Joomla CMS, an award winning software

Joomla – An Overview
Why CMS?

Content is the most crucial part of any website. It is the things of past where the websites were consisted of mostly static pages. Web portals and web communities have to update their content not just daily but a few times a day. All sorts of businesses need to provide up-to-date information about their products and services on their web sites. So managing and organizing this growth in content has become very critical nowadays.

Development and maintenance of website is a technical task, and if your website is dynamic then constant up-gradation is required. You need to recruit qualified technical people to keep track of your content and website up-gradation. This is a very tedious job and human is error prone, so to overcome this difficulty software called content management systems (CMS) is launched, of which Joomla, a free award winning software.
What is Joomla?
According to Wikipedia, Joomla is a 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.

Features of Joomla:

• Flexible and easy to use: Many web designers wish for a CMS that provides a lot of flexibility while designing a website. Joomla gives them more scope while working on a website. Functions like editing, deleting, adding, updating texts, photos, images, and pages on their website should not be very complicated. Joomla CMS is the answer to all their needs.


• User friendly: Basically a CMS enables you to manage and control the presentation of the contents of the website. The contents of a website may include texts, images, music or documents. To manage these contents in a professional manner, the website needs to be designed with a competent CMS. Joomla is a fantastic CMS which is very user-friendly. You needn’t to be an HTML expert or some kind of technical nerd to design any website using Joomla.


• Absolutely free: Joomla is absolutely free. It is a free open source CMS, so you do not have to pay a single penny to use this system.


• Easy to Install: Many web hosting packages now include the Joomla software and it is very easy to install. Initial customization of Joomla may require some help from a technical person and includes setting up the basic template. The template includes the web site design and navigation system. This template contains a few editable areas but the overall look and flow of the site remains consistent throughout the site.
  All you need to start using Joomla and become familiar with its features which are similar to any word processing software.


• Easy to maintain and update: A website designed using Joomla is also very easy to maintain and update. You do not have to depend on any professional to maintain or update your website. You can do it yourself by learning from the Joomla video courses that are available online.


• Automated templates: Joomla uses a simple browser-based user interface for managing various aspects of the site. Through easy-to-use web based forms, you can update image or text content, set it up to take sales orders, create new content sections or pages, manage your employee listings as well as contact information, or even regularly update your product catalog. When you want to change the appearance of the entire site, all you need to do is make changes in one template file to have it reflected throughout the site.


• Add-on's and plug-ins to facilitate the use of even more features: Joomla has the ability to provide your clients with ample of free plugins, modules and components for their sites. These things all extend the basic functionality of Joomla, allowing you to create anything from a small business website to a fully functioning corporate website with an integrated backend. Most of them can be downloaded for free, offering your clients feature rich and interactive tools for their site bound to keep their customers engaged and coming back for more. Some of them do have a fee but are more reliable as well as more feature rich than other CMS plug-ins.


• SEO and joomla: SEO(Search engine optimization) is the key of success of any website, so if you are creating a website that is not accessible to search engines, then you exist nowhere. Since 90% of the traffic comes through search engines only, that’s why web developers were constantly forced to weigh the ease and organization of a Content Management System with the priority of search engine presence. Joomla provides many features which makes your website familiar with search engines like search engine friendly urls that end with .html or .htm and don't have a '?' or other special characters, using Joomla each page can be easily customized for Title and Meta tags that prevent duplication, which is a negative seo-factor. With Joomla, you can customize 404 error page and also keep track of the broken links people are using to surf your site. Since blogs offer a unique personalized tone to your approach towards your target traffic. Joomla offers user-friendly tools to post your blogs online without much effort. Submission of sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and other popular Search Engines will help to index your site quickly, with Joomla, a sitemap(component or extension)of your website, html or xml based can be automatically generated. Newsletter forms a vital ingredient of a successful commercial website. You can remain in touch with your customers and prospects with this feature, which can be integrated through a customized newsletter extension in your Joomla.


• Simple to add new features: Joomla also makes it very simple to add new powerful features to your web site with just a click of a button. You can choose from any of the hundreds of extensions available - document management which allows you to index the kinds of documents on your web site, track the changes in them and make them easily searchable; image and multimedia galleries; forums and chat software; blogging software; mailing list management; shopping cart and complete e-commerce software; Web standards upgrades; Workflow management and many more.

