And remember, BlueHost are currently sponsoring our 3 month Joomla template membership – so if you make the wise decision to host your site with them, you can also make your website beautiful with one of our Premium templates, absolutely free!

Click here to visit BlueHost (After you watch my super quick video, of course!)

Update – a while back I made a longer Bluehost Joomla video which you can see here. The screencast above is a little more to the point.

Most importantly search engines tend to rank content with a search engine friendly URL more highly due to the keywords that are contained in the URL. If you look at the URL of this very page you will see:

blog.joomlabear.com/setting-up-search-engine-friendly-urls-joomla-sef/

This URL tells Google, and other search engines, that the page is most likely about a number of things, such as; Search Engine Friendly URL’s, SEF and Joomla. This reinforces the other primary on-page factors Google looks at, the page title tag and content.

Another very nice side-effect of a SEF URL is that when somebody copies and pastes your link into a blog or forum they give you a link back with keywords in the URL. This is a big bonus, and something that will be explored again in a future blog post.

In this video I show you as quickly as possible how to setup basic SEF within Joomla (yeah I can’t help rambling about little details – It is a long video again, and I’ve got a slight cold, sorry!)

If you want to skip straight to the quick SEF URL checklist and resource list this is under the video.

Quick check list to get SEF URLS working in Joomla

1. Access htaccess.txt in your root directory and rename it to .htaccess
2. Visit your Joomla Global Configuration and in SEO settings set all options to ‘yes’ and save.

To access your root directory you can either use FTP or your web host’s file manager, as I have done in the video demonstration.

FTP access is something I consider essential for anyone serious about running a Joomla site, or any website for that matter – it still surprises me how many Joomla users I meet who have no idea what this is or how easy it is to setup. With FTP you can access your Joomla installation and manipulate files directly – you can upload and download files, rename, change permissions, etc.

If you want to access your site with FTP then here are a couple of quick tools I recommend:

1. Firefox – A free web browser – from our web stats I know that more than 50% of people visiting Joomlabear already have Firefox – this message is for the other 50% – Get Firefox here!
2. FireFTP is a free plugin for Firefox that lets you FTP into your website directory from within your web browser, as seen on TV in the video above. Get FireFTP here (Install Firefox first, then add this plugin).

To access your site with FTP you only need the following:

• your FTP address, usually ftp.your-domain-name.com
• A username, your hosting account login usually works
• A password, your hosting account password usually works.

If in doubt contact your web host for these details.

If you prefer the file manager option, Blue Host offer very affordable and reliable hosting and cPanel can save you a lot of time with many different admin tasks. You can also get a free Joomlabear template membership with any new Blue Host account – more details on this offer and Joomla hosting with Blue Host here.

This is a quick walk-through video showing how to setup Joomla on BlueHost. BlueHost are an exceptionally good Joomla host who offer excellent support, up-time and are also very competitively priced. To top it all off they are currently sponsoring a FREE JoomlaBear Premium Template Membership when you signup to host your site with them. Simply email your receipt to us here at JoomlaBear and we will activate your free 3 month membership worth $47 – absolutely FREE!

For more information on this offer view our main Joomla Hosting area, or go straight to BlueHost and signup.

Now watch the video below to see how easy it is to setup Joomla on BlueHost.

LiquidWeb are an absolutely awesome hosting company and I would recommend them above most other options.

Their support is second to none – try emailing them the most complex technical question you can imagine and you’ll typically have a response from one of their knowledgeable technicians in around 5 minutes!

Sounds amazing I know, but they are that good.

The catch

As with everything in life, you get what you pay for. LiquidWeb don’t do $5 accounts, or even $10 accounts.

What LiquidWeb excel at is slightly larger setups – Dedicated Severs and Virtual Private Servers (VPS). These start at around $60 per/month and run into the hundreds. When your business reaches this level the LiquidWeb is worth every penny, especially if you value your uptime, server speed and support.

For many of our customers who are already running profitable businesses online these costs are minuscule for the peace of mind that comes from having your web presence looked after by a team of experts.

I realize the prices are more than most people wish to pay when starting out, but if you are starting to experience some measure of success online, or you foresee rapid growth in your web presence, then I would highly recommend having a close look at Liquid Web.

