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If you use Google Analytics to track your site visitors, you have probably seen the keyword “Not Provided” in your search keywords. This keyword indicates, that the user who have used Google to search and have found your site, have used the HTTPS-protocol to search in Google. That includes all people who are logged into a Google profile (Gmail, Google+, Google Calendar etc.), where you automatically use the HTTPS-protocol.

The reason that Google decided to hide the real keyword, is because when you use the HTTPS-protocol, you have the right not to be tracked by the websites you visit, if you use Google’s products.

The disadvantage with this, is that website owners lose a lot of data from their visitors – data that can optimize the website more to the visitors. It is not personal data that the website owners lose, only which keyword the visitor used when they found the website.

The prevalence of the Non Provided keyword in Google Analytics is very different from website to website. If you have a lot of visitors from Google Plus, your prevalence of Non Provided will also be larger.

The status of the prevalence of this website Andersen’s IT blog.com is currently 70%. I would like to hear how much your Not Provided Prevalence is? Please choose the interval that your prevalence is in, in the poll below and then share this site with your social networks, so they can vote also. This might give an idea of how big a part of search keywords Not Provided really is.

[widgets_on_pages id=”Please vote”]

This is a simple guide that will show how to install SP Share, a social sharing plugin for Joomla, activate it and get it to work. The guide is an answer to a question I got in a Joomla discussion board.

Social sharing is a must have on all websites, because it gives the website a higher SEO value and in the future possible a higher author rank. So if you want to see your article in the top of Search Engine Result Page (SERP) of Google, you have to implement Social sharing. This will also lead to more visitors. When you read an article on the internet, that you like, you can also thank them for the article by sharing it, so it will get more visitors.

SP Share is a very simple, flexible social sharing plugin for Joomla, that I can recommend you to use. It supports very many social sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Digg, LinkedIn etc. It supports both Joomla 2.5 and 3.0.

 

Install SP Share

1. First download SP Share from here.
2. Open Backend (Administration) in your Joomla installation.
3. From the menu choose Extensions and then Extensions Manager.
4. Now press “Choose File” and navigate to the downloaded Zip-file.
5. Press “Upload and Install.

Activate SP Share

Now you need to activate SP share, because this is not done by default.

1. Make sure you are still in Joomla Backend. 
2. In the menu, choose Extensions and then Plugin Manager.
3. In the search field, search for “Content – SP Share”.
4. Press the red cross so it becomes green (published).

Show the plugin in articles

At last you need to setup SP Share, so it is showed in articles.

1. Press the link “Content – SP Share”.
2. Choose the tab “Basic options”
3. Under categories, choose all categories or the categories where you wish the plugin to be showed.

After this the plugin should work perfectly. If you could use the help from this article, I would be very happy if you shared the article with your social networks.

In Joomla Backend there is a list with the 5 most popular Joomla articles, that will give you a quick overview on the most popular articles on your Joomla site. But what if you want to show more than 5 articles? This article gives you the solution.

So the problem is that I want to show more than 5 popular articles.

The solution

The solution to the problem is actually very simple. The Top 5 Popular Articles is actually a module, just like many other modules in Joomla. So you can edit the module, by first going to the backend and then choose Extensions and Module Manager.

Now in the first drop down menu, you should change from only showing Site modules to show Administration modules:

 

Then you are going to search for the module that represents the Top 5 most popular articles. So just type “Popular” in the search felt and click enter or Search.

 

Then click on the link of the module: Popular articles and you are now ready to edit the settings of the module.

Under Basic Options, you can now set the field Count to the number of articles you wish to show in the Top list. In the example below I have changed it to 10 articles.

 

At last, just click Save and Close to save the setting. Now the Top list should show 10 articles instead of 5.

So now you have a Top 10 most popular articles instead of a Top 5 list.You can also change the other two Top lists: “Last 5 logged-in users” and “Last 5 Added articles”. You do that by editing the modules “Logged-in Users” and “Recently Added Articles”.

If you are using Joomla for your websites, one of the disadvantages is the article system in Joomla. I recommend you to install the free K2 extension for Joomla, which will give you an excellent article writing system for Joomla. This extensions don’t only solve all the problems with Joomla’s own article system but also provide you with a lot of build-in features that belongs to every website.