Summary: In all, Joomla is a very powerful software that allows users to develop and maintain dynamic web sites. If you're building a new web site or renovating your existing site, you can take the help of Joomla CMS software. While non-technical users can use Joomla to manage various aspects of the site including the content very easily, more technical users can use add-ons to make the site more powerful and actually build large-scale online applications. Joomla is being used to power all kinds of web sites - simple, personal or family sites; small business web sites as well as more complex corporate intranets and extranets; community portals; magazines and newspapers; government applications and so on.

Content Management System (CMS) – An Overview

Why CMS?
Content plays an important role in determining any website's popularity, that's why it is known as "King of the web". So it is very important for us to keep our website updated with the latest happenings of the company. Everyone is nowadays struggling to keep their websites up-to-date. Gone are the days when static websites were used. As more people are becoming familiar with internet, it has become very essential for us to revise our websites around the clock. To design the content for the website, we need to employ website designers and for further modification also we need to rely on them. As human-being always have some limitations. So it is not a good idea to rely on human being for something which can be easily done with the help of software (CMS).

With the advent of content management system it has become very easy to build and manage the content of our website without having any technical knowledge, which is otherwise a big task. CMS is equipped with lots of in-build libraries of graphics, affiliate program links, which can be utilized even by common man to build and manage the websites.

What is CMS?
According to Wikipedia CMS is a computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text. CMS are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files, electronic documents, and web content.


What are the benefits of using CMS?
CMS provides flexibility and convenience for any person to design and manage their website on their own without actually relying on any technical people with ease. Content management system can be a great help for those consumers (school/ college pupil or housewives) turned into publishers also, who are trying to find out ways to manage their content output. These people don’t have time and money to spend for website designers or programmers but they want to publish their thoughts as soon as it strikes them and customize their websites frequently on their own.

There are various other advantages of CMS, some of them are:

• Saves time: CMS greatly saves the time to publish the content; it makes you to publish content faster, which is very necessary in order to create value to the content in modern days.



• Simple & affordable to deploy : Many CMS like Joomla is open source CMS are coming for free and its portability between lots of versions and its scalability on different platforms makes it very simple to use



• The CMS service can be delivered through internet. It doesn’t require any hardware to manage or software to install separately only for CMS.



• Easy to use and publish content online even without any technical knowledge.


• The handling and controlling of errors makes it very simple to use.
  


• It is equipped with lots of customizable templates which are ready to use and can be easily applied to the content.
  


• It can speed up the creation and maintenance of websites using web components and plugins.
  


• CMS can also keep you in touch with the social media by using blogs, message boards, RSS etc.
  


• It can be shared by multiple people having different user and administration rights in an organization because it establishes defined publishing processes.
  


• Reconstruct/Reuse the content: CMS is equipped with the feature of reusability of the content since the content is stored in database. It generates completely new output with the available content.
  


• Content scheduling: Content publication can be scheduled using CMS to keep track of who is publishing what, how quickly content is getting published, whether the publication schedule is being stuck to, whether out-of-date, content is being removed quickly enough, etc. In this way using CMS one can easily measure the success of your publishing efforts.


• CMS allows you to consistently manage the
  metadata through content template structures. Metadata plays an important role in SEO. Eventually it helps you to get good rankings in Search engines
  


• Using CMS one can secure its intranet privacy of content, which is really an important thing as different people of an organization could have allocated different rights to view, edit and publish the content


• Distributed maintenance: One can easily edit the content from anywhere, anytime using a common web browser which removes lots of bottlenecks.

Summary: CMS provides great comfort to the user to manage the content effectively and lucratively. CMS can also be helpful to those publishers who want to publish lots of content but don’t have technical knowledge. CMS also allows you to design common and consistent web content architecture, which is very essential to have a competent website. By using CMS user can get updated with the latest technologies of the world with ease. But before selecting any CMS, be mindful, as bad CMS can worsen your life.

Ten golden rules to avoid SEO mistakes

SEO has become the key of success of any website in today’s world, but still there are people who ignore the SEO part of their website and try to either find some cheaper ways to optimize their website or self optimize their website without having knowledge of SEO. At Himshilp we do a thorough study of our client’s website and its competitor’s website and then perform research to find the title, description, keywords, H1 tags and content in the respective client’s site.

I want to list 10 golden rules which could be followed, in order to avoid common SEO mistakes to optimize the websites:


Avoid badly framed website title:
Website title plays an important role in determining the rank of a page by search engines. If your website has irrelevant title, then your webpage will be given less relevance by search engine. After scanning your page the search engine matches your content with the title and keywords of your page, so it is very important to take care of few things while designing the title.

