The Key Reasons Why Joomla is One of the Most Sought After CMSs

Joomla is a popular open-source content management system (CMS) used by millions around the world to build powerful websites and online applications. It is an award-winning solution, well-known for its user-friendly features. Joomla has been designed for easy set-up and simple kick-start, even for new users. Since it is easy-to-use, it can be used to quickly build dynamic websites. In this post, you will discover the reasons why businesses prefer Joomla CMS for their website development.

• It is open-source and is free to use under General Public License (GPL). It is a user-friendly and easily understandable CMS.
• Joomla is very popular and is used by worlds biggest and most well-known companies like Pizza Hut, Kelloggs, Sony and Ikea to list a few.
• It has a wide range of plugins and extensions for developers to build customized robust Joomla sites.
• Joomla websites are easier to maintain, allowing users to systematically manage the content, pages, images and more through a secured admin system.
• Joomla can easily be integrated with WordPress, which is one of the best blogging tools of the recent times.
• Joomla is an excellent platform to build responsive websites, giving users an enhanced experience across all the platforms.The sites built on Joomla are easily navigable. They can be properly organized and their layout can be made attractive for users.
• You can even start your online business through your Joomla site as it has several eCommerce components that can help you to efficiently manage your products, their images & description, shipping, payment gateways and more.
• Joomla is easy to install; it hardly takes a few minutes to get downloaded from internet. Once the installation is over, you can easily start using it.
• The framework behind Joomla is well organized and uses Model View Controller standard (MVC), thus ensuring robustness in the website.
• Joomla provides a variety of in-built SEO features to help your website get higher ranks in the major search-engines, thus driving more traffic to your site.
• It has a variety of attractive themes and templates, helping you to design impeccable website to entice visitors.
• Joomla is a secure platform to build websites with features like reCAPTCHA and UploadShield Code to prevent your site from malicious uploads and spam.
• Joomla is widely used by organizations of all sizes, different businesses and private as well as Government organizations. It can be used to build websites for small ventures to enterprise-level businesses.
• Joomla helps designing multi-lingual websites, thus helping you reach a broad range of audience.
  
• It is backed by large online user communities from where developers can easily get advice and tips. There are online tutorials also available, thus providing solutions to your queries quickly.

Joomla is thus one of the best CMSs available for businesses to build highly-intuitive and feature-rich websites. It also allows customization to a great extent, allowing you to have a website that caters to your precise business needs!
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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!

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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.

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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

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.

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.

How to Edit A Joomla 3 Template In Joomla Administration?

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS.

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.

Joomla's primary focus has been on usability and extensibility since its initial release in 2005. It is because of this that the project has been the recipient of numerous awards, including being a three-time recipient of the PACKT Open Source Content Management System Award.

Joomla is a completely free open source solution available to anyone and everyone with a desire to build dynamic and robust sites for a variety of purposes. Joomla has been utilized by some of the Web's most recognizable brands including Harvard, iHop, and MTV. It is capable of carrying out tasks ranging from corporate websites and blogs to social networks and e-commerce.

Joomla is backed by a large and active developer community. With thousands of unique and useful extensions and templates available, it is presently one of the largest single site building platforms available. It is this incredible community effort that makes Joomla a great choice for developers searching for a single platform with which they can receive active support from their peers.

It is important to think of Joomla not as a limited platform on which a specific type of site is built, but a robust set of tools that makes it possible to connect visitors to data in a variety of ways. Joomla's extensive set of integrated technologies empowers site managers and developers to innovate well beyond the bounds of a simple website.

Steps Involved in editing a Joomla Template in the Joomla administration. This is handy to make small changes to your template files from the Joomla administration without having to upload files from ftp.

Steps Involved

1. Log into your Joomla 3 administration.
2. Click Extensions and then click Template Manager.
3. In the menu on the left click Templates.
4. From the list of templates select the template you want to edit, and then click the Template Details and Files link.
5. Select the file you want to edit from the list of template files and folders shown on the left.
6. Edit the file as required and then save and close the file.

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.

Easy Way To Speed Up Your Joomla Performance

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for words and phrases relevant to what the site is offering. In many respects it's simply quality control for websites. Having said that, if there was ever an industry that was little understood by outsiders it's SEO.

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS. 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.

Speed Up Your Joomla Performance

Want to increase the speed of your Joomla website? just start with a speed test. Speed is the most important factor directly influencing the performance of a website. Tools like Pingdom and PageSpeed Insight can test the speed of a website and give valuable suggestions to improve its performance. If the requested web page is taking too much time to load, user-friendly interface, high quality content, conversion rate optimization, and other techniques are not going to help you.

