optimization

• SEO DOs And DONT’s, According To Google

  Changes to Google’s algorithm have the ability to make or break businesses. Google is sending out the signal that you should worry less about the current SEO trends, and more about producing great content, and that they’re “leveling the playing field” for sites that don’t pay as much attention to SEO. Obviously great content is a positive, but at the same time, Google is showing us each month all of the changes it is making, and all the while, providing tips about how to do certain SEO things better.

• Setting up an automatic Smart Search indexing

  In another article I've praised the Smart Search core extension and recommended you to use it. But there is a problem with this extension - you need to re-index your site after you add new things manually to get the most out of it. Although the Smart Search index is automatically kept up-to-date whenever content items are amended, there are some circumstances where you need to re-run the indexer. You can do this manually using the Index toolbar button in the Manage Indexed Content screen. Or there is another way to do it?

• Special considerations to make your Joomla site secure

  Joomla, as most CMS's excells by making it easy to manage a website page. Offers a pretty easy way to manage Web-based publishing, format management, history editing and version control, indexing, search, and retrieval. Joomla has an impressive suite of features, but these features require some special considerations.

• Stop image hotlinking

  When other people link to your images directly this can put an unwanted, additional strain on your servers - it is not just an annoying, unfair practice to use your intellectual property.

  That practice is called image hotlinking and you can disable it by adding some code to your .htaccessfile.

• The most common Joomla SEO mistakes

  Mastering the Web is a never ending learning process. You can learn from both good and bad examples. Unfortunately most of us are learning from their own mistakes. A well known situation is that you got a brand new Joomla site, latest tricks, stunning design, appealing content, but you miss a key ingredient of the success: the Visitor. And you've wondering, why they aren't coming, despite your SEO efforts as sending out marketing e-mails to your closest 10.000 "friends" and spending nice money in buying incoming links and lots of postings on every imaginable social marketing site, blog and forum. It's not obvious, but the problem may be in what you did, and not in what you missed. Anyway, here's a mix of things usually Joomla webmasters are doing wrong. Learn from, and try to avoid these most common mistakes!

• The site name/title

  There is a setting in the Joomla site configuration, which is often overlooked or used to hold allmost nothing, in best case the URL of the site, the Site Name. You're asked during the install to fill the respective field, and you generally have no clue what to write in that box.

  So, what's wrong with that? The site is working, regardless what you wrote there...

  You may think one can wrote here anything crosses his mind, right?

• The Smart Search core extension

  Being disabled by default, this very powerful new core component shipped with Joomla 2.5 remains unnoticed by many Joomla site owners. It's time to began to use it and unleash the power hidden here.

• The ten commandements of SEO for beginners

  Why don't have Joomla in the title of tis article? Simply because these are the basics, the cornerstone stuff any webmaster must learn and respect. If you want a successful site, you must follow these Ten Commandements.

• To SEF ot not to SEF - is this a question?

  I'm joking, of course, but this is a real issue - from SEO perspective is a "to be, or not to be" type of question. To have some humanly readable URL's is key for your SEO success these days. And if Google and/or Bing does not loves you.... you are on the "not to be" side.

• Turbocharge your Joomla site

  Over the years spent in web page building and maintaining (since 1995, when published my very first webpage on a self-hosted SCO Linux box) a lot of information has been collected, settled down and at the end the best and most important tricks helping to make a website became fast and stable in the same time where surfaced. Despite the fact, that I wrote about this subject several times, it's a subject wich never looses his actuality.

• Turn caching on!

  To improve your Joomla website's performance, just turn on "caching" on the "Cache" tab from Joomla's Global Configuration. When caching is turned on, Joomla creates a static file or "cache" of your website data on the disk. When the static file is found, the system retrieves the data from the disk rather than from the database. This improves performance because it saves system resources by not making redundant SQL calls to the database. And it will also speed up the display time of the pages.

  You can set cache refresh rate in seconds. If you don't constantly update your contents, you might want to set it longer. And to further improve it, go to all your modules configurationand select "yes" to cache option (not available in all modules).

• What the alias field is for?

  Sometime we are forgotting the very basics when we are thinking about the SEO for our Joomla website. Did you asked yourself this simplequestion:

  What the alias field is for and how to use it to your advantage?

• When searchengine robots are hammering your site...

  SEO is good. SEO is great. Making search-engine spiders visiting your site is even better! Or not??? Recently one of my client has complained, that he was almost banned from one host, because the search-engine bots where "hammering" - read overloading - the server. Ouch...

• Why my Joomla site is this slow?

  Joomla generally is running at an acceptable speed -  users aren't seeing differences between an average Joomla site and another CMS'es. But what if they do? What can cause the (sometime unbearable) slowness of some Joomla sites?