Category and article settings

If you are using Joomla’s own build-in article system, you might have noticed that it has some problems controlling which elements should be showed in the article. E.g. you can both choose weither you should show or hide author name in the menu settings, article setting and in the single article settings. So you might choose in the single article settings, that you wish to hide the author name but choose to show it in the menu settings and then have difficulties in changing the settings of articles in Joomla. Here K2 has a very great setting setup. You just choose to inherit the article settings for a category from another category. In this way, if you change the category settings from that category you also change it in all other categories. This makes it very easy to change article and category view settings.

SEF-friendly URL’s

K2 is also very good for Search Engine Friendly URL’s (SEF URL’s). If you have enabled the build-in SEF-URL in Joomla, your URL address might look like:

http://my-site.com/3-my-cat/1-my-article

But you don’t get rid of these category ID and article ID in the URL. With K2 you can. Just go to the main K2 settings and choose to hide the category ID and article ID under the tab “Advanced”. In this way you will get a URL like:

http://my-site.com/my-cat/my-article

Using this setup you don’t need an extension specific for changing your SEF URL’s in Joomla.

Author box

K2 include a great authorbox. Just edit each user in the K2 settings and choose to show the author box. However, the extension miss the option to show social links, like links to Google+, Facebook or Twitter – this might come in the future.

Comment system

K2 has its own great commenting system, which makes it possible for users to comment on your articles. Very important for engaging your users on the site.

Social sharing

Although K2 does not provide social links in the author box, it does provide social sharing for Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Ranking with stars

K2 also provide a system for ranking the article with stars.

I can then also recommend you to install Rich Snippets Vote extension for Joomla, which will show the stars from the ranking in Googles Search Engine Result Page (SERP):

Related articles

K2 will also give you a list of related articles in the bottom of each articles.

Download K2

So K2 provides you not only with a easy setup, nice design and a lot of great features. I can very much recommend this extension and it should be a part of every Joomla installation. It is completely free and also supports Joomla 3. 

Download and install K2 for free from here

You might also want to read my article about the best Joomla 3 extensions.

Joomla is currently both available in a 2.5 version and a 3.0 version. The reason for that is that Joomla 3 still have some bugs, that should not disturb all Joomla websites around the internet. So Joomla offers to versions – version 2.5 that is well-known for most webmasters and stable and version 3 that is new and fancy, but has a few bugs.

One big disadvantage of using Joomla 3 already now, is that not so many themes and extensions yet support that version. In this article I have listed some of the best Joomla 3 supported extensions, that you can download. All of them are available for free.

JCE – content editor

The default editor that you use, when you write articles is simple and support the most important features. But if you want to edit with more features (e.g. text color), then you should consider installing JCE (Joomla Content Editor). This is a very popular editor for Joomla and it is completely free.

 

You can download JCE from here.

BT smart search

Don’t you like the default search module for Joomla. BT smart search deliveres a more pretty search result page and allows you to index your site.

Another reason for using BT smart search, is that the default Joomla 3 search module might not fit perfectly into the default Joomla 3 theme (the text field has too big width).

You can download BT smart search for free here.

SP Share

On any website, it should be possible to share the article to minimum Facebook, Twitter and Google+. SP Share gives you buttons to do this for a lot of different social networks. It also looks pretty, when the buttons is viewed on your website.

Download for free here.

Modules anywhere

With Modules anywhere, you can insert a module into any article. That could be a list of other articles, share buttons and customize your pages on your Joomla 3 site.

Download here.

Nice Google Analytics

If you are using Google Analytics for the statistics of your website, the easiest way to insert the tracking code into Joomla, is by installing Nice Google Analytics, that will let you insert the code very easy.

Download it for free here.

Community builder

Do you wish to build a more advanced community, than is default for Joomlas user system? Then you should take a look on Community builder, that gives more advanced profiles.

See more about it here.

Xmap

With Xmap you can automatically create a Sitemap for your website, that is supported by Google. Just install the extension and add the sitemap URL for Google Webmaster.

Download here.

K2

K2 is a free article writing extension that is essential for all Joomla installations. It also provide you with a social sharing feature, author box, rating etc.

