Messed up SERP/URL for blog posts

[atatidontregret]

Hi all, first post here!

I've been learning Joomla basics on the fly over the past few months, so I can manage a brand-new company website now that the original developer has largely phased out. I'm more of a content creator/manager, not a developer, so the learning curve has been... steep, lol.

As I've been poking around, it looks like the original developer didn't do much on the SEO front. Two problems with the blog are especially giving me a headache, and I get the sense they're related though I'm not sure.


First, all blog post pages have the same generic <title> tag (basically the company name), which causes all kinds of SEO problems. But they've all got unique Titles and Aliases in the Article editor. I also tried filling in the "browser page title" field in the Article Options tab, but that didn't do anything either.

I suspect this has something to do with the Blog's settings as a menu item. Currently its Menu Item Type is set to "Page," and I'm wondering if it should instead be "Category Blog" or "Featured Articles." But I'm really nervous about breaking the blog altogether if I mess with that.


Second, although I have "Search Engine Friendly URLs" and "Use URL Rewriting" both turned on in the Global SEO Settings, the URLs for blog posts are still super cluttered. For example, "companyname.com/component/content/article/30-blog/41-blog-post-title?Itemid=121." Yuck.

Again, I'm wondering if this is related to the Menu settings for the blog. But if I mess with those, do I risk breaking all the links between the main blog page and the individual articles?

Any thoughts would be super appreciated. Thanks so much!

[Per Yngve Berg]

Never heard of Menu Item Type "Page". It must belong to an extension.