About Joomla Titles                     

Title Hierarchy

Joomla has the capacity to set titles in five places:

-       Menu item (Page Title – look in Main Menu/menu_item, then System Parameters to turn on/off)

-       Section/Category Title (default set to off)

-       Article Defaults (Article Mgr – click on Parameters in the upper right icons)

-       Article Over-rides (Advanced Parameters within articles)

-       Within the article itself

Lower items in this list over-ride higher items. Each has its own good and bad points, but ultimately, you want the simplest, most automated method to lessen maintenance.

If you have the following requirements, for example, it would introduce some potential conflicts:

-       Standardize Title styles across all content automatically

-       Article lists must display and be titled with the same style as articles themselves

-       Spacing between title and text must be a single line and consistent

-       Article title fonts must be consistent with module title styles

For consistency, set the Article Manager defaults to Article Title = “off”. Thus,

-       Menu item (Page Title): Off

-       Section/Category Title: Off

-       Article Defaults (Article Mgr Parameters): On

-       Article Over-rides (Advanced Parameters within articles): Must explicitly set to “Off” if over-ride needed

-       Within the article itself: Not recommended, unless you wish to have different title types within each article and do not want consistency

Title Aliases

An alias can be assigned to Section, Category, or Article and there is also an Alias for Menu Item. Alias goes with the Name of each of those objects. When you name an Article, for example, you can let Joomla! automatically create the Alias. What Joomla! does is use the same value as the name you entered for the Article, except all of the spaces and special characters are removed and replaced with a dash.

If you change your article title later and want Joomla to re-name your alias, simply delete the Alias field contents before saving, and Joomla will automatically re-create it. If you want to create an Alias different from your article title, enter whatever you like in the field, making sure to use hyphens or underscores instead of spaces.

Those Alias values are used to create URLs (if you activate the SEF URLs in your Global Configuration Utility.)

How the URL is created has to do with the Menu Type you selected. For an Article Layout Menu Type, your URL will be http://example.com/menu-alias.html

When you consider your Alias values, you'll want to be thinking about what you want your URLs to look like. Many who are concerned about SEO try to ensure their URLs have good Search Keywords in them.

So, for example, if you write a blog about "Shetland Sheepdogs", you could make certain the words "Shetland Sheepdogs" is in the Article Title. Then, let Joomla! create the Alias from the Title. The words "shetland-sheepdog" will be in the Alias. If you then create a Menu Item for a Category Blog containing this article, Joomla! will use that Alias in the URL. That will increase the chances your Article will be visible to those searching using a search engine for articles about Shetland Sheepdogs.

If you want to know more about configuring SEF URLs, go to http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners and search for SEF URLs. There's a good configuration guide for URLs on that page. (Plus *everything* on that page is good for learning.)