Don't Use Page Titles in Your Mambo Content

Don't use page titles in your Mambo content items if you intend to create a proper document outline. This tutorial explains why.

In this article, we talked about the importance of a proper document outline. Providing a semantically correct, structured hierarchy in your page benefits all human visitors to your site, including those using assistive devices such as screen readers, but it also benefits search engines. You have probably read that search engines love headings - they do, because the correct use of headings makes it easier for them to understand the information contained within the headings and to assess its importance.

Mambo currently (versions 4.6 and lower) presents challenges in building a good document outline. Much of the content is delivered for eye-appeal and not for semantic structure. Many template designers style tags such as <td class="contentheading"> to give an appearance of this being a heading tag. It's not, and it adds nothing to the page structure.

To work around this limitation we could either hack the core code (not recommended, and not needed as Mambo 4.7 will fix this problem) or we can turn page titles off and add our own structural heading.

When you create a page ("content item") you are presented with the editor fields and a tabbed parameters interface. To turn off the page titles, go to parameters and set page titles to "hide" - see the image below:

Next, add your own page title at the top of the introtext editor field. Like so, <h2>. The reason we use <h2> is simple - <h1> is already used for the site title.

This is a very easy step towards presenting the information in your pages in a semantically correct, search engine friendly way. Try it and see - the benefits for SEO are worth it.

In a later tutorial we will look at the other elements of semantic markup. Keep a watch out for it!