Adding Metadata to Joomla
The last few posts (and probably the majority of the next few) are likely all about HTML5, metadata, schema.org and Joomla. That’s because I’ve decided to “convert” this site to HTML5 with metadata tags defined by schema.org. My hope, beyond learning some of the changes in HTML5, is to improve this site’s visibility by ensuring that search engines can do the best possible job understanding the content.
Most of the HTML output from Joomla is generated by templates, and that means to generate HTML5 and metadata output, I have to write my own template. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because there are a number of aspects from the current template that I’m dissatisfied with. Oh, and did I mention that while I’m at it, I want the output to look good on small screens too?
Besides this project, I’m working on quite a few other things simultaneously, so this will probably take a very long time, and who knows, maybe I’ll never finish.
My goal is to improve the indexing of this site, the first first thing I needed to decide was how to evaluate success. Thankfully, there are some tools for analyzing web page contents, and I’ll be using them to gauge success:
Although not so much a tool, another helpful resource is from our good friend, the W3C, and the Web Schemas wiki
Lastly, if you want to see the work in progress, you need to view this since with the appropriate template. To do that, append the following to any URL ?template=cleanflow
It will be some time before it looks good, but it will eventually get there.