Even if you have a relatively small website, it is likely that you eventually have to deal with hackers. One of the most common methods of hacking is the brute force attack – here hackers will cycle through numbers and letters to try to crack your password. It has happened to Joomla users in recent memory, so it is important to be prepared as much as possible.

The reason that these brute force attacks were successful encompasses a number of different factors. First, you have unlimited login attempts with the Joomla platform. This means that brute force hackers can continue to try until they gain access or are detected. While there is not much the average user can do about this, you can use different tactics to make your site more secure against these hackers.

1. Don’t use the admin username
Many times, the most common usernames are targeted such as admin, webmaster, administrator, test, etc. These all are very common usernames and that’s why, it makes sense to avoid using them. Don’t worry, from the backend, you can select a different name that’s publicly visible. This means that your username can be “amazingme” and you can choose a different name to be displayed on the front-end.

2. Use a strong password
Use a strong password and avoid common passwords such as fghj, 2221, 12345, your name, etc. The brute force attack targets all the common passwords first, and that’s why you should use a strong password that is a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters like #@*^. For example; a strong password would be something like h@LL003v3ryB0dy^^#. Also, never use the same password at two different places.

3. Limit login attempts
It is highly recommended that you limit login attempts. This can be done by using a security plugin like Better Joomla Security, or by using Limit Login Attempts plugin.

4. Update core and add-ons to improve Joomla security
Since the most common successful attacks are due to known vulnerabilities in outdated Joomla versions and add-ons, one of the most important tasks for anyone responsible for Joomla security is to ensure that all the software remains up to date.
Thus, one of the most important features that has been added to Joomla is the new Joomla Update Manager which can be used to easily update many extensions, as well as the Joomla Update component to update Joomla itself.

5. Backup often
Take regular backup of your complete Joomla site. Some people don’t give importance to backup, and unfortunately, they realize the value of backup only after a disaster strikes. Also don’t rely much when your host says that they regularly perform backup, because if they don’t, then it will create more problems.

If you've changed menu items or aliases on your website, the old links will still be indexed on Google until it gets back around to checking them again. This means that if someone is linked to your website in Google and it gives them an old link, they will get a 404 error and won't be able to view anything.

This is where redirecting comes in. We need to redirect all the old links to the new ones to ensure a viewer still gets to the correct page. This can be done individually but can take hours - this is where we can utilise a batch redirect to speed up our process. This basically enables you to take any links with a certain alias and point it to a new alias.

Here is what a default Joomla htaccess file looks like:

##
# @package		Joomla
# @copyright	Copyright (C) 2005 - 2013 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.
# @license		GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt
##

##
# READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE!
#
# The line just below this section: 'Options +FollowSymLinks' may cause problems
# with some server configurations.  It is required for use of mod_rewrite, but may already
# be set by your server administrator in a way that dissallows changing it in
# your .htaccess file.  If using it causes your server to error out, comment it out (add # to
# beginning of line), reload your site in your browser and test your sef url's.  If they work,
# it has been set by your server administrator and you do not need it set here.
##

## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above.
Options +FollowSymLinks

## Mod_rewrite in use.

RewriteEngine On

## Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits.
# If you experience problems on your site block out the operations listed below
# This attempts to block the most common type of exploit `attempts` to Joomla!
#
# Block out any script trying to base64_encode data within the URL.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]*\([^)]*\) [OR]
# Block out any script that includes a <script> tag in URL.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C)([^s]*s)+cript.*(>|%3E) [NC,OR]
# Block out any script trying to set a PHP GLOBALS variable via URL.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
# Block out any script trying to modify a _REQUEST variable via URL.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
# Return 403 Forbidden header and show the content of the root homepage
RewriteRule .* index.php [F]
#
## End - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits.

## Begin - Custom redirects
#
# If you need to redirect some pages, or set a canonical non-www to
# www redirect (or vice versa), place that code here. Ensure those
# redirects use the correct RewriteRule syntax and the [R=301,L] flags.
#
## End - Custom redirects

##
# Uncomment following line if your webserver's URL
# is not directly related to physical file paths.
# Update Your Joomla! Directory (just / for root).
##

# RewriteBase /

## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section.
#
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
#
# If the requested path and file is not /index.php and the request
# has not already been internally rewritten to the index.php script
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php
# and the request is for something within the component folder,
# or for the site root, or for an extensionless URL, or the
# requested URL ends with one of the listed extensions
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /component/|(/[^.]*|\.(php|html?|feed|pdf|vcf|raw))$ [NC]
# and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
# and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical folder
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# internally rewrite the request to the index.php script
RewriteRule .* index.php [L]
#
## End - Joomla! core SEF Section.