Read my article about K2 here
Download K2 here.

Akeeba Backup

A great backup service for your Joomla site. With this extension you can take a complete backup of your site including the database.

Download here.

These where some of the Joomla 3 extensions that I currently use. I still need some extensions that has the following features:

• A download extention: That supports a download section where users must be logged in to download files. I have previously used Phoca Downloads, but this is not yet supported by Joomla 3.
• A favicon extention: That puts a Favicon on your website. I have previously used Phoca Favicon, but this is not yet supported by Joomla 3.
• A SEO extentions: Like WordPress SEO by Yoast. I have not yet seen any extention for Joomla, that can do the same for Joomla, that WordPress SEO by Yoast did for WordPress.
• A discussion board extention: Like Kunena. Kunena is unfortunately not supported in Joomla 3 yet.

If you know any extentions that has these features and supports Joomla 3, please let me know. Can you recommend any Joomla extentions.

Have you tried to install Joomla 3 and then having problems inserting images in articles and pages? One reason for such a mistake, is if magic quotes is set to On in the PHP settings.   In this article I will try to explain the problem and how to solve it.

Description of the problem

The problem is that when you upload images and insert them into Joomla 3 articles (or pages), the code  " is added to the HTML code of the images. Actually  " is added every time you insert a HTML code containing the character “, which almost all HTML contains.

Reason for the problem

The reason why this happens is that the PHP setting magic quotes is turned On. It is a setting for PHP, that was originally developed to prevent beginners of entering bad code. So some characters (“, ‘, and NULL) was replaced with a . However this setting caused more problems for users of PHP, than it solved problems. So it is removed from the future PHP version 6.

So since there is no good reason to keep magic quotes turned on, you should turn it off.

Is magic quotes turned On at my Joomla installation?

If you want to see, if magic quotes is turned On or Off on your Joomla Installation, just login to the administration backend. Then choose “System” in the top menu and then “System information”. Then finally choose the tab “PHP setting” and you will find the status of magic quotes on the list that appears. If it is set to On, that might be the reason why you have the problem.

How to solve the problem with a PHP.INI file

One way to solve the problem is to add  the following line to your PHP.INI file of your root folder and your administrator folder:

magic_quotes_gpc = Off
session.save_path = “/tmp”

If you don’t already have a PHP.INI file you can create it. Unfortunately, not all hosts allow to create your own PHP.INI file and if you try, it wont work. In this case you should solve the problems in a .HTACCESS file.

How to solve the problem with a .HTACCESS file

If you cannot solve the problem with a PHP.INI file, you can solve it in a .HTACCESS file. The .HTACCESS file is placed in your root folder. If there is no .HTACCESS file, you can either create a new one or rename the file HTACCESS.txt to .HTACCESS (Not .HTACCESS.txt). Then you can add the following line:

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc 0

This should work. Check if Magic quotes is turned off, by going to PHP settings in System -> System informations -> PHP settings in backend of your Joomla installation. At the list, Magic quotes should now be turned off.

I hope this solved your problem. If not you are welcome to write a comment about your problem.

Google has started to update Google Pagerank for websites in February 2013. The values are usually updated four times a year, last time in November 2012.

How is Google Pagerank determined?

Google Pagerank (Google PR) is a very important ranking factor, that determines the place of your website in Google’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP). The algorithm that determine the Google Pagerank is unknown (except Google), but we know some of the factors, especially:

• How many websites link to you?
• What Pagerank does the websites that links to you have?

Many people interprets Google PR as a vote, that is divided into peaces when you link to other websites, and then contributing to their websites Google PR. This means that your Google PR is constructed from all the votes the other websites has given your website.

The Google PR scale is believed to be logarithmic, which means that is easier to go from Google PR 0 to 1, than from 9 to 10.

Why is my Google Pagerank not increased?

If you wonder why your Google PR did not increase, the answer is propably because your link profile has not been improved. If you want to improve your link profile, you have to do some linkbuilding – see an article about linkbuilding here.

Next Google Pagerank update in 2013

The next Google Pagerank update in 2013 is expected to be:

• Ultimo June 2013 or primo July 2013
• Ultimo September 2013 or primo Oktober 2013
• Ultimo december 2013

How was the result of the recent Google Pagerank update for your websites? Did it increase or decrease your Pagerank? You are welcome to share your answer in a comments.