1. One should never use a keyword more than once in the title.

2. Title tag should be framed with 10 - 60 characters, without any special characters.

3. Always place the important keywords in the title obeying the rule of leftward i.e. the
First word is best, second is second best, etc.

4. The title should always relate to the content of the webpage, its meta description and
meta keywords and should be legible by the user.

5. There should be distinct title and description of each page.

Don’t use duplicate/ insufficient content of the page:
Never design duplicate or bad content for your webpage. Insufficient or Duplicate content will not be tolerated by search engines, even your websites can be banned. Content is known as the king of the web. So always write a content which is unique, friendly. Then people would like to link to you. You can even hire people who write decent unique content by paying them some amount.


Check all your backlinks (Poor backlinks/ less backlinks are harmful):
The quantity of backlinks/ incoming links of a website represent its popularity. The number of backlinks replicates the number of votes caste for a particular website or a web page. Google consider backlinks as a very important factor to determine page rank. Don’t link to the websites which are not relevant to your website as it will not benefit you. Always link to a high page-rank website. Google doesn’t support link-exchange, so better not adopt it. One way quality backlinks are always better for SEO. There are various ways to increase the backlinks. The submission to Directories & Search Engine Submission is the easiest yet powerful and result oriented activity. Creating interesting blogs and articles are also very helpful to get quality backlinks to your website. The social networking profiles can also be used to bring backlinks to your website.

Check all your internal links:
Broken internal links create negative impact on SEO. Always validate all your internal links so that there are no broken links in your website. Using similar anchor text in all the links is also not advised. Anchor text is the text which is the visible part of a hyperlink, never use the same anchor text in all your links like click here or some thing which is irrelevant to that link. Anchor text link should contain keywords. Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only. And try to use keywords in the urls also.


Use header tags in the content appropriately:
One of the POSITIVE ON-Page SEO Factors is the usage of keyword in H1, H2 and H3 tags. We should use these tags in order to get the page optimized. But the problem with these tags is that they don’t look nice as such in the web browsers for h1, h2 tags are too large and h5, h6 are too small. So overall appearance of the webpage gets distorted. That’s why generally people ignore them. But with the advent of style sheets it has become very easy for the programmers to change the hierarchy of the tags, so that one can view them in the browser with the appropriate size. Also one should never use H1 tag more than once in a page.


Use keywords properly:
Keywords are wonderful weapon of your websites so never ignore them whether it is keywords in meta tag, url, meta description.

meta keywords: Never use common meta keywords in all the webpages of your website. It will be screened as duplicate content filter checks by the SE. The common rule for Keyword in keyword meta tag is to use less than 10 words. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be punished for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice. If not, it may be considered as spamming.

Keyword in URL: Often people ignore the proper usage keywords in url, and it is stuffed with irrelevant words. Always use appropriate description of the page content in the url assuming this hierarchy First word is the best, second is the second best, etc.

Keyword in description meta tag: Do not put similar descriptions for all the pages. It should be unique for all the pages and relevant to the page content. Ideally it should contain less than 200 chars.

High Keyword density in body text: Ideally keyword density should be 5- 20% - (all keywords/ total words). Individual keyword density should be 1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words). But if you are thinking that using keyword everywhere will make the page more relevant then its wrong assumption. Do not stuff keywords unreasonably everywhere.


Make proper XML sitemap of the website:
Sitemaps helps you communicate with the SE. Website gets indexed in various search engines by XML sitemap. So always update your sitemap so that your webpages get indexed easily in the search engines.


Use < img> tag properly:
Most of the times the images are overlooked in SEO. Long and meaningless names of the images convey nothing to the search engine, try to incorporate some keywords in the image name so that the search engine will list them. Use alt tag to describe the images. ALT tags should contain a description of what the image is. It is a labeling device to translate your image into text for search engines. It also translates your image into a textual reference for users with visual handicaps. So use < img> tag carefully.


Don’t use too much of javascript where it is not required:
Use as much as clean HTML code instead of javascript code as the search engine could not translate java script.


Have patience:
There is no shortcut to get listed in top 10 for the selected keywords. It takes time for a page to get indexed in Google. So have patience and be vigilant. Publish unique quality content, by validating it and reinsure that it gets indexed properly in the search engine, this is an ongoing process, so keep changing the content of the website since if you will optimize your website for once and take a backseat then you can be out of index.

Finally be cautious of those internet marketing firms who give you 100% assurance in getting the pages indexed. Even Google says that there is no rule to get the 100% optimization and the rules to optimize the webpage are keeps on changing so be vigilant and take the appropriate step.