To add our redirects, we must ensure we put them before the Joomla SEF rewrites which is generally the last part of the file. See below how you can rewrite a URL.

######PTP SEO Redirections -- BEGIN
#301 Redirect Entire Old directories
RewriteRule blog/blog-category-1(.*)$ blog/blog-category-2$1 [R,L]
######PTP SEO Redirections -- END

This basically tells anything that has blog/blog-category-1 in it to redirect to the URL blog/blog-category-2. so the url withblog/blog-category-1/sub-category/item-to-view will automatically update toblog/blog-category-2/sub-category/item-to-view

Below is where we need to add this into our htaccess file - just before the SEF rewrites.

######PTP SEO Redirections -- BEGIN
#301 Redirect Entire Old directories
RewriteRule blog/blog-category-1(.*)$ blog/blog-category-2$1 [R,L]
######PTP SEO Redirections -- END

# RewriteBase /

## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section.
#
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
#
# If the requested path and file is not /index.php and the request
# has not already been internally rewritten to the index.php script
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php
# and the request is for something within the component folder,
# or for the site root, or for an extensionless URL, or the
# requested URL ends with one of the listed extensions
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /component/|(/[^.]*|\.(php|html?|feed|pdf|vcf|raw))$ [NC]
# and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
# and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical folder
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# internally rewrite the request to the index.php script
RewriteRule .* index.php [L]
#
## End - Joomla! core SEF Section.

Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. In the race to the top of Search Engine result pages - ultimately higher SERP (Search Engine Ranking Points) the site speed is an important factor. There are lots of tricks to increase a Joomla site's speed, here is one wich does not need additional code to be installed and executed, but yet is powerful an let you fine-tune your site's performance.

Enter the Browser Caching arena. No, is not new or revolutionary, it's there for long - and often overlooked. Better, the best Joomla fine-tuning tools are ignoring it, or have a simple switch to turn it on or off, you basically can't fine-tune it. But it's a powerhouse, and you should fine-tune it. You can very easily assign different cache times for your visitor's browsers for different kind of files composing your page. And this is the honey-pot all other optimization tactics are missing. There are parts of the site which can be very persistent, but there can be others, which need to be frequently updated.

So go ahead, and boost your site's performance by simply adding the code below to your .htaccess file. Feel free to alter the code to change the cache timing of files until you match your site's specifics. For example if you have a site with imagery which is frequently updated, you might want to set the settings for images to a lower value. same is applying if you use some trickery which outputs updated Java Script files based on user actions. In contrary, if you have a static content, a brochure type of site, you might want to increase the cache time for your textual content.

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"

The Joomla core is not inherently slow, however many Joomla webmasters are not taking the necessary steps to optimize their website. Along with some “traditional” steps to website optimization, there are also some tactics that are specific to Joomla itself.

     The first thing that most webmasters will focus on after they have their website up and running is speed. Now after Google have stated that website performance could impact SEO results in the near future, speeding up websites has become even more important. Joomla is similar to many other content management systems so many times the best way to speed up a Joomla website is the same as any other website. However, there are also some Joomla specific changes that can help speed up Joomla website. Let's take a quick look at some fundamental ways to speed up a website as well as some changes that are really only relevant for Joomla users.

      Fundamental Ways to Speed Up Any Website and How It Relates to Joomla
1. Optimizing Your Template
The template that your website is using is often the number one cause of speed loss. While it may look great, it could be slowing your website performance down to a standstill. Joomla has thousands of templates and more are being created every day, however many of them are very inefficient. Some templates use more than 70 small images per page. Even worse is the fact that these images are not always optimized, making your website even slower.