 

 

Outsourcing content writing, is when you pay other people to write high-quality content for your website. You could also call it external content writing. The benefit of doing it, is that you don’t have to spend the time researching and writing the articles yourself, you just describe what the article should be about and then freelance writers write it for you.

Maybe you have a lot of websites, e.g. if you are working with affiliate marketing. Then you probably don’t have the time to write all that content that all your websites requires. Instead you can go to a content writing service, i.e. Freelance-writers.net, where you can order articles written directly for your website. By using outsourced content writing, you can start up many more sites and then earn more money with affiliate marketing.

The price of the article may vary much, depending on which site you ordered the article on, the quality level of the site, the experience of the writer and what the article is about. At Freelance-writers.net, you pay per word the article should contain. The prices is from $15 per 500 words or $0.03 per word.

The benefit of using a content writing service is that it is easy and the price is low. The disadvantage is that you never know who the writer is and what quality the article will be about. You only do this by using some you know a little better and that you can have a more directly communication with. It is therefore a good idea to slowly find more permanently writers that you know, if you want to keep using outsourced content writing.

You can either find individual writers by contacting some of the authors from content writing services, that you like. Or you can search for individual freelance writers on the internet, and maybe see some of their work before you try to use them. E.g. I have a outsourced content writing service you can use, if you want an author that both thinks of quality and know something about SEO values of article, which is also important for a content writer, because it may give you more visitors and a higher rank in search result pages. My prices starts from $0.05 per word, but then I also guarantee you high-quality writing.

If you have decided if you want to use a content writing service or an individual content writer, you should contact the writer and provide him with a description of the article you want, what should it be about, what keywords should it be optimized for, how long should the article be and what is the deadline.

With outsourced content writing, you pay for the content but also get the full rights of the content. This means that you can also publish it and call it your own article. But it is important to make sure with the content writing service or individual content writer, whether you really are getting the full rights. You shouldn’t pay for articles, where you don’t get the full rights.

I recommend you to only order articles that are 500 words or more. This is because this increase the SEO value of the article. In old days, it didn’t matter how long the article was, as long as the article contained a lot of important keywords. Today only long articles is seen as high-quality articles and only with not to many keywords.

At last don’t go for the articles that are too cheap. There are a lot of indian individuals and content writing services, that are willing to sell you articles $0.5 per 100 words or $0.005 per word – but they are not worth it. Pay at least $3 per 100 words to get high-quality content – they are worth it.

I hope this article introduced you to what outsourced content writing was and what you should think about if you use it. I would like to hear some of your experience with using outsourced content writing, if you will write it in the comments.

If you need high-quality, outsourced content writing, don’t hesitate to contact me on my site where I sell content writing service.

Social networks is one of the most important channels to market your website and your products. Get some tips and tricks to how you can get more followers on the most popular social sites: Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

But why is it so important to use Social networks if you want to market your website? Because it has many active users with all kinds of interests. Because it is easy and cheap to do it. And because it is important for the SEO value of your website.

Facebook

Facebook is the biggest social networks – it has over 1 billion active users worldwide each month. Almost everyone have a Facebook profile, so this is an important place to market your website. The social network is used for almost all kind of sharing, but especially personal sharing happens here.

There are many ways to market your articles and website on Facebook. Some ideas is:

• Make a Facebook page for your website or company. Then try to attract followers to this page, e.g. by sharing the page on your personal Facebook wall or link to your Facebook page on your website.
• Put a Facebook like or Facebook share button on your website. This will make it easier for visitors to share your content on their Facebook profile.

But how can you get more people to like your Facebook site or your website?

• Write high-quality and unique content on your website, that is content people wants to share.
• Write on your website, that if visitors wants to discover new content on your site fast, they have to like your website.
• Make a content, where people can win a price if they like your website or Facebook page.

Twitter

Twitter is also a very big social network – it has 500 millions users. On Twitter you can only share a very short message and a link to your content. So here it is important to be precise in your message and really attract people to this message, so they want to click to your website.