Update Joomla Core

To update Joomla to the newest version you can either click on “Update now!” notification which should show up on your dashboard, or you can manually update by navigating to “Components” → “Joomla! Update.” Remember to back up your website, especially on major release updates.

Update Joomla Extensions

To update your Joomla extensions navigate to “Extensions” → “Manage” → “Update.”

Content Delivery Network

Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with Joomla is an easy way to instantly see decreased load times. By doing this, you will ensure you are serving your assets (product images, javascript, CSS) from multiple locations around the globe so they are delivered faster to your visitors.

Caching

Joomla has an inbuilt caching system. This cache is provided to improve Joomla website performance. Whenever a user request a web page, Joomla has to perform some necessary actions to respond. Joomla has to retrieve images, text, videos and other content from the database. There are plugins, templates and other files associated with the requested web page. These all need to be loaded before the server could send the response. This ultimately results in increased page load time. However, when the cache is enabled, these actions are performed when a web page is loaded first time. Content and all necessary files are stored in the Joomla cache. Now, for all following requests, no data will be fetched from the database.

Image Optimization

As we mentioned in a previous post on lossless image compression, on average 56 percent of a website’s page weight is made up of images. So optimizing images can drastically decrease your page load times. Unfortunately in Joomla there is no built-in option for image compression. So we recommend either compressing and resizing them beforehand in a tool like PhotoShop (using the “Save for Web” feature) or an online tool.

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.

What's New In Joomla 3.4.8?

Joomla has just released version 3.4.8 of its open-source content management system (CMS) in an effort to lock down two new vulnerabilities, one of which could grant attackers full control of an affected website. As noted by SecurityWeek, the severity of these flaws didn’t go unnoticed: Symantec tracked an average of 16,000 hits per day attempting to exploit the issue. Here’s a rundown of what’s at risk with an unpatched Joomla install.

Joomla 3.4.8 fixes some issues found in the 3.4.7 release on Monday to do with browser sessions. All reported bugs from the 3.4.7 update have been fixed in this release:

• Users were unable to edit or create items after the 3.4.7 update
• Fatal error about connection->stat() not existing on external database connections
• After session timeout users could still navigate the backend but without being able to create/edit items or use pagination/filters

Joomla Security Risks

For almost a decade, a critical remote command execution vulnerability has existed in Joomla; versions 1.5 through 3.4.5 are affected by CVE-2015-8562. According to Ars Technica, while Joomla security teams patched the vulnerability within two days, the bug was already being exploited in the wild on IP addresses 146.0.72.83, 74.3.170.33 and 194.28.174.106. In addition, any events using either “JDatabaseDriverMysqli” or “O:” in the user agent were likely attack vectors.

So what’s the big risk here? CVE-2015-8562 leverages an issue with poor filtering when Joomla saves browser session values. As detailed by Sucuri, exploiting this flaw and combining it with the result of MySQL meeting a UTF-8 character that isn’t supported by uft8_general_ci — which causes data truncation from a specific value — it’s possible to launch an attack that could fully compromise servers. Cybercriminals then use the servers as malware hosts or sell access to them for a fee on the Dark Web.

Big Numbers

Given the relative simplicity of the flaw and the substantial impact if exploited, its no wonder attackers were eager to jump on the problem in the wild. In an effort to determine which servers are still vulnerable, cybercriminals have been swinging for the fences, sending out HTTP requests and analyzing the responses of phpinfo() and eval(chr()) functions to find likely targets. The result? Symantec clocked a high point of more than 20,000 attempts in a single day, with day-to-day averages hovering around 16,000 hits, according to SecurityWeek.

It makes sense that cybercriminals would be working overtime trying to exploit the vulnerability. While WordPress still dominates the CMS marketplace, Joomla holds a solid second place with over 550,000 Web pages using the open-source service, including Linux.com, The Hill online newspaper and Harvard University. Full access to any of these servers would let malicious actors wreak havoc; Malware distribution, DDoS attacks and stolen data are all potential outcomes.

The takeaway here? Even with Joomla security on the ball, there’s no guarantee that existing code flaws won’t crop up and cause problems for big companies. The solution? Active monitoring for starters — just because an application, CMS or cloud-based service seems secure, that’s no reason to turn a blind eye if odd behaviors start to emerge. Immediate patching is also critical. Within two days, Joomla rolled out version 3.4.6 and closed the security hole but in the time hits were already skyrocketing. Two more days and 32,000 attacks could slip through. A week? More than 110,000.

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.