Do you want to remove the meta tag “generator” from your Joomla site?  It’s very easy to do.


In this post I will show you how to do it with a plugin, and also how to do it with a single line of code.

Why do I want to remove it?

Ideally you do not want large amonts of unnecessary code in your website. You do not want to make it harder for Google and search engines to find what they need–you want to make it easier. Now I understand, this one line of code isn’t exactly a ton of bloat, but it all adds up over time. A bit of code here, an extra meta there, and all of a sudden you have a huge index file that takes ages to load. Keep things tidy.

Give me a plugin.  Code scares me.

By far the easiest way is to use the Joomla plugin ByeByeGenerator.  Install the plugin, enable it, verify the meta tag is removed in the source code and you are done.  Not only is the method the easiest, it will work for any version of Joomla.  1.5, 1.6, 1.7 & 2.5.  This method is also persistent, so if you change your templates a lot or do any updates, this plugin will always work and never get overridden.  But what if you are a purist?

I don’t want another plugin, just tell me how to do it manually

The method to removing the meta name generator tag for Joomla varies between versions.  On Joomla 2.5 you can simply add this code to your index.php file in your template.

JFactory::getDocument()->setGenerator('');

Put it just after the line //no direct access.  This method will vary greatly on what template you are using and from what company, so I cannot get too detailed.  For example YooThemes has a different template structure then RocketThemes.  You will have to noodle around a bit yourself in order to do this.  The main advantage of editing the template code instead of installing a plugin is less overhead.  The fewer plugins you have, the faster your site will be, and queries add up fast.

Conclusion

This is one of the few cases I’d suggest using a plugin over editing code.  This plugin totally removes the meta name generator tag, installs in no time at all and get’s the job done.  I use this plugin personally for the Joomla sites I build.  I heartily recommend it.

iJoomla Speed Check Module

Want to know how fast your site really is? Our new Speed Check module will tell you. Just install it into your Joomla site to see your page load time. It’s a quick, simple — and free — way to find out if your Joomla website is slow.

And you do need to know your site’s speed. Google recently announced that your Joomla loading speed will be a deciding factor in calculating your page rank.

You know that a high placement on search engines is absolutely essential to your website’s success. There’s little point in having a beautiful, well-designed website if nobody can find it.

And we’re dedicated to helping you reach the top of those placements. That was why we released iJoomla SEO, a tool that helps you optimize your website for search engines and monitor your keywords on Google. It’s been a huge success, helping thousands of Joomla website owners over the last couple of years save time and win better rankings on search engines.

We’ve now decided to allocate some of the profits from iJoomla SEO to develop free SEO tools for the Joomla community. This Speed Check module is our first.

Put Your Site Speed First

Site speed is often an afterthought in the development process. It needs to be front and center. Our new module allows you to stay on top of your site’s speed, so that if it’s too slow, you can do something about it.

And there’s always something you can do about it.

In “5 Ways to speed up Joomla and Make Your Site Faster,” our SEO expert Matt King has provided some invaluable tips to help you speed up and optimize your Joomla site. It will make a huge difference in how much love Google gives you.

Designed for Your Site

You can control the colors of every element of the module, including the border color, background color, text color and “provided by” color, to make them work with your site’s design.

If you prefer that your visitors won’t see the module, you can also select “special” as the access level. You’ll have to be logged in as admin on the front end to see your speed.

You can control every color in the module

How to use iJoomla Speed Check

1. Download it here
2. Unzip the file.
3. Choose a version (Joomla 1.5 or Joomla 1.6) and unzip that file again.
4. Install the module and plugin.
5. Publish the plugin.
6. Publish the module.

Why should I speed up Joomla?

Google recently announced that it uses your Joomla loading speed as a deciding factor on where your page ranks in the SERPS, (search engine results). Site speed has generally been more of an after thought to most people, but now it needs to be front and center in your development cycle. It’s pretty embarrassing having a terrific site, but having to wait 12 seconds for it to load. In this article we will discuss how to measure your Joomla speed and 5 tips on how to make it faster.

Measure your Joomla speed. Get a baseline

Make Joomla as fast as a bullet

There are lot’s of tools to measure your Joomla speed. Make sure you are consistent and use the same one throughout your testing.

• iJoomla now has a free module you can install in your Joomla site to instantly display your page load time. You can grab it here. It is free for anybody and a quick an simple way to find out if Joomla is slow.
• Another option is to add an additional line to your Google Analytics tracking code. You can find out more info about this here if you are comfortable with making this change.
• An option directly from Google is to use the page speed testing tool. Be warned though, it will use a lot of technical terms.
• Yet another option is to become familiar with the tools at Pingdom.com. They are a terrific website monitoring company that can provide you with all sorts of info about your site.