2. Optimizing the Rest of Your Website
There are a number of tactics that can be used to utilized on any website, including Joomla based websites. One of the first things that many people do make sure that they are encoding their pages with Gzip. This will almost always speed up your website, but not always. If your servers processor is the problem then Gzip will actually slow down your websites loading speed. However, this is rarely the case and Gzip will help website performance of almost everyone.Many of the other tactics relate to your CSS, PHP, and the like. The essence of all of these tactics is less is more. Remove all of the white space from your template files, especially your index.php file. Remove CSS commands that are not necessary. If there are CSS commands that are used, but only in rare circumstance, then it may help to take those commands and create another CSS file that is only used when needed.

Joomla Specific Methods to Speeding Up a Website
3. Use Joomla's Inbuilt Caching
Joomla has a built in way to ensure that your website is caching. This can even be used by webmaster who are using a server that doesn't have PHP caching installed by setting it to the file method.

4. Utilize Joomla Updates
While the biggest reason that you should always have the most updated version of Joomla is security, new versions of Joomla often have small changes to the core that will speed up the load time of Joomla itself. The same is true regarding the Joomla extensions that you are using. In fact, many of the biggest problems relating to a Joomla website often are rooted in the extensions that have been added.

5. Keep an Eye on Your New Extensions
The Joomla extensions directory has an extension that can do pretty much anything short of washing the dishes. Unfortunately, many of these extensions are often terribly inefficient and can slow down your website dramatically. If you want to single out which components that are slowing your website down the most, there is an easy way to accomplish this. Install a page caching component, but don't enable the caching. This allows you to see the load time for each URL. After four or five days, go through the list that was created and find all of the URL's that are the slowest. There is a good chance that all of the slow URL's have a certain component or two in common that is not on the faster pages.
Another great way to keep an eye on additional extensions is to enable Joomla's core content cache. Then take a look at all of the database queries that are being executed. The goal is to keep this number as low as possible, ideally under 30 although that isn't always possible. Using this information, take a look at any recurring queries and find out what component is the cause. The easiest solution is to simply disable and then uninstall the component. However, if you feel like the component is a valuable asset to your website, contact the components developer and ask them to optimize it, or find/hire a freelance developer to do it for you. Of course, if you can do it yourself then by all means do it yourself.
It is also important to ask yourself if you really need the component. Every component will increase your load time, so it is unwise to frivolously add every component that you see. It is also a good idea to completely delete any components that you will not be using. (The same is true for templates.

6. SEF?
One the first things that most webmasters do is make their URL's more search engine and user friendly. The Joomla core does this to a certain extent automatically, however many webmasters want a little more control, or believe that it could be done better with an additional component. The problem is that most of these components are extremely inefficient. Many webmasters are willing to trade some load time to keep using SEF URL's, but it is worth keeping in mind.

7. Avoid Bridges at All Costs
While Joomla is considered to be a very functional CMS, many webmasters choose to bridge it with another program to further enhance functionality. While this seems like a great idea, because both programs work together well and seem to compliment each other, it is often not worth it. Remember, both of these programs function independently, which means that the core of both programs will have to load. This will always cause a huge hit to your websites performance because essentially two pages are loaded every time. If the functionality is vastly improved, then it might be worth it, but this is rarely the case.
There are a number of other tactics that people use to optimize their website and Joomla websites are no different. There are also a number of free tools that can be used to make optimizing your Joomla website easier. What tactics and tools do you use to optimize your Joomla website?

Joomla 3.0 was released on September 27th and it marks the first of the STS (standard term support) releases that will culminate with Joomla 3.5 LTS (long term support) release in September of 2013. Joomla 3.0, and the next STS version Joomla 3.1, are intended for early adopters and as such they are not recommended for the vast majority of people for developing their production sites.

What's new in Joomla 3?

Joomla 3 is a major new version of Joomla and as such there are some significant changes. From a users persepctive the first thing you will notice is the all new administration UI that is powered by Twitter's Bootstrap. This HTML and CSS scaffolding allows for consistent styling and more rapid development of HTML interfaces. This is a great bonus for Joomla as it has long suffered from a UI that has not evolved much since the early days of the project. A quick hilight of some of the key features in Joomla 3 include:

• Twitter Bootstrap CSS/LESS files in a JUI package
• New responsive administration template - Isis
• New responsive bootstrap powered front end template - Protostar
• Simplified installation process
• ProstreSQL Database Drivers Support
• New administrator statistic modules
• Improvements to searching
• More code standardization
• Updated to use version 12.2 of Joomla Platform

Of course there are many other new features, changes, and additions, making Joomla 3.0 a very significant release with real usability and functional improvements.

