Learn how to maximize your Joomla website for better search engine rankings. Our SEO guide will teach you how to make the most of Joomla for SEO. Includes Meta Data, URL structure, page speed, and compression techniques.
Looking for how to make your Joomla website SEO friendly? You are in the right place.
Joomla does pretty well out of the box but there are several elements that can be improved. Often times site owners want to add many unneeded features

Standard SEO Best Practices

• Keep the number of images to a minimum
• Give your images a descriptive names
• do not place any content or text in images (remember the search engines can not read the images)
• each page should have 250 to 700 words of content
• keep the user experience as a top priority
• Use H1, H2, H3 tags

Meta Data

Meta (or Page) Title

This is the most important of the meta data elements. The page title appears at the very top of most browsers and is the blue link in Google search result pages.
Page titles are a balancing act between including your keywords and creating an interesting clickable title. Page Titles should be kept to around 60 characters.

Meta Description

The meta description is not visible to the user anywhere on your page, but the search engines do use it to index and rank pages. Google will often times use the meta description as the text on the search engine results page.

Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords have really been abused in the past by spammers as a result most search engines do not use them for ranking. There is some research to suggest that search engines will use keywords to sort pages but not rank them. The end result is that you do not need to spend much time on your meta keywords.
If do add keywords to a page:

• Keep the number of keywords less than seven
• Make sure the keywords exist in your content
• separate them with commas

SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs

Joomla by default doe not have very good urls they typically look like:

• index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=126&catid=1&id=58&lang=en&view=article

The next step up is to turn on the core Joomla SEF URLs:

• best-practices/joomla-seo-best-practices.html

If you need more control you can look at a 3rd part SEF extension.  Many times the urls will look very similar to the Joomla SEF URLs but if you need more control or have special circumstances a SEF extension is very helpful.

Joomla Speed & Performance

Making your site fast will help you in many ways:

• A better user experience, how long do you stay on a slow loading site?
• Improved conversions
• More love from Google.  Google has added site speed to their 200 or so page ranking factors.

Follow these suggestions to improve the speed of your site.

Select a good hosting company

A fast server and good hosting company is the foundation for a fast site. Without a fast reliable server all of your other efforts will disappear. Not sure which company to go with?  Check out our Joomla Hosting Editor top picks.  Want to make sure your hosting company is doing a good job?  Think about using an uptime monitor and read about the advantages of an uptime monitor.

Best New Features in Joomla 3.5 You Should Know

The Joomla! Development Team seem to have settled into a comfortable equilibrium with the release of Joomla! 3.5. After the often huge and infrequent revisions delivered during Joomla’s earlier development cycle, most notably with the jumps to Joomla! 2.5 and then to Joomla! 3.0, the revised development cycle emphasising smaller, more regular releases have been a boon for the CMS’ stabilization. With more (if less expansive) feature upgrades, a lightened core package and a focus on keeping each new release as backwards-compatible with existing tools and extensions as possible, we’ve seen some nice additions over the past few years, and this is only going to grow moving forward.

Support for PHP 7

Joomla 3.5 will include upgraded PHP 7 support which, based on the numbers should make for some impressive improvements in site efficiency. Taking its cues from the Microsoft school of naming, PHP decided to skip a grade and jump straight from version 5.6 to version 7, hence the name. Touted as the biggest change to PHP since version 4, PHP 7 incorporates advances made in the PHPNG (PHP Next-Gen) project, which was created with the intent to make PHP a faster and smoother platform to match the high-speed web of the 2010s.

According to the PHP website, the impact of these changes is huge; in their graphs it’s noted that whereas one request from WordPress previously required 100 million CPU instructions to complete on PHP 5.6, that same request requires only 25 million to do the same on PHP 7. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone will see a huge increase in site speed since there are too many factors to take into account, but since upgrading to PHP 7 will provide the optimization benefits without the need to rewrite any code it’s a good prospect for any Joomla admin; if your service provider hasn’t scheduled an upgrade to PHP 7, now might be the time to start asking!

The new features in Joomla 3.5

One of the consistent mantras of the recent Joomla! dev cycle could best be described as “evolution, not revolution”; each update brings some new additions to the party, but a lot of the important work is in making Joomla a more flexible and expandable CMS. That’s not to say that there won’t be any new stuff to play around with when the stable release hits in a few days, but a lot of the fruits of the contributors’ labors will be found in the bugfixing and other little improvements. Without further ado, let’s have a gander at some of the new bits and pieces included in the 3.5 release:

TinyMCE Drag & Drop Images

Probably the biggest addition in this Joomla! release, which adds a user-friendly way to add images directly to articles. Not that adding images is a particularly tough process in the first place; if you’ve used Joomla! for any length of time you are most likely more than well-acquainted with the standard media manager’s simple upload and insert functionality that is available within the editor. With this new feature though, the content-creation process is streamlined further by making it possible to just grab the image you want to add to an article during editing and dragging it to the TinyMCE content area; the image will be automatically uploaded to your server and inserted into the content.

There’s some interesting points to note about the usage of this new feature that make it an effective tool, especially for newer users who are just getting to grips with Joomla:

Images added via drag & drop are automatically uploaded to the root images folder of the Joomla installation, but it’s possible to specify a subfolder in the TinyMCE options, which you can find by clicking on Extensions → Plugins in the main menu of your Joomla admin area, then clicking on Editor – TinyMCE in the list of plugins.

When an image is dragged & dropped into the content area it will be inserted wherever the text cursor is just like with the normal insert image functionality, so it doesn’t matter where in the content area the image is dropped. Just make sure you’ve put the text cursor it in the right place before you add the image!

If the image being added is not found on the server a green progress bar appears at the top of the editor to let you know that it is being uploaded, which will turn red if the image couldn’t be uploaded or if the process fails for some other reason.

