Have you lost your Joomla administrator password? Don’t loose heart! I will show you two ways to reset your Joomla password:
Related: Secure Password Generator
If you have lost your Joomla administrator password, you can reset it in your MySQL database using phpMyAdmin. Here is how to do it:
- Log in to your Joomla web hosting account and find where to administrate the MySQL database for your Joomla website
- Log in to your Joomla database, usually via phpMyAdmin interface
- Find the _users database and click on it (normally preceded by your account name, i. e. accountname_users)
- Find the record for your account, usually with usertype = Super Administrator
- In the password field you will find a string of characters. That is your old password encoded. You will not be able to retrieve your old password, but you will be able to reset the password to a new one using mySQL’s built in MD5 function. Just click SQL and run this query:
UPDATE example_users SET password=MD5(‘new password’) WHERE usertype = “Super Administrator”;
(put in your new password where it says ‘new password above) - Click ‘Run’ and you have reset your Joomla password!
Related:
If you have lost your Joomla password, you can request from Joomla to send you an email with a link to a password reset page. Your administrator login page does not have such a function, but your frontend login page does.
-But I don’t have a frontend login, you might say.
-Yes you do, is my reply.
Just type in the URL http://[replacewithyourfancydomainname.xxx]/index.php?option=com_user&view=login and you land on your frontend login page containing two links for request of login information:
- Forgot your Password?
- Forgot your Username?
Just click the first one if you forgot your password. This will take you to a password reset page. Just follow the instruction and you are back on track.
Related:
WordPress 3.1 ruins your SEO if you do not use SEF URL:s. This is true only for your indexed category URL:s, not for your single posts. But this is serious enough. If you have upgraded to WordPress 3.1 you MUST use so called Search Enginge Friendly URL:s. Why? Because with WordPress 3.1, your site displays a new permalink for categories »
WordPress 3.1 is great news in many aspects, but not for SEO. If your theme adds categories to a menu (which most themes do), these menu links are changed with WordPress 3.1. This is really bad for your SEO. What Google has indexed as http://yourcoolblog.com/?cat=1 is now with WordPress 3.1 linked to as http://yourcoolblog.com/?category_name=[categoryname]. This is true also for the links that most themes display for single posts, saying: Posted in: [categoryname]
This means:
- you no longer have any links on your site to the categories that Google has indexed, and these search results will of course loose their ranking on Google.
- you now have the same content displayed on another URL, which Google will consider duplicate content.
The cure
After updating to WordPress 3.1 you really need to use so called Search Engine Friendly URL:s. You need to be on a server that can handle rewrites and you need to use Permalink Settings.
Other blogs about WordPress 3:1:
How do you write an effective email newsletter, one that people really read? Here is a simple step-by-step guide how to write effective newsletters:
1. Be relevant. Share knowledge that will help the reader. Help them get better at what they do. Give them advice how to get the most out of the product or service that you sell. Mix know-how with promotions like a contest or a discount.
2. Write short articles. Think of each article as of a press release. Bring your main message up-front. If you need more space for what you want to share, just write a short teaser with a link to the full article on your website or blog.
3. Target one person and be personal. Speak directly to your reader, i. e. “I suggest that you…” Be less formal than in a typical newspaper. Build a personal relationship to one person.
4. Make it easy readable. Use simple words. Write short sentences. Write short paragraphs with lots of space between each paragraph. Use headlines for each article. Readers will be fast-scanning your newsletter looking for something that will catch their interest. Catch it!
5. Bring attention with the subject line. Be careful: It should tell the reader something about the content. Make your subject line stand out among the multitude, but don’t deceive your reader! Make sure you don’t use words that servers block as spam identifiers, like ‘free’, ‘offer’ etc. Make the subject line short. Put the most important words among the first five words.
6. Design for the preview pane. Many readers scan the preview pane before they decide whether to open the email. Most email programs don’t show images by default. If the first top inches of your newsletter consist of images, the reader will see nothing in the preview pane.
7. Check the layout in different email programs and browsers. Send it to yourself and a few friends that use different webmail services. Check it in MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird etc.
8. Learn from your statistics. Find out what content your readers appreciate by checking
a) what subject lines attract readers to open your email
b) what links they click on
c) how long time they read the content.
Of course you need a good email marketing solution with tools for readers’ statistics and effective email list management. You can use a paid service or you can install a free open source email marketing solution together with your website.
Oh my, so many incomplete, obsolete and inaccurate SEO guides to Joomla out there! Need to do something about it… So here is a complete guide with steps listed in order of priority. Some steps will be described in detail in later posts.
- Activate Linked Titles on the frontpage and on all your section/category pages. Links with proper keywords in their anchor text is the most important SEO factor. This is true both with incoming links from other websites and with your own internal links. The anchor text tells the search engine what the target page is about.
