If you are a website developer and you have a Joomla website, one of things that you want for your website is to be visited. You want the contents of your site to be read, you want to generate website traffic. The traffic is the number people that are visiting your website measured by the number of clicks to your site, website hits and website visits.

Today, it is a constant battle between websites to be read and visited. The more traffic you generate, the more popular your website is, and the more money you make. According to a survey done by Forrester Research back in 2006, search engines lead 81% of consumer and potential customers to websites. Now, in 2008, people seem to rely more on websites and have grown too lazy to go to a mall even for the smallest purchases.

Famous search websites such as Yahoo, Google, MSN, and AOL employ the help of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) service providers to be sure of their websites are of superior visibility and will always be at the top of list in search engine results. Professional Search Engine Optimization and search engine marketing companies worldwide keep on conducting studies and researches to boost traffic for many websites. Search Engine Optimization in itself is one of the fundamental parts of an online marketing strategy. The goal here is to make the most out of search engines. Studies show that keyword related marketing contributes to an average of 80%-90% percent of a website’s overall traffic. It is very important that a website tries to improve its search engine optimization. But how does a website go about generating web traffic thru search engines?

Joomla site success is about content and keyword. And you can improve on this area by creating more and more content on your website. If for instance a user searches for “watches”, you are halfway in winning the race if you can appear on the web search results, and this can be possible by having articles and content with the word watches or anything about watches in your website. The key here is having diversity and a huge number of articles for web content. A good vocabulary can help when it comes to writing articles. The more words you use the more chances that you can end up at the top of the list of the next search engine search.

After clicking, you also need to make the visitor of your website stay on your page. By clicking more links that can be found within your website (links that will read to further reading of an articles, more contents to read, etc) you can get more points and boost on the site on the site traffic.

Indeed, the marketing of Joomla sites thru the use of search engines can give a strong and powerful competitive edge over several competitors. And of course, good traffic for the website is never a bad news for a Joomla site developer. A large amount of site visitors is a very clear indicator that you are making the most of your site, optimizing it, and the best thing of all – bringing in more money.

This is a common fact that the site that you develop to promote your online business should be a search engine friendly one as this is the only way to generate organic traffic for the site without spending extra money on advertising. Now if you feel that in order to make a site perfectly search engine friendly you just need to create keyword rich content or use the other common tricks then you are wrong.

Though they are quite important when it comes to traffic generation, still if you can use the search engine friendly urls in the sites it would be great from the perspective of both you and the search engines. Now this is quite popular now-a-days to design your website with Joomla which is a series of scripts written in PHP programming language. This is possible to use the SEF urls in the Joomla sites.

Understanding the requirement of using SEF urls in the Joomla sites, the makers have updated the Joomla version and they have also developed some tools to turn on the settings. In the Global configuration you have to execute few steps. First of all you need to install the Joomla to the system. Then you have to set the option of “SEF urls” on and then save it in the system.

Then add the “Suffix” to the urls and again save it. The fourth step would be turning on the “Use Apache mod_rewrite” option and saving it in the system. If you are looking forward to make the site absolutely perfect from the Seo point of view then the first two steps mentioned above are important wherein the last two are optional.

In fact if there is no such compulsion you not really need to perform the last two steps in most of the cases. The reason is that not performing these will not affect the search engine ranking much.

Now that you have got an idea about using the SEF urls in the Joomla site you should understand the reason and impact of it. We all know that whenever a search is performed by a user the search engine spiders crawl through the web and find out which website is most relevant to the searched keywords.

Depending upon the relevancy they index the sites in the result pages. Now the usage of the SEF urls will make the most important keywords describing your site to appear on the URL section. This will definitely impress the search engines and they will feel that this is the most relevant page for their visitor.

Hence they will not take much time to index your site to the initial pages. This is the reason why many people are taking keen interest in putting the SEF urls to their Joomla sites. The makers of the software also understand the fact clearly. And keeping this in mind they have designed the option of using the Sets in the Joomla sites.

Joomla is one of the most popular software which allows you to design the websites, create templates and prepare the CMS systems for the websites. This is basically a series of PHP scripts that allow you to develop your website. The templates that can be designed with the installed Joomla are often ready to add a lot of magnitude to the website.

It completely depends on you how you would like to see the website. If this is a retail or shopping website then you can add the features like shopping carts, product details and reviews. The rich look of the site can be obtained suing the shadow and brightness effect. Then there are options like using the simple styles where you have a lighting effect all over the site especially on the layout and also opt for the slide show option.

The CMS system can be designed with Joomla and this is always very efficient in handling the important files of the websites. It allows the users to edit or create content and also manage the image and audio files of the website. The security measures, plugins etc are other essential features of Joomla that can make your website just perfect from all aspects.

The first step towards using the Joomla for the development of your website is to install it in the system. Once the Joomla installation is done you are free to design the required areas. There are two types of Joomla installations. You can either opt for the default installation or do it manually.

The installation guidebook for the manual installation of Joomla contains quite a number of important features. The initial part will definitely contain the title and details of acknowledgements. Then it will tell you about the minimum features which you must have in your system to develop a website with this software.

Then it will help you out with the options of remote as well as local hosting. The password is another important fact that the installation manual talks about. In case of any sorts of errors you will have to refer to the CHMOD 777 components which will allow you to install the matter in your system without any mistake.

Finally you will have to check whether the installation is complete. When there are errors, you will have to wait till the installation is complete then create a different file that should be uploaded in the system.

You can download the manual for Joomla installation from the websites which specialize in free Joomla applications.  Fantastico is also another option that can prove to be quite helpful in web hosting. In order to install the Joomla application you need to use the web services.

There are quite a number of parameters which you will have to maintain while installing Joomla to your system. As these options are easily available on the web you are free to select this service from any of the resources that you fell is convenient for you and make sure you are following the instructions accurately.