If you’re uploading an image with the same filename as another image already on the server, then the upload is cancelled and you’ll see a popup message letting you know the image’s location; you can then use the usual add media method to insert the original image, or change the name of the image you want to upload to avoid conflicts with the original image. In future updates the author of this plugin intends to make it so that images with duplicate filenames will be automatically renamed, as is currently the case with duplicate article aliases, but for now the popup message will have to suffice.

If an uploaded image’s filename includes blank spaces they will be replaced with underscores to keep the image URL safe before being added.

Drag &amp Drop Images is not a massive addition, but this kind of optional enhancement does wonders for making content creation more natural and comfortable, and since this plugin is enabled by default in new installs users that are new to Joomla will find it even more beginner-friendly.

Insert Modules into Articles

OK, so inserting modules into article content is by no means a new thing; this functionality was originally added way back in Joomla! 1.5 after all, but it wasn’t always easy to do for beginners who weren’t familiar with the syntax. Joomla! 3.5 aims to simplify this process considerably with one simple addition.

When editing an article with the TinyMCE editor a new button has been added to the toolbar; Module. By clicking on this button a list of available modules will be listed; simply clicking on the module you wish to insert will automatically add the correct syntax into your article.

This is still fundamentally the same solution that existed in prior versions of Joomla, just with a clearer functionality, and just like the earlier solution there are a few quirks that are worth noting:

Modules must be created and listed in the Module Manager before they can be assigned; you can create and publish new modules within the editor.

A module doesn’t need to be assigned to a position before you can display it; it does however need to be published, either to the specific article page or, failing that, to all pages. If it isn’t assigned a position then publishing it to all pages will only display it in the article.

When selecting a module to display in an article you can choose either a module position or a specific module from the list; just click on the module or position name accordingly.

Currently the insert module functionality only applies to the standard TinyMCE editor included with Joomla by default; third-party or other alternative editors do not include this option.

This new option counts as another step towards making Joomla! more user-friendly; we’ve often seen users that simply were not aware that it was possible to insert modules into articles previously, and those that did that were still beginners with Joomla! found it hard to understand the syntax, so breaking the option down into a couple of clicks within the editor is a much more functional approach that everyone can take advantage of.

Customize the CSS of your Protostar template

Protostar’s the workhorse of the Joomla! template scene; no-frills, fast and functional for users who just want to start making their own site without worrying about the bells and whistles. Even so, most users want at least a little customization, and previously this was only available via the use of plugin, or some risky index file modifying that could cause problems if the index.php file was modified in an update. In Joomla! 3.5 a simple fix has been added to allow for custom CSS; the template now automatically checks for a custom.css file for Protostar, and if it finds one it will be loaded, and of course if there isn’t a file then it will load with default settings.

Update Email plugin

Major releases for Joomla may take a while to prepare, with usually one or two ‘big’ releases each year. However, that doesn’t mean that all the people taking time out of their daily lives to contribute to Joomla’s development all just stop working once a new release hits; there’s a continual stream of updates, fixes and other minor changes that help smooth out the Joomla experience and make it more secure, whether they’re correcting newly-discovered bugs or enhancing security. With hackers, scammers and other nefarious tricksters stalking the web, it should be a top priority for site admins to get the site’s Joomla installation updated as soon as possible after the update’s release.

The problem is, when a new update for Joomla is released the only way you’ll find out about it is via the message that appears in the admin area after logging in, or if you happen to visit the Joomla site or read websites that report on Joomla in general; something that’s not necessarily going to happen if you’re busy. With this new plugin, once an update is released each Joomla installation will send an email notification to all its Super Users letting them know an update is available; it even includes a link to click that will take you to the update screen after logging in to your Joomla backend so everyone can get updated ASAP.

We’ve often mentioned the importance of keeping your Joomla installation up-to-date, if not for the bug-fixes then definitely for the added security it brings, so this new feature will certainly help you to stay on top of things and make sure your site is as secure as it can be.

Download system/environment information

Something for the support-focused types among Joomla users in this new feature. No matter how well built a site is, there’s always going to be issues, and when that happens it’s useful to have detailed information about the Joomla installation and the server it’s installed on to make troubleshooting easier. In ealier Joomla releases this information was available System → System Information section of the main menu, with details covering what type of webserver was used, which Joomla & PHP version was installed, and lots more.

With this new feature, the System Information screen will now also include two additional buttons at the top of the page, allowing for the system information to be downloaded as either a text file or a json to make it easy to reach or distribute when providing or receiving support.

Site and admin link switches in the User Status Module

When logged in to the Joomla backend you probably noticed the toolbar at the bottom of the page that shows the number of visitors and administrators currently logged-in, the number of new messages, as well as a link to let you view the site frontpage. This new addition to Joomla makes some minor modifications to this area, adding a new Show Admin link that will open the main Joomla admin page in a new browser tab/window, as well as new toggles in the module settings to let you turn both theView Site and Show Admin links on or off.

It’s another small change, but for someone like me who’s always jumping between pages and changing settings or modules while editing an article it’s nice to have an instant way to open a new tab to the Joomla backend. If you’re in the habit of middle-clicking on the ‘Home’ icon of the Joomla menu to open a new tab, then you’ll definitely appreciate this addition since the Show Admin link is clickable even when editing a module, so you can mess around with other settings and then jump back to the module’s tab to finish configuration.

Currently the Show Admin link is disabled by default, but you can enable it easily by clicking onExtensions → Modules in the backend main menu, then changing the filter from ‘Site’ to ‘Administrator’; you’ll see the list of modules placed in the admin area. Click on the User Status module in the list, which should be in the ‘status’ module position; the first two options in the module settings are for toggling the links on or off.

Count Items

Most of us know where to find what we need in the Joomla backend, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved. Joomla 3.5 will include multiple counters in the category view for your articles, banners, contacts and news feeds, making it easier to keep track of items.