Here is the list of new features in Joomla 3

1. Mobile Ready
Joomla! takes a big leap into the mobile space with a total overhaul of both its frontend design and administrator interface. With the adoption of the Bootstrap framework, Joomla! has become the first major CMS to be mobile ready in both the visitors and administrator areas. Now every website can have mobile friendly content for visitors and mobile friendly tools for administrators.

• Fully Responsive Site Template
• Fully Responsive Admin UI
• Fully Responsive Core Output

2. User Friendly
Joomla administration has a brand new look and feel, built with the power of Bootstrap responsive framework, along with a touch of the awesome UI/UX work of the Joomla JUX team. Joomla comes ready to go and fully responsive for mobile devices, tablets, and normal computer screens. The entire backend of Joomla has a brand new look and feel that will improve your workflow with any type of device.

• New User Friendly Interface
• Streamlined 30 Second Install
• Refined Admin User Experience

3. Developer Tools
Spend less time coding and building interfaces with Joomla 3. The Joomla User Interface (JUI) library gives you a standardized backend & frontend interface via CSS and Javascript Frameworks. LESS CSS and jQuery means you can write less code and the Icomoon font icon library provides a wealth of retina-optimized icons.

• Build a Component with Zero CSS
• Style a Site with 1 CSS File
• Icomoon Font Icon
• jQuery & Mootools

4. Whole Lot More
Joomla 3.0 is a whole new exciting world. We took a little from the top, bottom, and side to create a whole brand new look and feel, along with many features under the hood features that bring Joomla to the forefront of the content management system world.

• Extensive work on code style standardisation and consistency
• Incorporation of Bootstrap into a jui media package.
• A new responsive administrator template Isis and interface.
• A new frontend template Protostar built using Bootstrap and updated accessible template called Beez3
• PostgreSQL Driver. You will be able to run Joomla 3.0 sites using the PostgreSQL database.
• PHP Memcached Driver
• Use of JFeed for feed management rather than SimplePie
• Installation of language packages directly from the extension manager
• Guest user group present by default
• Saving blank articles allowed
• New administrator statistics module
• Update TinyMCE to version 3.5.6
• Continued clean up of older unused code, files and database fields and tables and improved standardization of tables.
• Improvements to Smart Search
• Unit testing in the CMS
• Updated system tests in the CMS

Joomla is becoming one of the most popular websites Content Management System (CMS) with hundreds of millions of Joomla websites and thousands more be built every day, it isn’t surprising if many hackers want to attack it. In fact, there were many Joomla websites which were defaced because of the ignorance of their administrators.

1. Backup data
Take time to make a troubleshooting plan before your site visited by hackers. You always remember: “Backup early and often” to protect your data. This gives you the certainty that if something goes wrong with your Joomla website, you can restore it at any time you want. Then you only need to find vulnerabilities on a website.

2. Update Joomla
If your website is running Joomla 1.0 or 1.5, you should upgrade to Joomla 2.5 or 3.0. In the higher versions, there are many security improvements in the core elements of the application. However, you should do with caution “always backup your Joomla before proceeding with the upgrade”.

3. Careful management of installed extensions.
The extension of third-party make Joomla extremely popular, but it’s also a way to enter your website. In addition, you need to update regularly for each different extension. So, you should consider that expansion is really necessary.

Make sure the following steps:

- Run code review for any extension used.

- Review Vulnerable Extensions List to make sure any 3rd party extensions versions used appear on the vulnerable list.

- Update and patch for extensions when it’s necessary.

Remember that an extension, which isn’t safe, can be harmful to your entire website.

4. Remove unused files.
You install many extensions, but don’t use them? This is not only a weakness but also garbage for your website. Please use the uninstall function to totally get rid of the extension to avoid trouble.

5. Password protection:
The hacker usually attacks on weak passwords. You should regularly change your password and use all: uppercase, lowercase, special characters, numbers.

The database is very important. The SQL injection attack or any other attack on the database can make your effort lost. Make sure that your database access is protected at MySQL.

6. Use URLs search engine friendly:
Always use URLs search engine friendly. This not only improved the website's Google ranking but also prevent hackers exploit to use Google’s search results.

