Quickly Add a HTML META Tag to a Web Site Running Joomla

You can quickly add a meta element to a web site running Joomla using the web administration control panel. In my case I needed to add a meta tag to the index page of a web site for Google to authorize access to their Webmaster Tools section. When you sign up for the Webmaster Tools Google will ask for you to verify the site in one of two ways which are either adding a meta tag to the index page of the site or by creating a new HTML page. The easiest method using Joomla is to add the new meta tag.

Example Google Webmaster Tools Meta Tag:

To add this meta tag to a web site running Joomla via the web administration control panel follow the steps below.

1. Login to Joomla Control Panel:First login to eh Joomla web administration web page typically located at your domain followed by “/administrator”.
2. Navigate to Templates: Click Extensions from the Joomla control panel top navigation and select “Template Manager” from the drop down menu. The image below is an example of what the Template Manager page will look like.

   

3. Select Default Template:The default template will have a star image in the column titled Default. Click on the title of the template, in the step 2 image it is siteground-j15-48, which will take you to the template details page.
4. Edit Template HTML: On the template details page there will be multiple items you can click on in the top right of the web page to modify various items related to this specific template. To be able to add a meta element you will need to click on the “Edit HTML” icon which will open a the “Template HTML Editor”. Near the top of the file you are editing add the meta tag, in this example it is supplied by Google and shown above, before the closing “head” tag (</head>). Once the tag was added make sure to click the “Save” icon located in the top right of the “Template HTML Editor” which will save and apply your addition.
5. Verify Meta Tag Addition: Now open the Google Webmaster Tools site again and make sure the meta tag addition was accepted by Google.

You can also make other changes design type changes to Joomla using the same method which is much easier than having to download a file via FTP, edit the file, and then upload the file back to the site overwriting the original.

If your changes are not accepted the issue might be that even though you have modified the default template there is a chance that the index page of the site has a different template assigned to just that page. On the “Template Manager” page other active template will be shown with check marks in the assigned column. So if this is the case you can find out what pages each template is assigned to from the “Template Details” page which is accessible by clicking on the name of each template. If another template is assigned to the index page or to the home page then you will need to add the meta tag there instead by following the same steps above using the different template name.

The above information was obtained from a site running Joomla version 1.5.7 running on a Linux CentOS 5.2 server.