How does it work? In Joomla 3.4 and earlier, if you opened, for example, the Content → Categoriespage, you’d see a list of article categories along with their access level, IDs and language. In Joomla 3.5, as well as this information there are also four new columns displaying the number of published, unpublished, archived and trashed articles in each category.

This makes keeping track of items a breeze, and if your authors have an efficient workflow it can make spotting erroneous unpublished articles a bit easier too; instead of trawling through the list of articles you’ll be able to see at a glance if there’s more unpublished articles than expected in a particular category. Again, this new feature won’t set the online world ablaze, but it makes Joomla even more intuitive and user-friendly for day-to-day site management, which is an important element in its future growth.

Anonymized data collection as an opt-out feature

We all value our online privacy, especially in these days of social media that makes it all to easy for information to travel round the world before you have a chance to hit ‘delete’. Much is made of the data collection habits of companies such as Google and Facebook, and many users are rightfully concerned that they may go too far. With these types of discussions cropping up regularly it might not seem like a good time to introduce data collection to Joomla, but rest assured the community-focus of the Joomla team leads means that they do it right.

The truth is, when you’re building a complex platform like Joomla it pays to have information about the environment it’s installed in; tracking things like the PHP, database and Joomla version a user is running help plot out future upgrades that enhance the functionality of the CMS without alienating the user base by requiring a higher PHP version than is currently installed by the majority of users, for example.

Thankfully, the creator of this feature, Don Gilbert, has previously served on the Production Leadership Team and Framework Working Group of Joomla, so he’s acutely aware of the needs of the community and has ensured that, unlike the more disputed data collection tools, Joomla will only collect barebones information with no identifying data whatsoever. What’s more, it’s entirely optional; after installing Joomla 3.5 you’ll get a message at the top of the screen asking for your permission to collect the data along with reassurances that it’s an anonymous process. You can choose to allow for your stats to be always, so they’ll be included in every run of the process, only once, or to opt-out entirely and never send any data at all. You can also change your settings at any time directly in the plugin, which is called System – Joomla! Statistics and can be found in the plugin list available by clickingExtensions → Plugins in the admin main menu.

The Joomla team have said that access to the raw data collected by this plugin will be extremely limited to provide even more protection, with only extracted statistics being released to the public i.e. the percentage of users using Joomla 3.5 versus other versions, with statistically insignificant numbers being wrapped up into an “Other” category to further safeguard privacy. The code for the plugin is of course open-source and available on GitHub, so we can rest assured that this is a case of data collection being used for good purposes!

We’re sure that the majority of the Joomla userbase will be happy to opt-in and provide this minor information, since one of the defining characteristics of Joomla has been the passionate, inclusive community that want Joomla to grow in popularity and functionality. The Joomla team should be applauded in this instance too for their commitment to protecting the privacy of users, and their transparency with the introduction of this plugin.

Joomla 3.5 – Anything else to know?

So there’s a bunch of new features available in this release, and as always there’s several pages worth of bug-fixes included with the update to help make Joomla more stable, but there are two additional points to be aware of:

Backwards Compatibility Break

If you’ve been working with Joomla for a while you likely remember how tough it was migrating to Joomla 2.5 from 1.7; with so many big changes and long wait times between each release it was inevitable that things wouldn’t always upgrade cleanly. With the newer development cycle that was introduced with Joomla 3.3, the development team committed to keep Joomla backwards-compatible to avoid any nasty surprises when upgrade time rolls around. Unfortunately, this is simply not possible this time, as to ensure that Joomla is compatible with PHP 7 a single, minor change was required; theString class has been renamed to StringHelper.

Technically this is breaking their backwards-compatibility promise, but we think it’s fine to give them a bit of leeway here since it was the changes to PHP that forced this slip, rather than anything the Joomla dev team did! Also, the change is minor and shouldn’t cause any problems for the majority of installations, so there’s nothing to worry about if you’re concerned about upgrading.

New URL routing shifted to Joomla 3.6

One of the features being worked on for Joomla 3.5 was new URL routing; the current system has not changed heavily since the initial release of Joomla, and many developers have been anxiously awaiting this update. However, though the code is ready, the PLT have decided to implement this feature in the next major release of Joomla, version 3.6, as it was not sufficiently tested before the release of the Joomla 3.5 beta. So we will get this feature, but we’ll have to be a little more patient!

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offer Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantee 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

What's New in Joomla 3.5?

The Joomla! Project and the Production Leadership Team are proud to announce the release of Joomla! 3.5 as the latest in the 3.x series. Introducing 34 new features, including support for the recently released PHP 7 scripting language, which significantly increases web site speed.

This version of Joomla! supports the most recent release of PHP, the most popular programming language for developing web applications. PHP 7 was recently announced with significant performance improvements and is now available for use by the general public. With Joomla! 3.5 users can now enjoy the benefit of that performance improvement.

Joomla's new email update notification plugin periodically checks for available Joomla! updates and bug fixes, then emails administrators to notify them. 3.5's new statistics collection plug-in gathers the system environment in use. The raw data collected is anonymised before transmission and access to the compiled data is publicly available at https://developer.joomla.org/about/stats.html.

