5 ways to make your Joomla site look more professional than others:

1. Create a new favicon.ico. Yes, the default black Joomla logo is pretty, but people bookmarking your site they need to see a icon that identifies your site rather than Joomla or others using Joomla default icon. If you don't want to design on a 16x16 pixels scale, there are sites that will generate a favicon for you. Then upload it to /template/<your_template_name>/favicon.ico
2. Make sure you backup your database everyday. We recommend the JoomlaPack - AJAX powered backup and restore
3. Don't cut and paste from Microsoft Word. It may be easy but MS Word produces some of the worst HTML ever. Cut and paste into a text editor such as Notepad or PSPAD before adding that content to your site.
4. Make sure you put the Search button in an observable position. A search of the latest 20 sites on the Joomla forums showcase reveals that more than half doesn’t have a clearly visible search button.  Low on the left or right hand column is not good places. Try and put it close to the menu so that people's eyes are logically drawn to it.
5. Utilize "Read More". Lots of visitors will never get past your homepage. Make sure that your homepage is not a long text area and start creating some "tease" –short content. In general, articles should not be longer than 4 or 5 sentences, followed by a "Read More..." link.

5 ways to improve your site via your Global Configuration file:

1. Content >> Unpublish the PDF and Print options. These generate duplicate content problems in Google and may delay your SEO success.
2. Server >> Use Server Defaults. Setting this to 777 or 775 creates a big security hole on your site.
3. Metadata. Don't overload here. Keep it to a maximum of 6 description words and keywords. These will show on every page and you want to allow each page to have its own keywords.
4. Cache. Turn cache on from Global Configureation-> System. Your site will run faster. The cache function saves copies of the web page as file so that users don't have to load your whole page and make many database connections every time they visit.
5. Statistics. Turn them off! They'll slow your site performance down. Go and get Google Analytics instead. Click here to see how to insert Google analytics to your joomla site.