the competition for SERP's (Search Engine Ranking Positions) is fierce. The slightest advantage you can gain can make the difference. Good navigation is key here - and part of this is to give some extra info to your visitors of what they will see if they clicking on a given link. Adding the article title to your Read More links is a way to make this happen.

In several previous tips(like Turn caching on!, Caching reloaded, Give a boost to your Joomla site and couple of others) I urged you to turn caching on wherever is appropriate. Recently one of my readers had criticized me, because he tried to follow the tip, but on several modules he used simply he didn't found the option to turn cache on (or off) in module settings.

Indeed, this might be a problem, since some modules does not have this option! this little detail don't need to stop you to do so!

This tip is only for Joomla 1.0! For newer versions the handling of bandwidth is more cleverly solved, so read on only if you still use Joomla 1.0.

One of most annoying limitation SEO wise in the Joomla versions prior to Joomla 1.6 was the inability to set directly (without use of some SEO component or a core hack) meta data information for categories. This was important especially on category blog or category list type of pages, where you have left without proper way to control the meta data added to these pages.

Have you been driven crazy by the junk code added to your articles when you, your mate, or your clients are added page content to a Joomla site by copy&pasting from Word? I'm sure the answer is YES. The huge amount of junk you can add this way to your page not only slows down considerably the site, but also can potentially destroy your design. Anyway, you can kiss goodbye the clean, uniform look you (may) wished for your page when started to build it.

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.

One of the problems any webmaster is facing that the site may be not fast enough to meet his expectations. How you can squeeze up that last drop of extra speed from your site? We published lots of tips on this theme, but let's reorganize and update them with possibilities of the latest Joomla implementation (1.5.10 as the original article was written, 1.7.3 on last update I wrote this). I try to present them in decreasing order of importance/effectiveness, but the actual order reflects mostly my personal experience - which may be different from yours - and not some rigorously measured facts. But, believe me, I have a good nose for this. Some of the tips are easy to implement - and some may need advanced knowledge. But I mixed them up there to let you know what you may need to check - or what you may need ask from your programmer/web developer.

When one needs something, usually want it fast' and with large, complex Joomla sites that may be a problem. Sometimes the search takes... okay, not forever, but long enough to think about how you can give it some extra speed. Here are some tips and tricks to accelerate Joomla search speed:

You knows the basics, right? Great content and a good number of incoming links are necessary for gaining the top SERP (Search Engine Ranking Points) for a particular keyword phrase. The good old way to reach this goal was to build an attractive landing page and add to it as many links as possible.

By default Joomla 2.5 does not add the robots meta tag in the header and you have no handy tool by default to do it in one place, unless you don't use some add-on which let you do this easily.

But what if you prefer to do it yourself, bare-handed, without seeing even some code? You might be surprised, but in fact in Joomla 2.5 it's very easy to set up meta tag robots for your home page and content articles.

Did you followed the advices of SEO gurus, and now you have a bunch of domain names, like mydomain.com and mydomain.org, mydomain.info and mybestdomain.net, and you want to use all of them to display your sole, well built Joomla site, but dunno how? Here's the trick you need!

After I upgraded this site to Joomla 1.7 I wondering, how I can create a RSS feed with all entries to re-create the original functionality we had in the initial site. The problem is that Joomla 1.7 use for this purpose the "Syndication Feeds" module, which picks up the Featured Articles menu item (if any) to create a RSS feed from the currently displayed page.... This works fine - relatively - if you use the default Joomla setup, the Featured Articles menu item being your default homepage. But this isn't my case - and this isn't anymore the case of most of the sites... so I needed to find out something else.

The sh404SEF component is a terrific tool for creating and maintaining SEF URL's for your Joomla site - and to make it more Google - and user - friendly, with one condition: to have a SEF plugin for your components already delivered to you with the sh404SEF or to find one ready-made on the web.

Luckily most of popular components are already covered by the component itself, or there are geeks on the net (like me) publishing the needed add-ons. One of notable exceptions is the popular form component, Chronoforms.

Using Dublin Core Metadata for Search Engine Optimization is a practice often overlooked by Joomla (and non-Joomla) webmasters and self-proclaimed SEO gurus alike. Bad enough, because embedding Dublin Core metadata elements in your web pages provides a standards-based approach to search engine optimization that boosts your SEO score and complements your HTML meta-data.

Are you a good webmaster willing to see how your site are performing? Or you're a web developer in need to show to your client how their brand new/re-branded/tweaked/SEO/SEM mastered site is performing? If the answer is yes, you may already know, that web statistics is a powerful resource. And there are a lot of Joomla packages to help you. So, why you are reading this, instead of grabbing one and using it?

Now you have one more extra reason to use Google's very useful Webmaster Tools. Recently Google added to his arsenal of Joomla related enhancements a useful one: In the Google Webmaster Tools you will see a warning with useful details on what to do each time yor Joomla site gets outdated!

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

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

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

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

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