In addition to the features mentioned above, other highlights of the 3.5 release include:

• Download system & environment information: gives users the option to download system/environment information for support purposes.
• Ability to add a user CSS file to Protostar: currently it is impossible to use a custom.css file when using the Protostar template. This update adds a check to see if the file user.css exists and loads the file to allow for user customisation.
• Added site and admin links to module user: adds switches to the mod_status module to show/hide links to the front-end and back-end of the site.
• Article counts: a set of updates that allows the visual presentation of published, unpublished and trashed articles in the Category Manager for articles, banners, contacts and newsfeeds.
• Random category blog and list order: this update answers a common user request to add a random ordering option for articles in the blog category and category list view.
• Editor Buttons added to the Toolbar: You no longer need to scroll down the page to find the “readmore” or “insert image” buttons. Editor extension buttons that used to be placed below the text area can now be found in the toolbar where they belong.
• Easily Insert Modules in Articles: allows users to easily add a module into an article with a button directly on the editor toolbar. Users don’t need to learn any syntax or remember the module details as the user interface does it for them.
• Drag and Drop Images: Adding an image is now as easy as dragging and dropping it from your computer directly into the content. This works anywhere that you are using the default TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor.

To have a full list of the features please visit our GitHub Repository.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a must-have skill for web developers, blogger, Web Content Editor, Writer. Every minute, there are hundreds of new sites created. So if you do not make your site appear on search engines, no body may know your site and it’ll be forgotten and useless. This is must be a disaster for kind of ecommerce, blog sites. So Joomla sites is not an exception. A site ranking must be thought out when you are planning to create a website.

1. H1 & Alt tags

If you've been around Joomla seo for a while - you will know the importance of the H1 tag. This is one of the most important on-page Joomla and can still be used to directly influence SEO. If you use the H1 correctly, you can have a very postive influence on your search engine rankings. Your page should have only one
As per google algorithm, google spider very much consider on h1 and alt tags for onsite seo, The alt text tags’ purpose is to be displayed when an image is unable to load. Search engines take the alt tag into consideration, so don't forget to add alt tag to your images html.

2. Create your title tags

Tittle is also a very important item for SEO, or could be the most important. Title tag should be unique for every page ( max 60 chars ). It is possible to override the title using the Page Display Options in the advanced options of menu-items. Using this feature, you will have full control about your menu item titles.Menus >> Menu name >> Menu item >> Page display tab

3. Use Meta Description

The meta description is used to describe short summary of a page. So that readers can decide whether the page is what they are looking for or looks interesting. Your meta description will have the most impact if it is 160 characters or less in length, including spaces and punctuation. Make them compelling, concise and informative.
When you're writing your meta description, keep in mind the following tips:

• Don’t abuse important keywords
• Do write high quality descriptions.
• Don't repeat information that is in the page title.
• Don't include your site name or URL. value.
• Don't repeat descriptions over multiple pages

4. Don’t do keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is now considered as a strictly black-hat SEO technique. It does tend to have some positive short-term effects, but it’s playing with fire and rarely is beneficial in the long run. Ideally, each page of your website will use three to five keyword phrases, specific to that page.

5. Optimize anchor text

Optimizing you anchor text is extremely important, especially for your on-site URL's. When building in internal link structure, this is the most important issue to look at. Your anchor text links should contain keywords that describe your article, not something vague such as, read more, click here, etc.
Some recommended Search Engine Optimization extensions are MijoSEF, sh404SEF, and JoomSEF.

6. www or non-www url’s

If you Joomla site is accessible either with or without a www-prefix is actually also a matter of duplicate URL's. Google ask you to choose one in Webmaster Tools, and it's also important to choose one in Joomla. You can go into Google Webmaster Tools and specify how you want Google to index your site, with or without www. Or you also can set up the redirect in your .htaccess file:
non-www to www redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

www to non-www redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

7. Internal and external link

Linking internally is as good as creating backlinks from external websites.
Creating incoming links from other domain is really hard work while for internal links you are able to do it easily – that’s your site. So if you have a page with content relevant to the article you’re writing no wait further link to it internally! - it will improve your rankings.
Linking externally, you might need to usethe rel="nofollow" tag in your links. Too many external links from a page can be bad for SEO, so setting some of them to nofollow can be good.

<a rel="nofollow" href=http://differentdomain.com title=" Text"> Text</a>

8. Good site map to get Google indexed

One you created your site you should create a sitemap.xml file which contains the structure of your Joomla site’s URLs. This helps Google and other search engines to determine the structure of your website and how to reach all parts of it. The file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset   xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" etc. etc.>
     <url>
          <loc>http://joomlavi.com/</loc>
     </url>
     <url>
           <loc>http://joomlavi.com/another-page</loc>
     </url>
          ..................
</urlset>

9. Use Joomla SEO Extensions

The Joomla Extensions Directory - JED contains a lot of Joomla extensions and plugins for SEO. Using SEO extensions is a useful way to make sure your Joomla website is optimized for search engines. Below are some other widely recommended Joomla SEO plugins:

SH404SEF

SH404SEF is probably the most pupolar SEO extension for Joomla. It has been around for a long time and supported for all Joomla versions. The main features are rewriting URL, avoiding duplicate content and 301-redirect.

X-Map

This is a free and most extension for sitemap extensions on JED. Xmap creates a sitemap based on the menu structure of your Joomla website. Xmap allows you to create a map of your site using the structure of your menus.

SEO-Generator

This native Joomla 1.5 - 3.x plugin automatically generates keywords and description for each article by pulling text from the title and/or the content to help with SEO. It also gives you the ability to set different title configurations, robots meta tags and Google webmaster verification keys.

Header Tags

The Header Tags plugin gives you more control over the heading tags (h1-h6) in your website. The plugin searches for existing heading tags within the selected content area and handles them according to your specifications. So if want all the H4 tags in your site to be changed to H3

SEO Simple

This Joomla (1.5/1.6/1.7/2.5/3) plugin simply takes the starting chunk of text from the page’s content and applies that as the value for the meta description tag in the page’s head. Search engines often use a Web page’s meta description in the SERPs, and as such it is important that these meta descriptions have relevant text related to the page’s content.

Easy Frontend SEO

EFSEO is also a free SEO extension for Joomla. you can control all important metadata manually and automatically.

