As I mentioned in an earlier post about MojoBlog, that the only thing missing with this Blog tool for Joomla where the SEF options to create nice SEF URLs, and missing the Title tag for each post.
Reading some posts from www.goodwebpractices.com and www.alledia.com I wanted to see if the options in the advanced settings of the SEF Component sh404SEF would help to overcome these MojoBlog problems.
It did!! and it wasn’t even that difficult, so I thought I would share this with you, so you can do the same…
Getting sh404SEF Component and Module ready
First of is getting the sh404SEF component to show you its real strength!
If you installed and use the sh404SEF component (please use the latest release), you will see this basic configuration screen:
And you see nothing there that can help you… now just click on the item next to this screen that says “select advance parameters:
After this, you will see a screen with some more items to use in this great SEF and SEO Component:
As you can see now, there are to items on this screen that you can use to get some great stuff for you MojoBlog posts.
But before you can get to work on those items, you have to make sure of one other very important item to be published!
The sh404SEF Custom module needs to be published!
You can find this module in the normal module overview of Joomla, and you only need to publish it.
The module is part of the sh404SEF Component installation, so you don’t need to install it yourself.
There are a lot of parameters below this screen, but you only have to set it to published, that’s it.
Creating the SEF URL
Once you have done the above things to get everything into place, lets start by creating a SEF URL for a MojoBlog post.
First go to the front-end, while making sure the site, or just the MojoBlog component is NOT showing SEF URLs. You need this to get the “old non SEF URL” to put into the settings.
If you have a post, it should say something in the last part of the URL like
“index.php?option=com_mojo&Itemid=63&p=5″
This will be different on your site ;-)
Copy this part of the URL and then go back to the sh404SEF Panel and click on:
And then choose “new” , this will bring up a field that will aks for that old URL and the new one.
Just copy the code from the previous step into the “Old URL” part and create a nice new one that should get into that place.
Please use “-” to connect the words
For the URL you can use the post title and you could leave out words like “and”, “for” and stuff like that for shorter URLs (Google ignores those anyway)
If you have set the option in sh404SEF that .html should be added to the URL, you can set it here as well.
Save the new URL and you are done with this part, you could check if it works already.
(Make sure the SEF Component is enabled an working again if you disabled it before)
Getting the Title and Metatags to Work
You have seen another nice items in the sh404SEF Control panel… it says “Metatags”
Before you click on it, make sure you have the ”Old URL” you used earlier at hand, because you are going to need it here as well.
After you clicked on the above icon , choose “new meta” from the upper right-hand menu.
You will get a screen like the one below:
As you can see, the first file is where your old URL should go.
Below that you have the fields:
- Title: where you can write your HTML Title that will be picked up by Google
This title is different form you post title and shows only in the Title bar of your browser.
- Description Tag: make this into a nice commercial description for you post
- Keywords tag: Keep this few in numbers and make sure those terms are in the post text
- Robots tag: Come in handy you want to doe some Follow, NoFollow or Index, NoIndex stuff
Otherwise you can leave it empty.
- Language tag: only useful for multilingual installations.
If you are satisfied with your lyrics, save it and go to the front-end, selecting the post you just worked on, in the source code of that screen you should see the Title, description and keywords you just entered…
One final thing remains, but that is out of you hands…. wait for Google or other search engines to re-index you page so you can check if what you did is indeed what the robots will pick-up…
If you want so see if things work on a live example, go to Hummerbie Mojo Blog and check some of the posts.
P.s. One more tip… the “Old URLs” from MojoBlog contain the last code &p=10 (or another number) and that last number correspond with the post ID from MojoBlog. So if you know that number, you can use the old URL you copied and just change the last number.
