Getting a new website found is increasingly difficult. Competition is fierce. It's a lot like playing pool in that it's more about finesse than brute force.

I don't offer search engine optimization (SEO) as a paid service. It's important for me to be really good at one thing and Joomla is it. HOWEVER! I am pretty good at SEO. My own site comes up #3 out of 11.5 million results if you Google "joomla web design". I will tell you this was no easy task and it took a long time. If you are willing and dedicate the time, effort and a little money, I'll tell you everything I know about how to get your site up in the search results.

A reliable web host is as elusive as the Loch Ness monster. In the six years Montano Designs has been creating web site and had a web site of our own, we've been through 10 COUNT 'EM 10! web hosts. We started out with Go Daddy back when you got one of the owner's sons on the phone if you called tech support. Like so many business that grow too fast, their support suffered and we moved on.

We've tried most of the major web hosts and some little guys. Here's the problem: The big guys offer loads of data storage and bandwidth for a low, low price in a shared environment. They fill up their servers with some legitimate customers and a few rogues. These rogues do nasty things on their sites like spamming, flooding, and all sorts of things that bog down the server. All of the sudden your site gets slow and you don't know why.

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on your web page compared to the total number of words measured in percentage. Keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase in the world of search engine optimization.

There's the long way and the short way to move your Joomla site.  This Joomla! tip of the week will focus on the short way.  If your web host offers cpanel with file manager you're good to go.

1. Log into cpanel on your old host and select file manager.
2. Create an archive of the files you want to move.  If your site is in a sub-directory, open that directory first then select all. This will save you a step later.
3. Download this archived file to your hard drive.
4. Go back to cpanel and open phpMyAdmin.
5. Select your database from the list and click export.
6. Save as file should be ticked.
7. Download this file too.
8. Go to your new hosts cpanel open MySQL databases and create a new empty database.
9. Don't forget to add a user to that database.
10. Back to Cpanel and open up phpMyAdmin.
11. Select the database from the list.
12. Click import and import the sql file you saved from your old host.
13. FTP the archive file over to the new host.
14. Back to cpanel and open up File manager.
15. Extract your archived file.
16. Open up your old configuration.php file in Dreamweaver or some html editor.
17. Change db name, db user, db password to reflect the new information, and the two absolute path references to the new hosts path.
18. Upload changed configuration file to the new server.
19. TADA!

To forum or not to forum, that is the question.  Many, many of my clients tell me they want a forum on their website.  Not a problem!  There are some great components out there for Joomla that make it very easy to start a forum on your site.  I personally like Fireboard, but there's a new up-and-coming forum called Simplest Forum. I like simple stuff.

Here's the dilemma: Do you have the time and manpower to maintain the forum?  Do you have a large enough audience to make your forum interesting?  Are your topics of interest?  Because you build it doesn't mean they'll come.

I've run my own forums in the past and I'll tell you the truth, they are a royal pain to maintain.  Pardon the rhyme. Spammers are so sophisticated these days they have programs that crawl the web looking for free places they can post their adds for drugs, websites of ill repute and the like.  When you run a forum you need to keep it cleaned up.  You're visitors get enough of this junk in their email boxes and don't want to see it on forums.

Flame wars, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Dread) and Trolls.  Sounds a bit like Lord of the Rings doesn't it?  These are people with nothing better to do than cause trouble on forums.  You have to make allowances for freedom of speech, simultaneously reining in the trolls.  If your forum becomes acrimonious people will stop coming.

Forums are a great way to get people to your site.  A by-product of an interesting  forum is people will visit your other pages.  You can also earn money from sponsored ads and increase your page rank by having people link to your forum.  The bottom line is forums are work with reward.  You have to make the call to determine if you have what it takes to maintain it.