10. Avoid duplicate URL’s

Any kind of duplicate content in your site could harm search engine rankings. The main reason for duplicates to appear is the wrong structure of the website . First, you need to think over the structure and identify main categories and subcategories.. If you create multiple categories in advance this can prevent duplicate pages from appearing in future. There are many way of getting rid of duplicate URL’s like using 301 redirects, setting up rules in .htaccess, setting up robots.txt, use SEO extension mentioned above, google webmaster tool.

11. Avoid 404-errors

Google recommends building a nice custom 404 page for your case with the quote “A good custom 404 page will help people find the information they're looking for, as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further."
When someone to click on a link to your website and get a 404 error. Make sure that people can never end up with a meaningless 404 Page not found error message. Especially the default Joomla page for this is very ugly. As it will also completely different from the rest of your site, people will think the site is broken and leave it. If this happens often it can negatively affect your SEO rankings. The best way is to create a custom 404-page for your template. All our Joomla Templates have custom 404-page to make to they are good for SEO

12. Avoid Flash

If you're serious about SEO, just don't use any content that is invisible to search engines. So, basically just avoid Flash because of the following reasons:

• Flash is bad for SEO.
• Flash requires lots of bandwidth.
• Flash bad impact for user experience.
• Flash is not accessible.
• Many Mobile Devices Do Not Support Flash

13. 301 – redirect for old URL’s

As explained above, you should avoid 404 errors as much as possible. When you are migrating from an old site to a new one, or entirely renew your site. Your URL's will change. Also the Google index will take a period of time to update new URL, and it will keep on sending users from the search results to your old URL's. If you don’t do this, it will badly impact your search rankings! You have to determine what your old URL's are, redirect them to the new ones. You can custom redirects by using SEO extension like SH404SEF , or Shin .htaccess with following structure:

• RewriteRule ^oldpage1$ "http://newsite.com/newpage1" [R=301,L]
• RewriteRule ^oldpage2$ "http://newsite.com/newpage2" [R=301,L]

14. Google webmaster tools

Google's Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort. Once you've created your SiteMap, you will be able to submit it to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools gives the advanced search expert with following key features:

• show all sorts of errors with a site
• Set Site Defaults
• Analyze Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
• Top Search Queries
• Manage Sitelinks
• Enhance 404 Error Pages

15. Optimize your Robots.txt file to allow images to be indexed

The robots.txt file's purpose is to inform the search engines bots/crawlers/spiders about the files you don't want them to index. Beside content, html structure… you can use images to make your website SEO friendly by removing the Disallow on the images folder in the robots files.
Open your robots.txt file (in the root folder of your Joomla! website) and remove the images line so that now search engines are not denied from indexing your images.
Beside allowing your Robots.txt file for images, you also need to optimize image for site speed improvement. This will help a little for SEO

1. Overview

Error Reporting is a useful Joomla function to troubleshoot PHP errors on your Joomla site. This function provides some clues about what and where the PHP problems are.

2. When to turn it on?

Got blank/ white screen in your Joomla site frontend? Well, that calls for turning on the error reporting feature. You may also want to disable the URL rewriting (htaccess method) using Apache mod_rewrite under the SEO settings for differential diagnosis of the issue as url rewriting with htaccess file in non-supported server (mod_rewrite not active) also renders blank pages.

3. How to proceed

In your Admin Panel, navigate through Global Configuration >> Server tab >> Error Reporting.
There are several options for you to choose, namely:

• System Default : Joomla will inherit error reporting defaults set in the server (usually in php.ini file).
• None : Choose this option to switch off the Error Reporting so that no notification will be shown. However, when any 3rd party extension overrides Joomla error reporting with their own settings, notifications may still appear.
• Simple : Overrides server settings to give a basic report with warnings only about the fatal errors.
• Maximum (Recommended) : Overrides server settings to gives full report with all the errors, warnings, notices, deprecated functions call, strict standards on the website.
  

Tip : You can enable the Error Reporting with the configuration.php file. Edit the file and add one of the following numeric values for $error_reporting, which equals to the PHP’s error constants:

-1 = 0 : No error reporting.
30711 = E_ALL & ~(E_NOTICE|E_WARNING) : All errors reporting. No warnings or notices.
30711 = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE : All errors and warnings reporting. No notices.
30719 = E_ALL : All errors, warnings and notices reporting.
32767 = E_ALL | E_STRICT : All errors, warnings, notices and strict standards reporting.

4. Recommendations

For developers error reporting gives them a headstart and they know what they have to fix and where. For regular users, it helps to provide more details to the developer instead of saying "I got blank / white page".
Error reporting should be disabled on an live site as the error reports would be visible to your users and information about your website may be revealed including the absolute path of your website.
Turn it on only when something goes wrong such as a blank page and/or you are debugging your Joomla website. Once the bugs are fixed, change the error reporting settings back to “None”. This is highly recommended for any Joomla website in term of security.

5. Live example

Let's see how an error would be reported when your Joomla Error Reporting is ON.

• Open your_site_root/components/com_content/content.php and remove “;” from line no. 11.
• Check your front-end. As your Error Reporting is set as "None", it must be just a blank page.
• Now proceed to turn the Error Reporting to "Maximum" and you can see the exact error.
  

6. Joomla extension for Error Reporting

You may find some more useful Joomla extensions for error reporting in our Joomla! Extension Directory. Easy Error Reporting would be a handy choice as you can enable the error reports for specific user groups only.

