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.

In the example screenshot above the URL will result in:

www.example.com/test-article

or,

www.example.com/test-article.html

The result depends on how you configure your SEF URL  setup in Joomla’s Global Configuration, and whether or not you use a 3rd part SEF extension like sh404SEF.

The built in Joomla SEF is fine as slong as you are not incredibly fussy about URL structure. It will insert the numbering into the URL.

On the healthy recipe website demo linked to above I have set my Global Configuration for SEF so it looks like this:

To use the Apache mod_rewrite option you will need to be running on a linux based host and you will also need to FTP into your Joomla site  root directory, and rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess if you have not done this already.

A final tip is that this also applies to Section and Category URL’s – you can edit the Alias field for each to customize.

Web developers tool bar can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

You also need FireFox http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

You can download the SEF patch from Joomla At Work.

View the template demo at http://chromatic.joomlabear.com/

IMPORTANT: I don’t talk about this in the video but you must use FTP to upload the patch files and replace core Joomla files. You can’t install this like an extension. I don’t generally approve of ‘hacking’ Joomla like this – but for the SEF patch I make an exception because the features shown in the video are essential, in my opinion.
Also note that when you update your Joomla installation in the future the patch files will be overwritten again by Joomla core files and you will need to grab the latest SEF patch and reapply before your SEO modifications are live again. A pain I know, but until Joomla includes HTML title editing in the software I will keep using the SEF patch. Rankings = Traffic, need I say more.

Another thing I do not make clear in the video is that modifying the Title Tag parameters in mainmenu > home is a function that you can apply to any menu item – not just the home page – sorry about that the way I phrase it you would think it’s just a home page thing.

And lastly I don’t state that by updating the Black Bear Chromatic Title Tag this will also be visible in Google eventually – but not until Google re-indexes our Joomla template demo.

Thx for listening – If you have something you’d like to know about Joomla! then leave a comment and I’ll consider it for the next Joomla Video Tutorial.

This time we’re looking at how a gradient can be added to the edges of a background image so that it seamlessly fades into the background color of your HTML page.

Basically we will be turning the image below, and to the left, into the image on the right – apologies in advance for the long-winded video – I’m still getting the hang of talking while I’m working and sometimes it’s hard to remember what I want to say while I’m concentrating! Bear with me…

And a big thanks to Matt for letting me play with his really nice pool table background image – you can see the background in action at Matt’s Pool and Snooker site – click here.

I should also add that the software used for image editing in this video is Adobe Fireworks – You could use similar techniques to achieve the same effect in Photoshop, Gimp, etc.

Excuse my voice – I’ve had a wicked cold/flu and my mic isn’t that great – but I do think this is a great format for future reference materials/tutorials. Let me know what you think in the comments.

The video above shows a time lapse of shots taken with a water proof stills camera. Pause between shots is 30 seconds. The sequence was started just before dawn and shot from our office window. Thats the view we see while we work on templates for you

The video was created by my very good friend Phil Aitken from Film Scouts who can be found at his site specializing in film locations.