You may ask yourself, “Well how fast should my site load?” That’s a tough question to answer. Everybody will be different. If you use the Google pagespeed tool they will assign you a number. Take that number. Anywhere from 1-100, with 100 being the best. Strive to get as close to 90+ as possible.

1) Speed up Joomla by compressing your images better

One of the easiest things to do is make sure your images are optimized for the web properly. Avoid using huge, slow loading images. Optimize the size of the images you wish to use in Adobe Fireworks for the highest compression, with the least image degradation. Photoshop will work, but it is not the right tool for the job. Fireworks just compresses better. (Learn more about why Fireworks is a better option for image compression. )
Above all, never, NEVER, upload a 1200×1200 pixel image, and resize it using html or css. The huge full sized image will load, but just get resized on the fly by the server. Multiply that by a 100 or so visitors and your server is overloaded and about to go offline and of course turn your Joomla speed to mush.

Please make with the squishy-squishy for your images

2) Extensions, scripts, bloat

Joomla allows you to install an almost infinite amount of extensions and plugins and tools in seconds. The problem is all of these have been developed by individuals who may not share the same coding practices as the Joomla core team. One component might use jQuery 1.0 with is 19kb, one nifty gallery might use jQuery 1.5, but sends it to you uncompressed so it is 208kb, your forum might be using MooTools, (but not the one in Joomla) and thats another 180kb. Then some other wiz-bang of an extension has some .js that is 248kb. Before you know it you have 10 different types of frameworks being loaded on EACH PAGE LOAD. That is huge code bloat and will bring your server to it’s knees, as well as make page load times incredibly slow.
When installing a Joomla component you cannot always go for the fanciest or prettiest or nifty-ish, you need to factor in what javascript it uses as well. If you are clever, you can do all the cool things you need, and load only a small amount of .js and save yourself loads of headaches.
If anything, you need to decide if you really need that cool toy on your site, or if you simply put it there for eye candy. Ideally, keep the amount of .js to five and under. One is ideal.

ZOMG! javascript overload!

3) Compress, compress, compress

In your Joomla configuration there is a setting called gzip compression. If it is not enabled, click it and save it. This will allow all the css and html to be compressed on the server and a much smaller packet of data get’s sent to your computer, and then uncompressed by your browser. This might seem like a lot of work, but it will make pages load faster.
(some webhosts have this enabled already on their servers. If enabling this setting in Joomla breaks your site, the chances are good it is already being compressed and you can just change it back. It’s not possible to do multiple compressions with gzip.)

zip-zip-zipity-zip it.

4) Anybody got any extra cache?

Caching can be enabled in your Joomla configuration. It takes frequently accessed items and stores them so it can spit them out at you faster. The upside, your pages load faster, the downside, your content is not always 100% fresh. For most sites this is no huge deal, unless you are changing articles every 30 mts or so, and if you are you have other issues outside of the scope of this article.
Save this tip for when your site is completed and ready to go live. If you enable this while you are still building your site, you will wonder why changes to pages or image are not taking effect and drive yourself bonkers.

All the cache in the world.

5) Does your webhost stink?

An often overlooked issue with slow Joomla loading websites is a poor webhost. Are you on a shared server? If so you are sharing your internet connection with hundreds of other websites. Where is your host located? Are you located in Florida and your webhost is in California? Did one of the sites on your shared host get hacked and use up tons of bandwidth? These are all questions you need to ask yourself. Is the 4.99 cheapie hosting really good enough when your page load times are in the double digits? If you have a desire to be a big site, with lot’s of traffic, you need a VPS or a dedicated server. Shared hosting is for n00bs.

hey, is the server offline?

Summary

By following some of these tips, not only will Google potentially rank you higher in their search engine, your visitors will have a much nicer experience. Your dad/mom/sister/buddy/neighbor might not be bothered by waiting 10 seconds for your site to load, but the people on the web need it now, or they will take their business some place else.

How about you?

Do you have any tips or tricks I didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments, we would love to hear from you.

We’ve just released iJoomla SEO version 1.1.0 and many of the improvements it contains are down to you. As you know, we monitor user suggestions on our forum very closely and tackle a different extension each time. The latest version of iJoomla SEO is packed with suggestions raised by users:

• Choose your Google site. Now you can choose the Google site you use to monitor keywords. Just go to the settings page and replace the .com extension with any other Google extension.

• Extensions metatags sync. Previous versions of iJoomla SEO retained different metatag entries in supported extensions. Now those entries sync. When you upgrade, you will be asked to choose the metatags you want to keep.

• Categories for internal links and redirects. Now that you can place the internal links and redirects in different categories, we’ve also added a search box and a filter by category.

• More supported extensions. By popular demand, we’ve added support to more extensions, including Zoo by YooJoomla and WordPress by corePHP.

As always, your upgrades are free! So get your copy now and enjoy these great new features!