7. Further reading

• Sever Settings Group - Joomla! Docs
• error_reporting - PHP.net
• How to turn your error reporting to Maximum - OSTraining

Easy Way to Improve The Security of Your Joomla Template

Joomla is a Content Management System that helps you to integrate the content and the modules to develop the most interactive and impressive web pages for your website. Joomla is an open source software application with an easy to use interface and high extensibility. Joomla is used vastly by many corporate portals and websites, government applications, online newspapers and magazines, small-scale business websites, and many other personal web pages. You can install and set up the Joomla application easily within a few clicks. Some of the core features of Joomla are detailed below:

• Powerful caching option facilitates a speedy page load.
• A handy help system is integrated within Joomla for assistance.
• Incorporating templates into your web site as a whole or for individual web pages is made easy.
• Structure independent menu hierarchies irrespective of the content structures.
• Organize you content in a better way.
• Manage users with the help of the nine user groups provided with various levels of permissions.
• Provision of many international language support and UTF-8 coding.

The template is one of the most important aspects of your Joomla website.

It is used on every pageload and affects the look, feel, layout, pageload time and nearly every other aspect of the website experience.

Not surprisingly then, the template is also a prime target for intruders who look to gain access to your webserver or deface your site with spam or graffiti.

To help prevent this, use the following tips to improve your Joomla security policies specifically for your website template.

Fix file permissions on your web server

Like any computer system, the files on your web server all have permissions that control who can access them.

For web servers, these permissions are broken down into three categories:

• Read privileges — who can read a file
• Write privileges — who can edit a file
• Execute privileges — who can execute system commands
• The safest permissions for the files on your web server — including the files in your template — is for the public to have read-only access. Changes to these files should only be possible by the owner (i.e. the apache root user) of the file.

While a system administrator can easily modify permissions, we recommend that you use the excellent Admin Tools extension to properly set file permissions right from the Joomla backend.

Lock down the main template file

For all Joomla templates, the index.php file is the main file that loads all of the assets like CSS and JavaScript, and mixes the site layout with the content from the database.

Since this file is heavily targeted by intruders, it can be helpful to strictly control the permissions such that even the owner (again, the Apache root user, for example) of the file can not make changes.

In fact, if you use the template editor in the Joomla backend, the index.php file is made read-only for everyone once the file is saved.

Again, we think using Admin Tools to do this makes the most sense.

Prevent file listing (HTACCESS)

Letting visitors know what files you have in your Joomla template folder is never a good idea.

You can check if your template currently displays these files by typing the name of your template folder into your browser (eg. domain.com/templates/) and seeing if you get a Forbidden warning.

If you see a list of your installed template folders, your site is not as safe as it could be.

To solve the problem, you’ll need to use FTP to edit the HTACCESS file in the root of your website so that is contains the following line:

Options -Indexes

Restrict template edit permissions

Joomla has a powerful template editor that allows users to modify all the components of the template, including the main index.php file.

Thus, anyone who gets backend access to your site can hack your template with ease.

In addition to having unique usernames and strong passwords, you can limit the impact of these types of intrusions by limiting which user groups are allowed to edit templates.

For example, we recommend that users in the Manager usergroup not be able to edit the template.

To configure this in the Joomla backend, select Templates from the Extensions menu.

In the Options at the top-right, locate the Permissions tab and disable the following items for Managers and other groups with backend access who do not need to edit the template:

• Edit
  
• Edit State
  
• Configure ACL & Options
  
• Configure Options Only

Review users regularly for Super User access

Between your website developers, temporary contractors, and the staff/clients who regularly access the backend of a Joomla site, it’s easy to collect unnecessary Super Users.

Regularly monitor the Super Users and Administrators in the backend User Manager to ensure that every user is needed.

Is you are unsure of someone’s status, check the Last Visit Date in the User Manager to see when the user last logged in.

Keep template up to date

Like most popular content management systems, there are thousands of templates available for Joomla. And it’s very likely that most Joomla websites use one one of these templates either directly or as a modified version.

However, the vast majority of Joomla templates do not use the Joomla update system to help alert you when template updates are released.

Thus, we recommend that template users subscribe to any notification system provided by the template vendor.

An alternative and more comprehensive solution is to monitor the relevant changelog page on the vendor’s website for each of the templates installed on your Joomla website(s).

For example, the changelog page for the Callisto template from RocketTheme shows 6 updates in 6 months.

There are a number of free ways to monitor changes to a changelog webpage including plugins for Chrome and Firefox, and the online tool Versionista.

RocketTheme also maintains an RSS feed of updates for their templates if an RSS reader is still part of your daily routine.

Only use templates from trusted vendors (never from Warez sites).

Like most popular software, Joomla templates can often be found on Warez sites.

Often, these templates are modified to contain malware and other dangerous scripts.

If you are serious about security, it is critical to always download templates from the vendor’s official website.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

SEO Tips fo Your Joomla Website

Joomla is one of the most popular free content management systems (CMS) in the world that allows you to easily create and manage a dynamic website. It has an intuitive management interface to control all the features and functionality this powerful CMS possesses. Furthermore, there are hundreds of free extensions written for Joomla that allows users to extend its functionality and customize it to their own objectives. Joomla Content Management System is supported by a large and friendly community where newbies could really rely on assistance from more experienced members. Joomla counted more than 30 million downloads in 2012 and is growing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making constant improvements on your website to gain better rankings in the search engine results page (SERP). SEO includes different kinds of techniques and strategies you could use to optimize your website in order to increase website traffic. Traffic from search engines, also known as organic, is valuable because visitors are actively looking for something you offer and tend to convert more often, whatever your goals may be.

Outranking your competitors can be a challenging work and that’s where search engine optimization kicks in. If you make it easy for Google and other search engines to read and understand your content, they can rank you higher in their search results. Before we explain in depth how to optimize your website to stand out, you need to know how search engines work.

If you own a Joomla website, this article is very useful for you to recommend some hot tips to optimize it. Using these tips not only improves SEO for your site but also brings the natural interaction or conversion rate. Here are 9 hot TIPS for Joomla SEO 2016 introduced.