7. Change URL for administration security.
Standard Joomla address is http://www.yoursite.com/administrator. In order to secure your site against attack, you can rename it to be something like http://www.yoursite.com/administrator?wewroi4459

8. Remove version number, name of extensions.
Most of vulnerabilities only occur in a specific release of a specific extension. This is why you should remove the information about the version number of any extension is installed. Remove the version number may prevent an attack before it can happen.

Showing My Extension version 2.5 is really bad thing. You can modify this message with only the name of the extension by doing the following:

- Retrieve all files of the extension from your server

- Open up Dreamweaver.

- Load any file from the extension that you just downloaded to your local machine

- Use the Search function and set the search to Search through specified folder. Navigate to the folder where you downloaded the exploit.

- Set the search term to "My Extension version 2.5" and press OK.

- When found the correct file, remove the version number.

- Upload the changed file to your server and check if the changes are made.

9. Use the correct CHMOD for each folder and file

Setting files or folders to a CHMOD of 777 or 707 is only necessary when a script needs to write to that file or directory. All other files should have the following configuration:

• PHP files: 644

• Config files: 666

• Other folders: 755

10.  Change your .htaccess file:

########## Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits
#
# Block out any script trying to set a mosConfig value through the URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} mosConfig_[a-zA-Z_]{1,21}(=|%3D) [OR]
# Block out any script trying to base64_encode crap to send via URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode.*(.*) [OR]
# Block out any script that includes a < script> tag in URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C).*script.*(>|%3E) [NC,OR]
# Block out any script trying to set a PHP GLOBALS variable via URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
# Block out any script trying to modify a _REQUEST variable via URL
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
# Block out any script that tries to set CONFIG_EXT (com_extcal2 issue)
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} CONFIG_EXT([|%20|%5B).*= [NC,OR]
# Block out any script that tries to set sbp or sb_authorname via URL (simpleboard)
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} sbp(=|%20|%3D) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} sb_authorname(=|%20|%3D)
# Send all blocked request to homepage with 403 Forbidden error!
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]
#
########## End - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits

11.  Turn off Register_globals
You should turn off Register_globals, however, you must know that it can disable PHP script to work and maybe affect other programs that you are using on the website.

To make it, you just edit the php.ini file in the root directory of your domain name.

12. Review and action Security Checklist:
These checklists will point you in the right direction and inform you of typical security. So, make sure you went through all of the steps.

The new Joomla version 3.0 will provide the new markup and UI, based on the Bootstrap HTML/CSS/JS framework from Twitter. These changes will create a great overall User Experience for Joomla site administrators, thereby giving site users the same. Also, beside Mootools, jQuery will be included to Joomla 3.0, give developers more strength to create friendlier back-end user interface. Many new features are implemented which provides a impressive improvement versus current 2.5 version. I will introduce some main new features as follow:

Joomla 3.0 – New installer

Using the words “Short and simple” to describe about Joomla 3.0 installation process is truly right, since there are only 3 steps to install a Joomla 3.0 package.

New installer interface

Twitter Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a free collection of tools for creating websites and applications. It contains simple and flexible HTML, JavaScript and CSS-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, charts, navigation and other interface components.

Twitter Bootstrap – will be included in Joomla 3.0

Also, Bootstrap provides the basic common CSS for developers. They can use common user interface elements like buttons, layouts, alert messages, modal boxes, dropdown menus, tooltips, icons, tables, form elements and more from Bootstrap framework.

Great User Experience

The Joomla 3.0 is known as friendly User Experience (UX) since it is based on Bootstrap. That means the template and extension developers can  build the products which base on the same set of markup standards or consistent markup. You know, controlling your website would be much easier when all extensions look and work in a unified fashion. So you don’t have to get to be familiar with new interface on each extension.

Mobile Responsive Design

You might know the “responsive” feature from some Joomla templates. Now, it is included in Joomla 3.0, too. With the responsive design, you can control your Joomla site with mobile devices with ease. A responsive site will resize to the screen it is presented on any browsers or devices. Moreover, since it is responsive, it presented beautifully on mobile not only front-end, but also the back-end. This helps users manage the administrator easily on the mobile. For example, all the lists are put in one page that makes it more simply to control. 