Click Here For Dedicated Servers & VPS Options With LiquidWeb

I’d heard some good things about Steadfast Networks hosting services recently and decided to give them a try out and see how they dealt with Joomla! Read on to find out why they are an affordable hosting, especially if you are mildly techy and don’t mind tweaking a few things.

Quick summary:

Steadfast is inexpensive – $4.95 per month, with no setup fee and no contract – you could leave after a month if you were dissatisfied for any reason and it would have only cost you $4.95.

Support is good – very quick to respond, usually around 10 mins. However I still feel this host is better for those of you who feel reasonably capable with FTP, using a web based control panel to extract zip files, etc. If you struggle with these types of tasks there may be a better hosting option for you. However you won’t find cheaper with these features.

Uptime has been great for me, very happy. I have read a review where a Steadfast user had their site Dugg (digg.com) and it resulted in 16,000 visitors in one day – Steadfasts $4.95 account handled that traffic fine.

Technical Notes – IMPORTANT: A full tutorial on setting up Joomla at Steadfast Network will follow shortly. In the mean time please be aware of the following:- You need to manually install Joomla at steadfast – there is a one click installer but it is determined to place Joomla in sub directory called joomla.

Manual install is very straight forward though – simply upload teh Joomla zip from joomla.org and you can use Steadfasts file manager to unzip the package online.

The other important thing to note is when you install Joomla you need to add two lines to your .htaccess file otherwise you will get a couple of errors as you run through the installer. They are the following:

php_value mbstring.language neutral

php_flag display_errors “0″

These lines can be placed anywehre in the .htacess file – note you will need to rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess

With the above minor things considerd Steadfast is working great for me – I’m setting up a little demo site on my Steadfast hosting at link music. Not much there yet but you can click around and make sure things work for you, the site isn’t down etc.

I’m finding performance is very good – no down time in the past week since I added this domain. Latency is low, i.e pages load very quickly including the admin interface. Everything is snappy.

Read on for the rest of my rant… The important stuff is above.

The first thing that impressed me was the pricing, Steadfast’s hosting plans start at only $24.95 for a year! working out at around $2 per month!

However I decided that might not quite be enough for the site I was setting up, and also wanted to keep the option for multiple domains open down the track (not offered with the starter plan which is only for one domain name) so I opted for the Basic Plan, Giving me the following features for only $4.95 per month! And no setup costs!

Basic Plan

500 MB of Disk Space

30 GB of Monthly Data Transfer

Hosting for Unlimited Domains

Unlimited Databases

Unlimited Email Accounts

Unlimited Subdomains

Enterprise SPAM Filtering

$4.95 per month – Free Setup

$26.95 per 6 months – Free Setup

$52.95 per year – Free Setup

The first thing that strikes me about the feature set above is it’s real and honest and this gets a big thumbs up from me.

We’ve all seen the hosts that offer unlimited bandwidth! unlimited disk storage! etc, etc. These hosts simply are not being honest with their supposed quotas. one of the bigger hosts claims to give 500 GB of disk space but if you read the fine print in their terms and conditions you’ll notice they state that you may not store more than 5 GB of media files such as movies, music files, etc within that 500 GB quota. Which is of course utterly rediculous, who would stor 500 GB of HTML documents?  thats proabbly enough HTML to fill the entire world wide web! (obviosuly not but I hope you get my point – the only reason you would want 500 GB of disc space is for your meda!).

So back on track – the quota offered by Steadfast is real, honest and I’d eat my hat if they didn’t let you use all of it unlike other hosts who wil cut you off t the knees long before you use up the quota of infinite bandidth they sold you when you signed up!

A quote I found from someone reviewing Steadfast on another site was this:

“Ok i’ll make this short.

For 4.95$ per month my site successfully resisted about 16k uniques in one day (got dugg )”

That was one of the many pieces of feedback that impressed me.

The bandwidth (data) and disk space allowance isn’t huge on this plan but it is adequate to run a small Joomla site and an excellent option for someone wanting to get their toes wet with Joomla without much startup cost.

The 100MB of disk space with this plan would be more than sufficient as long as you don’t want to upload many media files. A typical Joomla installation with extensions usually weighs in around 15-20 Megabytes, at least for me  though I do have a tendency to pack my Joomla installations with a lot of bits and bobs. This would leave another 80 MB for your media, etc.

Step one: Install Joomla and take it for a spin