search Component For Better SEO

If you are also irritated by shortcomings of Joomla’s default search component from an SEO point of view these tips are for you. Talking about a 2.5 system right now.

First of all the page title. Joomla will either add the menu name as page title or you can give it a custom page title in the menu item set up. This way or another the title will always be the same whatever the search word or term is. Meta description is not set at all.

Static page title, regardless of the search word. Page heading can be set in the menu item set up but it would also be static.

No meta description.

There is a useful plugin for improving this available for free from eboga.org called Joomla Search SEO Plugin. This plugin will extract the titles of the search results from content items and injects them in the page title as well as in the meta description. Very useful. Make sure you unpublish the original content search plugin or you will have double search results for content. Here’s how it looks after installing it.

Page titles that were found in the search were added to the page title.

Meta description was also generated.

Now we need a <h1> headline. I found a simple solution for this in the components/com_search/views/search/tmpl/default.php file.

Find this:

<?php if ($this->params->get('show_page_heading')) : ?>
<h1>
<?php if ($this->escape($this->params->get('page_heading'))) : ?>
<?php echo $this->escape($this->params->get('page_heading')); ?>
<?php else : ?> 
<?php echo $this->escape($this->params->get('page_title')); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</h1> 
<?php endif; ?>

Replace it with this:

<h1><?php echo $this->searchword; ?></h1>

There we have it we have a dynamic page heading for the search results.

Dynamic h1 title tag in the default Joomla! search component.

This is all very nice but would be even better if the search results could be crawled and cached. We can make use of plugin that converts meta keywords into tags. These tags would display in the articles as links right to the search results and they can be followed by the search engines. There are a good couple of these plugins at the Joomla! extensions library. My favorite is Showtags by Roberto Segura because it lets you force the menu item ID.

Now you can have as many different new pages as many keywords you can think of with dynamic page title, meta description, h1 headline and content.

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A little update to this, I didn’t manage to get the H1 tag working with multilingual content yet because of the item ID. I might figure this out later but if anybody would have an idea I would appreciate it.