- Use important keywords in your article titles. But remember: The title of the article will be the headline in the SERP, so the title must also attract clicks. Noone clicks on a keword stuffed nonsense headline in SERP.
- Make sections/categories from keywords.
- Make menu links from keywords.
- Optimize your global site title. Evaluate if your global site title (site name) is important to show in the SERP for branding reasons. If you don’t go for branding, then don’t use global title. Just let the title of each article be what shows up in the SERP. The fewer characters you use in the title, the more relevance is given to each keyword. If you decide to use global title for branding, let it show in the end of the title, after a dash, and make it short!
- Install a site map (a page with all internal links) and add a link to the sitemap in the footer of the template so that every page your website links to the sitemap.
- Write articles for 1-3 keywords at a time. Use the most important keyword near the beginning of the first paragraph. Write content that helps people or write something that stands out. Think: What content would I link to? Don’t use the keywords too often. Check with a keyword density tool. Link internally to other articles on your site using keywords, like I just did in the previous sentence.
- Link every single page on your site to your homepage using the most important keyword in the anchor text. You can use a simple text link in the footer or you can link the logotype at the top. Just make sure you have the keyword in the alt-attribute of the linked image.
- Use correct semantic markup: <h1> for title, <h2> and <h3> for subtitles. <p> for paragraphs. Use the ALT-attribute for correct image description (including keyword) and the TITLE-attribute for links.
- Check your robots.txt – it should not block search engines from indexing your images folder.
- If you have time for the extra work it will give you: Consider installing SEF urls. Read Five reasons to use SEF urls but know that it will take quite some time to maintain a good SEF extension. A good SEF extension might give you some bonus tools worth considering too.
- Submit an XML sitemap to Google.
Now, make sure others get to know about your great content. Post articles on Facebook, Twitter, help people on forums, ask some bloggers to comment on your content etc. If your content is good, you will get incoming links, which is fundamental for search engine ranking. This art is called Link Building and is not a Joomla SEO topic.
As said in the beginning, I will add some detailed descriptions later. Did I forget something? Please comment!
I often get questions about search engine friendly URLs, or SEF url:s. Does it matter for SEO if the URL is “human readable” or not, if it contains the keywords or not?
Many say that it no longer matters if the web address (URL) is looking like this http://www.greatnewssite.net/content.php?s=71 or like this http://www.greatnewssite.net/sports/fotball.php. Some have heard it from their web hosting provider who can’t handle rewrites. Others heard it from Google, who 2008 declared that what we referre to as Search Engine Friendly URL:s does not affect the search results.
Sure it matters! But not as the term SEF suggests.
I was not surprised when Google dropped the SEF bomb Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs. I have always maintained that common sense should guide Search Engine Optimization practice. Google’s business concept is to deliver the most relevant search result, and why then would it matter what address the data is stored at? I never believed that putting keywords in the URL alone would make any difference to the search result. But it sure has significance – in other ways.
Here are five reasons to use SEF URLs:
1. When someone throws a link in a forum
When someone likes the content on http://www.greatnewssite.net/sports/fotball.php and recommend it to others by throwing a link on a forum simply by pasting the URL, the forum will automatically convert it into a link with the URL content as the link’s anchor text. If you use SEF URL:s with keywords, that link will help your Google ranking for that keyword.
2. The keyword may be bold in the search results
If the keyword is in the URL, it will appear in bold in the SERP, which increases the click rate.
3. Canonicalization and “duplicate content”
Most websites are produced with a CMS, and it is very common that CMS:es generates different URLs to the same content depending on where on the site the link appears. This is not good from an SEO perspective. Some would scare you with the “duplicate content” argument, but then again I say: use common sense. My thesis says that Google wants to present relevant content even if it is produced by a publishing tool that has some problems with URL canonization. Duplicate content is not the issue here. However, url canonization very important from another perspective: You do not want to spread the link juice on different URLs with the same content. So when you choose CMS (and web hosting), ensure that all URLs will be canonical, either out-of-the-box or using with rewrite plugin.
4. SEF URL:s makes it much easier to change CMS in the future
Using dynamic URLs makes it impossible, or at least extremely time consuming, to keep your search engine rankings for individual web pages on a large site if you would switch to another CMS in the future. You would need to create 301-redirects for each individual URL for your website to the corresponding URL generated by the new CMS. If you use SEF URLs, it is just a matter of making the same settings for SEF url generation on the new CMS.
5. SEF is user friendly
Some countries have a rule that public authorities must use “human readable” URLs on their websites to make them more user-friendly. Many people actually navigate “upward” a site structure by removing everything after the /category / in the address bar.
The term Search Engine Friendly URL is therefore obsolete. The purpose with SEF is not to be friendly to search engines. We can call them user-friendly URLs, simply friendly URLs, or semantic URLs. However, established terms tend to remain as they are.
Use this free tool to check the keyword density on individual pages of your website. Feel free to post comments on the result.
| Keyword Density Tool © SEO Chat™
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