You can also make a Twitter profile especially for your website or company.  Then you should focus on getting followers for this Twitter profile, because these followers will get all your tweets about new content on your site. Some ideas on how you can get more followers on Twitter is:

• Get active on Twitter: Re-tweet others content, especially content that looks a lot like your own content, because this will attract your goal visitors.
• Follow others: Many times when you follow someone, they follow you back. Especially if you follow other people in the same business as you, because they are interested in the same things as you.

Google+

Google+ is one of the most growing social networks at the moment, and you should definitely not ignore this network. Why? Because it is one of the most growing social networks. Because it is the social networks that is Facebook’s biggest competitor. Because it is owned by Google.

Google+ was launched in June, 2011, and from the start it almost exploded in the number of users. There was only one problem: there were no activity. No one used Google+ to share what they was doing and no one planned parties from Google+ because they used Facebook to do this.

Since then, many things has changed on Google+. I still don’t see many people share their private things on Facebook. But I see one thing that has evolved very much, since the start of Google+. And that is networking. Not private networking as on Facebook, colleague networking like on LinkedIn or quick messages like on Twitter. But real professional networking, where you can meet new people that has the same interests like you and can start up discussions with people. Especially after Google+ launched their communities, there has been started many discussions and done networking on Google+.

But how can you use Google+ to market your website or company. Just like on Facebook, build a Google+ site, a special profile where you can market your products directly out to people that follows your site. But how can you then market your Google+ site?:

• Get more followers to your personal Google+ profile. Then share your posts from your Google+ site to your personal site.
• Attend in many communities about the same topic your website is about. Then share your posts from your Google+ personal profile (the post you shared from your Google+ site) to this community. By first sharing from your site, then to your profile and then to the community, you bring a link to both your personal profile and your Google+ site in all your community posts, so this will lead to more followers.

How can you get more followers to your Google+ profile?

• Follow others. Many times when you follow others, they will follow you back. This is an easy trick to get new followers. Especially follow people with same interests as you, because these will also be interested in your posts.
• Be active. Comment on others posts, click +1 to others posts, share others posts, create your own posts, share links from the internet and +1 things from internet.
• Attend in communities  Communities is a very powerful way to meat new people with same interests as you, so you should take advantage of this.

How you should NOT do!!!

Never, ever buy followers. There are a lot of websites that offer to get you followers for your Twitter profile or Google+ profile. Many of them also do, but they will disappear quickly again or not be active. Some of them might be users only created to cheat you. So don’t buy followers.

And don’t buy Facebook groups with 20.000 likes from someone, where you hope to market your products or website through. As soon as the users discovers that you wasn’t the one that created the group, they will disappear.

Last, but not least, when you are active on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – never make SPAM posts. Make posts that interest people. These have the strongest power and will be shared and liked/+1 mostly. And if you want to post a link to your article from Google+ communities  then read the instruction of the particular community – some communities don’t allow you to link to your article, and they will delete the link and block you.

These were just a few of my ideas to how you can get more likes on Facebook and more followers on Twitter and Google+. Do you have some ideas I can add to this list, then please write a comment.

Recently Google+ announced Google+ communities, which gave members great opportunities to discuss a lot of issues in high quality communities and meet a lot of new Google+ users.

But one annoying thing about the communities was, that when you wrote a post in a community, the post was also showed in your public stream and on your profile. So if you have more communities that you wrote the same post to, the same post would show up in your profile several times. And something you thought was only a discussion between you and the community, was published to your public stream. A lot of Google+ users found this annoying.

So finally Google announced that they have made a new option for hiding your community posts from the public stream. A great new setting on Google+. If you want to hide your community posts from the public stream and profile, just do this:

1. Go to your settings – https://www.google.com/settings/plus.
2. Find the paragraph called “Communities”
   
3. Uncheck  the setting “Show your Google+ communities posts on the Posts tab of your Google+ profile”.
4. Now your Google+ community posts will not show up on your profile or public stream.

Generally, if this setting is checked (which it is by default), your Google+ community posts will show up in your public stream, if the community is Public – not if it is Private.

If you have unchecked this setting and want to share your community post with your public stream, you can still share the post in manually in the regular way.

I hope you can use this little tip. You can also follow me on Google+.