Joomla is one of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS) over the internet. Many website designers and owners use it once they understand how it works as it might need a little knowledge about website structure and maybe some HTML.
I have been using Joomla for a short period of time. In the beginning, I found it time consuming to chase after all those modules, extensions and plugins but once I got used to it, I am satisfied and confident to bring any Joomla website to the next level.
I need to say Joomla has drawbacks in terms of SEO but there are solutions for that issue so let’s create a pros and cons list for Joomla.

Joomla Pros:

- Fast and easy to use once you understand how it works.
- There are hundreds of support extentions, plugins and modules.
- It is very easy to create and operate a multilingual website with Joomla.
- It is an open-source platform and the website can be extended easily.
- It is free.

Joomla Cons:

- Joomla is not SEF in terms of URL’s. You need to purchase SEO plugins in order to optimize your URL’s or do some hacking in with code. I will tell you how to optimize your URL’s effectively without using any plugin in my next post about “Joomla SEO Steps”.
- It is not very easy to understand the section, category structure in the very beginning. You might need to read some Joomla lessons to overcome this issue if you have enough drive.
- You need to rearrange your modules etc. when you change the template so it is better to decide your template before you create the whole website.
- You need to spend some money if you want continious support for most modules, extentions and plugins.
- Those are what I’ve already thought about Joomla. I would love to hear your comments on this issue so the list could be extended with your support.

Economic downturn is leading every organization in to cost-cuts and find new revenue channels. As long as companies set up a clever e-strategy, e-business is an effective business model since it is cost-effective and brings many opportunities together. This is why many companies are transforming in to e-business, exploring and taking advantages of revenues generated online while succesfully integrating in to social media for brand reputation and recognition.

Internet integration also brings search engine marketing opportunities, which is strongly accountable and flexible compared to other mediums of advertising. Spending on online ads is expected to overtake expenditure on TV ads by the end of this year and even in these economic climate, internet-based advertising will grow by 10.1 per cent during 2009 according to a new study. That is so promising for SEO’s and search marketers while pointing the success of online business.

What ever business you are involved in to,  get yourselves in the water and start benefiting from online world. Do you need help? Give me a shout now!

I don’t know if you already know this or not but you can set up your own social bookmarking website for free by using Pligg CMS Solutions!
About a year ago, I started a Turkish website called Linkopedi where I was intending to give links for social bookmarking websites and easing link building process for my visitors. After some time, I saw my users were eager to send their website data and asking me to publish them on this website. As a very curious person, I really love experimenting new things so I said why not and added a directory folder under my website and started building links for my visitors; it was very risky I accept but at the end of the day my visitors were happy and it was increasing my traffic as well.

Turkish Social Bookmarking Website Linkopedi

Recently, I came across to Pligg and I am so happy to announce that my Linkopedi finally became a social bookmarking website where people can submit their stories, save their favourite websites, vote on other’s stories, create groups, discuss anything they want and communicate with each other by the help of this free CMS. I am still in process of translating the CMS but the main features are working in Turkish so the website is alive!

I just started experimenting Search Engine Optimization for Pligg and write about my suggestions for other Pligg users in the future.

I would love to hear from you if you could check out Linkopedi to see how Pligg works and send me your comments!

I am always confused on whether to use <alt> attribute or <title> tag when adding images to my content. I made a research on this issue and here is what I come up with at the end.

Effects of <alt> attribute for SEO

The main purpose of using <alt> is making your content accessible. It enhance your website’s accessibility such as if some one is using a screen reader, can’t load the image for some reason, the browser will show the alternative text giving them a better user experience. The more accessible a website is the more likely it will rank in SERP’s. Using <alt> attribute for images will help search engines to understand what your images are all about and rank your images in the image search result pages such  as Google image and blended search result pages. It is said that Google even use alt attributes as descriptions of images in Google Image so this is a proof <alt> attribute’s success at Google’s end.

Using <alt> tag is simple. Normally, when you add the above image  in to your content, the HTML code looks like this:

<img  src=”http://www.futuresearches.com/wp-content/uploads/SEO.jpg”>

This is not enough to tell SE’s what the image is about. It is a better practice to apply <alt> tag like:

<img src=”http://www.futuresearches.com/wp-content/uploads/SEO.jpg” alt=”SEO Strategy, Site Analysis, SEO Recommendation, Link Building, Directory Submission”>

Remember not to do any keyword stuffing and don’t use more than 7-10 keywords in your alt tags otherwise it may be perceived as spamming.

Effects of <title> tags for SEO

Title tags gives additional information about the links ,telling users where they will be linked if they click on the link with a description display. They are also useful in some browsers who doesn’t support <alt> attribute. Search engines doesn’t give weight on title tags in terms of ranking but we all know search engines rank user friendly websites so using <title> tags are helpful for your SEO at the end.

Using title tags is pretty much the same as alt example above, just insert title instead of alt:

<img src=”http://www.futuresearches.com/wp-content/uploads/SEO.jpg”title=”SEO Strategy, Site Analysis, SEO Recommendation, Link Building, Directory Submission”>

I  finally decided to use both of them just to make sure my content is accessible with all browsers and optimized.

What is your opinion about <alt> attribute and <title> tag?  Do you think any of them makes more sense in terms on SEO?

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Favicons are small images shown next to your website’s URL in the address bar of your browser. They not only make URLs  look nice but also increase brand awareness for users. When a user add a website to his favorites, websites with favicons will stand out amongst others which would improve your number of visitors.

How can you make a favicon in Photoshop?

You will make an .ico image with 16 pixels by 16 pixels. First of all, you need to download the ICO plugin for Adobe Photoshop. You can download it from Telegraphics website. When the installation finishes, execute the zip file in to the photoshop/plugins.fileformat folder in your computer.

Open photoshop and select File>New and make a new file with 64 x 64 dimentions. Remember it is best to work with multiples of 16. We will resize our image once it is finished. Create your favicon image as you like. Go to Image>Image Size and change image dimentions to 16 x 16. After  resizing the image, go to File> Save As and save the file as favicon.ico

Upload your favicon.ico file in to main directory in your server. I put it in to the images sub-folder under my theme folder. Then, add the following code in to the head section of your template:

<link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

Remember to give your favicon image address in the above code. You can use .png or gif images instead of .ico but your favicon won’t be displayed in Internet Explorer.

Feel free  to ask me if you have any questions further.

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