The new features of iJoomla SEO version 1.1.0

How to upgrade iJoomla SEO

1. Download iJoomla SEO
2. No need to unzip the file
3. No need to uninstall previous version
4. Go to extensions->install/uninstall and install the zip file there

Don’t have iJoomla SEO yet? Buy it here

As you know, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most cost-effective way to get more traffic to your site. A finely-tuned, search engine-optimized site can do wonders for your visibility — and your bank account!

That’s why we created our newest component. iJoomla SEO makes search engine optimization easy and effective. It even makes it fun. We want to help you and your SEO efforts succeed!

Managing your metatags and monitoring your keywords with the iJoomla SEO component though are not the only ways to build your Google love. There are a number of other important strategies that can help you rank higher on Google. In particular, your site should be fast, accessible and table-free!

And that’s where are our friends at Joomlashack can help. They offer templates that are not only beautiful, but also SEO-friendly. Because there’s no point in having a slick site if no one ever sees it, is there?

JoomlaShack templates have several critical SEO features:

• The super-light code framework makes for fast loading!
• The powerful grid framework is easy for search engines to read.
• The logo image replacement produces SEO-readable text read instead of an image.

Get JoomlaShack templates for a discount:

These are templates that look great to readers and are loved by search engines. The coolest part? We persuaded Joomlashack to let us give you a BIG discount! Enter the promo code “ijoomlaseo” and you’ll get 15% off JoomlaShack’s templates now.

Visit JoomlaShack >>

Due to popular demand, we’ve decided to add meta tag support to K2, the popular extension by JoomlaWorks.gr, to our iJoomla SEO.  So now, you will be able to edit all your K2 meta tags in one place, easily. This feature will be available in the next version of iJoomla SEO, coming in mid July 2009, stay tuned!

Here’s a video that describes what are the new features that we’ve added to the upcoming version of iJoomla SEO. As you will be able to see, this new version is MUCH more robust, and allows you to monitor your keywords placement on Google, identify problematic pages on your site and fix them easily and create internal and external automatic links. These new features make iJoomla SEO a very complete solution for optimizing your Joomla site for Search Engines.

SEO may sound complicated and expensive, but there are a number of things you can do to improve your search engine ranking that won’t have you spending a dime or tearing your hair out. Our friends at Alledia.com have put together a list — just for iJoomla’s newsletter subscribers — of the 10 simplest SEO tips and tricks for Joomla sites.

Alledia.com really are experts at SEO for Joomla, so when they talk search engines, we listen. 

1) Don’t install any sample data when you set up a Joomla! site.

When you launch your Joomla! Site, it’s very easy to forget to delete all the demo articles that come with it. That will give you pages, links and newsfeeds that are irrelevant to your topic. Delete your sample data and don’t forget to empty your trash as well!

2) Your Site Name should be your site’s name.

There can be a temptation to cram as many keywords as possible into the “Site Name” field. It doesn’t help and when users register at your site, they get an email saying “Welcome to Widgets, Buy Widgets, Cheap Widgets, Bargain Widgets!” You don’t want that.

3) Turn off your PDF links.

When we analyze Joomla! Sites, we often find PDFs ranking higher than the original pages. Because PDF pages have no menu links, they’re a dead-end. Users can’t move from the PDF to the rest of your site. So turn off those links.

4) Don’t waste your site’s link juice with lots of social bookmarking links.

Lets face it, very few pages have a chance to hit the Digg home page or do well on Reddit, so only place those buttons on your best articles. Your visitors appreciate clean, uncluttered pages — and so do search engines.

5) Redirect the www and non-www versions of your site to the same place.

All you need to do is add this little piece of code to your .htaccess file. Note: Replace MyDomain with your domain name and .com with your domain extension.

6) Turn on your cache.

Search in Google and you’ll see a size for each site. Smaller, faster sites are more popular with visitors and with Google. One easy way to make your site act small and load faster is to turn on your cache in Global Configuration.

7) Enter a full description for all your sections and categories.

These pages are great for organizing your site… and for improving Page Rank. If you organize your sections and categories carefully, your site becomes very easy for both people and search-engine spiders to navigate.

Less is often more

Having thousands of Joomla! pages indexed in Google isn’t always a good thing, especially if those pages don’t bring value. Some components, for example, can produce lots of extra pages that are completely worthless. One easy way to check if your site is putting garbage on Google is to search for site:mydomain.com. If you find pages that don’t have good content, you might want to remove them.

9) Empty your global configuration metadata.

I’m sure you’re all big fans of Joomla!, but I’m equally sure that “Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system” doesn’t describe your site. Take it out.

10) Be confident.

Joomla! is fantastic software that allows you to easily create lots of high quality pages that are great for your SEO. If you keep a close eye on your site and take the time to learn how Joomla! works, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have top-flight search engine rankings!

Need more SEO advice?