Why use Add Keywords?

SEF (search engine friendly) urls and SEO (search engine optimisation) are very important for your site. Joomla does a good job with SEF and basic SEO. However, there are many facets to SEO and one of these, metadata, is not really well handled. The default settings produce a site with a lot of repeating, meaningless metadata. Then there is the work of manually adding metadata each time you write an article...

Contrary to what many people say, metadata is still important. Although search engines do not rely on it anymore, Google for instance does still look at metadata. It may not use keywords for searching but it does use descriptions - they appear as the short introduction below the link on the Google search page. In fact, Google may actually penalise sites which do not have unique content and unique metadata for each page.

Keywords are useful for navigation within your site as they are used by the related articles module. They can also be used to generate tag clouds. Add Keywords now natively supports the display of both tags and related articles.

The bottom line is that you want metadata to reflect the actual contents of you page/article. Using Add Keywords will at least give you a head start. If you're serious about SEO, Add Keywords will allow you to assign individual metadata for your menus independently from your articles.