Joomla SEO with Dublin Core

Using Dublin Core Metadata for Search Engine Optimization is a practice often overlooked by Joomla (and non-Joomla) webmasters and self-proclaimed SEO gurus alike. Bad enough, because embedding Dublin Core metadata elements in your web pages provides a standards-based approach to search engine optimization that boosts your SEO score and complements your HTML meta-data.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is a set of online meta-data standards for a broad range of purposes, including semantic tagging to help search engines match requests with relevant results. Because Dublin Core meta-data is based on a standard developed by an open organization, embedding Dublin Core meta-data in every web page is a highly recommended practice.

Although most major search engines probably do not, at present, assign much weight to Dublin Core meta-data, the trend to give more weight to it is visible, lot of page-evaluating, grading services already using it as a key factor in ranking your site. Anyway, the benefits of using it exceed the cost. The cost is low: taking the time to add it to every web page - a process that can be easily automated. More, the Joomla web-masters can benefit from existing plugins, available for all Joomla versions (latest is this one, for Joomla 1.7+). Some are arguing that Dublin Core meta-data increases code bloat, but web pages have so much junk code in them that the addition of a small DC block have no real impact on page size or speed.

The benefits list is much longer:

  • Prepares your web pages for a future in which search engines heavily begin to use it.
  • Helps prepare your web pages for the evolution of the semantic web - a world in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to recognize and fulfill requests for content by people and machines. For more information, on the semantic web, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web.
  • Used with XML and RDF, helps foster semantic publishing, which may be advantageous to scientific publishers; for more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_publishing.
  • Lends support to open standards and builds momentum for them.
  • Helps several internal search engines process and retrieve information.
  • Helps with your SEO efforts already and this help will increase over time.
  • Using Dublin Core metadata keywords adds to your site an extra level of standards-based credibility, increasing this way your Page Authority score - which ultimately leads to much wanted increase in your Page Rank.