Drag and Drop

The drag and drop feature is applied to make the item management more easily. All the old arrows on the ordering column have been removed, now you can drag-and-drop item freely in its categories to change the ordering of item list.

To use Drag & Drop feature, you must click on the 1st combo box at top right of table list, choose Ordering for “Sort table by”. Now you can see the “drag” icon at top right column of each item, move over to drag item and drop on position that you want.

The drag and drop feature

Tooltip

The tooltip in Joomla 3.0 is Boostrap based and provides a very easy way to use it in 3rd-extension.

The Tooltip display in Joomla 3.0

Context menu

Lists in Joomla 3.0 will have the “context menu” for each item, which helps you to access quickly to basic functions such as Edit, Publish/ Unpublish, Delete, Set default etc.

The Context menu in Joomla 3.0

Joomla 2.5 shipped with many new features including multi-database support and much improved one-click upgrades.

One the most important of those features was a brand new search extension: Smart Search. Smart Search is destined to be the replacement for com_search which has been around since 2005 at least.

Smart Search is disabled by default but it's easy to enable and is a big improvement.

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How to Enable Smart Search

Go to Extensions > Plug-in Manager and enable the Smart Search plugin.

Go to Components > Smart Search and click Index in the toolbar.

You'll see a progress bar as Joomla indexes your site. This is the first and last time you'll need to run this indexer.

When you're finished, you'll see all of the indexed content as in the image below:

Now that your content is in Smart Search, go to Extensions > Module Manager and place your Smart Search module live on your site.

The Smart Search module will look exactly the same as the normal Search module.

However, when you use the module, the Smart Search results will look very different:

There is also an Advanced Search feature to allow people to drill down more accurately:

Click on the Advanced Search and you'll be presented with the ability to filter your search by Author, Category, Country, Language, Region and Type.

SEO may sound complicated and expensive, but there are a number of things you can do to improve your search engine ranking that won’t have you spending a dime or tearing your hair out. The following are some SEO tips for Joomla sites:

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1) Don’t install any sample data when you set up a Joomla! site.

When you launch your Joomla! Site, it’s very easy to forget to delete all the demo articles that come with it. That will give you pages, links and newsfeeds that are irrelevant to your topic. Delete your sample data and don’t forget to empty your trash as well!

2) Your Site Name should be your site’s name.

There can be a temptation to cram as many keywords as possible into the “Site Name” field. It doesn’t help and when users register at your site, they get an email saying “Welcome to Widgets, Buy Widgets, Cheap Widgets, Bargain Widgets!” You don’t want that.

3) Turn off your PDF links.

When we analyze Joomla! Sites, we often find PDFs ranking higher than the original pages. Because PDF pages have no menu links, they’re a dead-end. Users can’t move from the PDF to the rest of your site. So turn off those links.

4) Don’t waste your site’s link juice with lots of social bookmarking links.

Lets face it, very few pages have a chance to hit the Digg home page or do well on Reddit, so only place those buttons on your best articles. Your visitors appreciate clean, uncluttered pages — and so do search engines.

5) Redirect the www and non-www versions of your site to the same place.

All you need to do is add this little piece of code to your .htaccess file. Note: Replace MyDomain with your domain name and .com with your domain extension.

6) Turn on your cache.

Search in Google and you’ll see a size for each site. Smaller, faster sites are more popular with visitors and with Google. One easy way to make your site act small and load faster is to turn on your cache in Global Configuration.

7) Enter a full description for all your sections and categories.

These pages are great for organizing your site… and for improving Page Rank. If you organize your sections and categories carefully, your site becomes very easy for both people and search-engine spiders to navigate.

8) Less is often more

Having thousands of Joomla! pages indexed in Google isn’t always a good thing, especially if those pages don’t bring value. Some components, for example, can produce lots of extra pages that are completely worthless. One easy way to check if your site is putting garbage on Google is to search for site:mydomain.com. If you find pages that don’t have good content, you might want to remove them.

9) Empty your global configuration metadata.

I’m sure you’re all big fans of Joomla!, but I’m equally sure that “Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system” doesn’t describe your site. Take it out.

10) Be confident.

Joomla! is fantastic software that allows you to easily create lots of high quality pages that are great for your SEO. If you keep a close eye on your site and take the time to learn how Joomla! works, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have top-flight search engine rankings!