Using a good Joomla hosting server for your website

Firstly, all you need is a fast reliable server because it will improve your site speed which is an important key to friendly with Google. SiteGround do a fantastic job of hosting Joomla websites as a recommendation. Remember that Google does not like the website which is not fast.

Keyword, Key-phrase, and Topic Research, choose the right keywords

Any optimization of content for SEO, the first thing we do is keyword research, whether you are doing SEO for Joomla or for any other website. What we will focus strictly on specific keywords is not necessary - you can and actually should use phrases and synonyms of your target keywords - because search engines will be able to extract the content out of the article much better. You can use hints from Google itself by looking at the suggestions at the bottom of a search page.
And one important thing that it's always difficult to find the right keywords to target. How can we suggest some relevant words which will recommend the keywords? Or how we find our good long tail keywords. It helps us to save lots of time. And it helps us bring plenty of great traffic.

Enable Search Engine Friendly URL

SEF component is highly recommended because of its powerful features which are typically significant offers SEO advantages over the core component. One of popular Joomla SEO plug-in is sh404SEF. Besides creating SEF URLs, it allows you to monitor which requests are generating 404 errors, such that you can ensure you any broken areas of your site are immediately fixed. These are especially useful after migrating a new website. You can also choose to redirect old URLs to the new URLs. In addition, Meta descriptions are also supported by sh404SEF, and it has great support for other popular Joomla components such as Kunena forum and others popular components.

Create Internal Links to pass Page Rank

Another easy to do aspect of Joomla SEO, which is many times overlooked is the practice to create internal links. Remember that at the very bottom of your page, you should have a listing of all the articles which you want to pass Page Rank to.

Improve your meta descriptions

Joomla SEO gets a huge positive effect if you implement careful title and meta description.
Also, remember to create a description for your site which is optimized for search engines. The Joomla SEO settings can be found here under System > Global Configuration > Site Meta Description and Site Meta Keywords. It also goes without saying, that your site Joomla Robots section should be set to Index, Follow so that search engines indexing can occur.

Specify the image dimensions

Image size is one of the important points of loading speed, it is also the reason why you need to reduce or make lighter your images because it's the way help you to optimize your site.
Lighter images:
A couple of online services to make our images lighter and keep the quality are:
• www.jpegmini.com - for JPG files
• www.tinypng.com - for PNG files

Use good names and ALT tags for your images

In addition, using good names and ALT tags for images that will make your site more friendly with SEO and highly ranked by Google or any Optimized tool.

Work friendly on mobile

If your site it mobile-friendly, it will be favored in search engine results to sites which are not mobile-friendly. By default means that if your site is not mobile-friendly, your site is getting a very strong negative ranking signal. So you should make sure you've made the necessary changes to make it responsive and mobile friendly.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

SEO Your Joomla! Website in 11 Super Easy Steps

So you've chosen Joomla! as your CMS of choice. You've bought, or designed and developed a beautiful template and added all your creatively crafted content to your new Joomla! website and you are now ready to start open your website up to that hungry horde of customers hurling their credit cards at you.

One problem: If you've started with a base Joomla! installation, odds are that those thousands of people itching to get their hands on your products probably aren't even going to be able to find your website in the first place. In contrast to Wordpress (which is what you could consider Joomla!'s primary competitor) Joomla! Is simply not quite as search engine friendly right out the box. In fact, I have found that you actually need to go through a number of steps (11, to be precise) in order to get a Joomla! website into a position where it really performs satisfactorily when it comes to on-site SEO factors.

Having developed a number of Joomla! websites over the years, I would like to share with you the exact guidelines that I give to the junior web designers at Red Giant Design Studio to make sure that our websites compete admirably in the rankings.
Without further ado, let's get stuck into the meat of this tutorial.

1. Make Sure You're on the Right Type of Server

This is the first step for a reason. It's important.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are using an IIS (Windows) server to host your Joomla! website, you are going to get so frustrated that your Mac may end up at the bottom of a swimming pool. (This may or may not have happened)

The reason I say this is that URL rewriting just never seems to gel well with any rewrite module that IIS can use. Rewrite modules are also a nightmare to get set up if you are using a shared hosting account. I've also, on occasion, had issues with the installation and configuration of Joomla! on an IIS server.
For practicality and succinctness's sake, I would simply recommend that you save yourself endless headaches and get your Joomla! site set up on an Apache server with mod_rewrite installed. Your nerves and the SEO components you're going to install will thank you.

2. Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess

Because you are going to want to enable URL rewriting to make those URLs a whole lot more attractive than they start out, you are going to need to rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess - which is the version used by Joomla! and mod_rewrite.

3. Enable SEF URLs and URL Rewriting

In your Joomla! Global Configuration, set the "Search Engine Friendly URLs" and "Use URL Rewriting" options to "Yes".
Joomla! SEF Settings
Search Engine Friendly URLs is the setting that removes all the dynamically generated gobbledygook from your URL and replaces it with the alias of the menu item that you're using on the page.
URL Rewriting is the setting that removes the /index.php/ from the URL. For this to be enabled must have mod_rewrite enabled and must have a .htaccess file.
The balance of the settings are really left more up to your discretion. I tend to prefer leaving the other three off. You may like to turn on the option to include your Site Name in your page titles, particularly if the site has a lot of content. Personally, I like to micro-manage everything and craft each title separately in most instances.

