Alter webpage title on Joomla and K2 for SEO purposes

Recently, I  had to alter the <title> tags of a website built with Joomla CMS (version 1.5.x) and the powerful K2 content component, for SEO purposes. The problem was that the sitename that you define on the Joomla site settings was prepended to all title tags in all pages. For example if we suppose that the site name is “Sample site name”, the titles on my webpages where as following:

• Homepage: Sample site name
• Article pages: Sample site name – Article Tile

This is unwanted behaviour for SEO (and not only SEO) reasons. I don’t know if this is an issue only for websites using the K2 content component or a genaral Joomla issue. Anyway, the desired behavior is something like the following:

• Homepage: Sample site name
• Article pages:  Article Tile – Sample site name

There is little information on how to achieve that on the web when you use K2. So I thought I should share the way I did it. The following code is included in the index.php file of your template, somewhere in or before the tag:

$option = JRequest::getCmd('option');
$view = JRequest::getCmd('view');
$app = JFactory::getApplication();
if ($option=="com_k2" && $view=="item") {
    $ids = explode(':',JRequest::getInt('id'));
    $article_id = $ids[0];
    $article =& JTable::getInstance('k2item', 'Table');
    $article->load($article_id);
    $mySEOtitle = $article->get("title");
    $mySEOimage = JURI::base()."media/k2/items/cache/".md5("Image".$article_id)."_M.jpg";
    $this->setTitle( $mySEOtitle.' - '.$app->getCfg('sitename') );
} else {
	$mySEOtitle = $this->getTitle();
}

Some things to note:

• the following line of code checks so that the following changes apply only to the pages that display a K2 item. This is to differentiate from the homepage

if ($option=="com_k2" && $view=="item") {

• the following 2 lines is how to get a K2 item from the database using the Joomla framework

   $article =& JTable::getInstance('k2item', 'Table');
   $article->load($article_id);

• bonus: the way to get the K2 item image. It is not stored in the db but in the filesystem using a filename that is the MD5 hash of  the Image Id and the word “Image” (eg “Image21”) and appending the size of the image to get (eg. _M.jpg, _L.jpg, _XL.jpg)

	$mySEOimage = JURI::base()."media/k2/items/cache/".md5("Image".$article_id)."_M.jpg";

I hope this helps someone as if it could have helped me. I would love to help with any questions you have!