4. Remove "/images/" from your Robots.txt file

This is something about Joomla! that has always left me bewildered. In the automatically generated robots.txt file that is created on installation, Joomla! includes a disallow rule for the images directory, instructing the search engines not to search or index your images folder.
As you may well know, images can generate a sizable chunk of your traffic from Google and the search engines if you have them correctly optimized.
Because all the image optimisation in the world won't help you if you are telling Google not to bother with your images directory, I highly recommend that you remove the following line from your robots.txt file:
/images/

5. Install JCE Editor

Not only is JCE Editor free, but it provides a whole bunch of really cool features which will help you put together and maintain your site.
My favourite two things about JCE are the fact that you can instruct it not to strip code that you add through the editor and the fact that it provides a great interface through which you can add images, coupled with Alt tags and image dimensions.
It's a really good component for Joomla! and I highly recommend you use it.
JCE Editor Logo

6. Use Alt Tags and Image Dimensions

This tip is really not specific to Joomla! but it is important nevertheless. The JCE editor allows you add the Alternate Text to describe your image as well as add the dimensions right within the image upload tool.
In case you weren't aware, adding image dimensions to your images allows the "space" to load before the actual image does. This should help improve your load times a bit.
 The only drawback to SEO Boss is that it may not gel well with all of your installed components, in which case you'll need to go and manually edit those through the relevant component's own interface. For everything else, however, it's great.

7. Manage Your Meta Data

Although meta keywords tags are pretty much redundant these days, your meta descriptions and title tags are still rather important.
I came across a pretty useful component quite recently, called SEO Boss. The only feature of this that I actually use is the meta tag manager, but I have found this to be extremely useful.

To edit meta data for your Joomla! website normally, you need to navigate to each menu item/article and edit the descriptions and page titles manually. With SEO Boss, you'll find a single screen that lets you edit all of your meta data directly from that interface.
The only drawback to SEO Boss is that it may not gel well with all of your installed components, in which case you'll need to go and manually edit those through the relevant component's own interface. For everything else, however, it's great.

8. Choose www. or non-www. and Redirect

Joomla!, unlike Wordpress, doesn't automatically redirect your website to either the www. or non-www. version. This obviously poses a canonical problem, which you need to correct manually via your .htaccess file.
To redirect from non-www. to www. add the following code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
Alternatively, you can redirect to non-www. by adding this code instead:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.yourwebsitehere.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourwebsitehere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

9. Be Consistent When Linking Internally

When it comes to CMS websites (especially Joomla! ones) duplicate content can become a bit of a problem. The key to combating this is to ensure that you link consistently to internal content.
By this, I mean only creating links to either the www. or non-www. version that you chose above, only linking to pages using a trailing slash or no trailing slash, or pages with a suffix (.html) or no suffix. Only link to a single version of a page, ever.
Remember, it's not duplicate content if nothing is linking to it for Google to find it.
You can't really control the way others link to you, but you can set an example. If people are linking to you incorrectly, you can add further redirect rules to 301 redirect to the correct links.

10. Speed Up Your Website!

It has to be said that Joomla! doesn't do page speed very well straight out of the box. The good news is that you can speed things up significantly by doing three main things: Leveraging browser caching, enabling Gzip compression and compressing your images.
10.1. Leverage Browser Caching
Without getting into too much detail, you want to utilize browser caching to instruct your browsers to cache certain types of content found on your site, as well as tell them how long to cache them for. My suggestion is to simply add the following code to the bottom of your .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 months"
ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 1 months"

You can, of course, tweak the code if your content needs to be held in the cache for shorter/longer periods, or if you would prefer not to cache certain types of content.

10.2. Enable Gzip

A good way to improve load times is to use Gzip to compress your code. I tend to only do this once I've got my whole site set up, but it's generally a good idea to use it.
To enable Gzip via Joomla!, simply navigate to Global Configuration > Server and switch the option for Gzip compression to "Yes".
Note: This will only work if mod_gzip is installed on your server.
Depending on your host, you may also be able to enable server size compression through your hosting control panel. I recommend enquiring from your hosting provider how you can go about this.

10.3. Optimize Your Images

Image optimization is something that every web designer should ensure happens, regardless of whether you're using Joomla! or not. It's ridiculous how many times I've come across websites loading 350kb images that can easily be cut down to 25kb. If you're not an expert when it comes to Photoshop, you can download highly optimized versions of your images using Google's Page Speed tool.
Through the above methods and other really minor tweaks, we generally manage a Google Page Speed score of 95+ and I can honestly report I find that many of our Joomla! sites actually perform better than similar Wordpress sites that we've developed.

11. Install Xmap

Xmap is quite simply the best sitemap component that I've found for Joomla! thus far.
It seamlessly generates XML and HTML sitemaps for your website and there are many plugins available for popular Joomla! components such as Virtuemart and sh404sef.
Simply navigate to Xmap and create a new sitemap. Choose the menu items you want to include, set their priorities, click "Save" and voila! You can then create a menu item for your HTML sitemap and grab the link for your XML sitemap to add to Webmaster Tools.

How to Password Protect Admin area in Joomla?

Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla! the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not an advanced user. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes.
Since Joomla is so easy to use, as a Web designer or developer, you can quickly build sites for your clients. Then, with a minimal amount of instruction, you can empower your clients to easily manage their own sites themselves.

Joomla is the most popular open source CMS currently available as evidenced by a vibrant and growing community of friendly users and talented developers. Joomla's roots go back to 2000 and, with over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looks bright for the award-winning Joomla Project.

Many companies and organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla package. In those cases, Joomla's powerful application framework makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla into virtually unlimited directions.

Steps Involved

In this documentation, we can check how to enable password protected admin Joomla area

1) Login to Joomla admin panel.
2) Go to ‘Components’.
3) Click the option ‘Admin Tools’.
If you are not installed the Admin Tools, please use the following steps to install.

a) Download the stable version of Admin Tool to your system.
b) Go to Joomla admin panel >> Extensions >> Manage.
c) Browse the Admin Tool file under the section ‘Upload and Install Joomla extension’.
d) Click ‘Upload and Install’ button.

4) Find the icon ‘Password Protect Administrator’.
5) Enter the username and password.
6) Click the button ‘Password Protect’.

That is how we can enable password protected administrator in Joomla.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.