Posts Tagged ‘Functional Web’

From Pc to Web Server in 5 Minutes

Sunday, February 8th, 2009



There are times when you either don’t have a web host or you don’t want to mess up your live site but you need to play around with your website. We show you how to turn your PC into a fully functional web and database server – all in less than 5 minutes!

Any web server which is going to host dynamic, database driven websites needs three things – the web server itself, a scripting language and a database server.

For our web server we’re going to be using Apache – the web server that powers a huge percentage of the web.

Secondly for our scripting language we’re going to use PHP which drives millions of websites.

Lastly for our database server we’re going to be using the widely used MySQL database server.

Now installing and configuring Apache, MySQL and PHP doesn’t sound like fun but the great thing is we can download them all as one easy to install package and because we’re going to use Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP the package has been named WAMP.

We first need to download WAMP from http://www.wampserver.com/en/index.php Once downloaded double-click the WAMP file to begin the installation.

Accept all the default installation options (choose whether to have WAMP start automatically with Windows or not and enter your email address when prompted) and then WAMP will launch leaving you with nothing more to see than the WAMP status icon in your system tray.

Now it’s not much to look at but you have just installed a webserver, scripting language, database server plus a PHP based database administration tool called phpMyAdmin which is some achievement even for an experienced Geek.

Left-click the WAMP status icon and put the server online and then click it again and select LOCALHOST and you’ll see the default web page showing you the thing is working. From here you can create as many websites as you like by creating subfolders in C:WAMPWWW and use phpMyAdmin to create databases so can install complex scripts such as the content management system Joomla or Ecommerce package OSCommerce – Anything is possible!

Now you could open up your PC to access from the Internet and become your own host but you can’t beat hosting your site with a proper hosting company for speed, reliability and security so I’d keep my WAMP server for testing and experimenting with developing your sites.



Search Engine Friendly

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009



“Search engine friendly.”

Search engines all have their own confidential algorithms that determine which Web pages are to be shown first. The algorithms assign weights to certain components or variables that it finds within a page. There are MANY people who can design web pages but not many can built a search engine friendly and functional web sites.

3 Important Meta Tags.

META tags are HTML Tags that describe the contents of a web page. The primary purpose of Meta tags is to help catalog and categorize the contents of a web page. If your pages do not contain them then they may not get categorized the way you’d like by the search engines.

You should generally include a META keyword tag on your page within the section of a Web page area.

TITLE

Keep your title quite short and include words relating to your subject area and should include your targeted keyword

Work at home business resources for all

DESCRIPTION

The description tag should be kept between about 100-200 characters. The description should also include words about your subject area and should not simply restate the title of the page, as it should also describe the page.

KEY WORDS

Key words and/or phrases relating to your subject will also be inserted (comma separated), they should be between 200-500 characters long.

Meta tags are hidden in a document’s source, invisible to the reader. Some search engines, however, are able to incorporate the content of meta tags into their algorithms. No engines penalize sites that use meta tags properly, so it’s recommended that you always include them.

The tag of your Web page is the most important HTML tag or element. All the search engines consider the keywords in this tag and generally give those keywords a lot of importance in their ranking system. Therefore, if you were to create one page with a keyword in the title tag and another page with the same keyword in the body tag, the one with the keyword in the title will generally rank higher in most engines.

The text found in the META Description tag will be displayed to the user in the search results for many engines. Therefore, it pays to craft a good description so that you not only rank well, but so people will actually click on your link once they see it. When creating your Meta Description Tag you must adhere to the guidelines that the search engines have in place. For example, there is a limitation to the number of characters that you can use in your Meta Description. Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the search engines and directories use the keywords in the description as a way of determining if your site is relevant to the search performed. This is also where concepts and strategies like keyword proximity come into play and is a high factor for your search engine ranking.

A META keyword tag lists all the keywords for which you would like search engines to rank your site. Although not all search engines support this tag, you should use it for the ones that do.

One of the most important things that you can do for your web site and your search engine ranking to be indexed in the search engines is write a good description and title for your site. If you spend extra time on the title ,description, and tailor it so that it is definitive, concise, and follows all of the guidelines, your web site should not have a problem getting indexed and will positive for your search engine ranking.

Key element is your keywords. Keywords are the key to whether your site is seen in the search engines or not.

Most of the time when people use a search engine they search for common words or phrases like game, travel, music or business. These words are called “key words” or “keywords”. Because of this webmasters try to use key words that are likely to be searched for included within their page. The more often a key word shows up the more likely the page will rank higher in a search engine. If you over do it however you can actually be rejected by a search engine. That is why webmasters try to make each page relative to only one to three keywords. They then use those key words as the first words within their HTML meta tags, image tags, heading tags, title tag, text link tags, alt tags and even the file name of the page itself.

Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain! Don’t waste time optimizing for words that will never bring you any traffic.

Few tips for a search engine friendly website.

Keep it simple

Make your site easy to navigate. Give a site map so visitors can see a list of everything contained on the site. They can then use this as their reference point. Search engine spider can also easily follow all your links read it content and store them in the search engine database.

All the major search engines claim to favor pages with high-quality content. They claim that to rank well on their engine that you simply need to create relevant, high quality pages. Keywords should be relevant, applicable, and clearly associated with page body content.

Cloaking is normally associated with sites doing IP and USER-AGENT serving where the internet server will present a page that will vary based upon the visitor characteristics. No matter how great the content, is considered spam by all of the major search engines.

DO keep your content current.

There’s nothing worse than visiting a website in 2008 that was last updated in 1999.

Never Spam. The following techniques are usually considered spam:

Irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags

Meta refresh tags.

Invisible text and overuse of tiny text.

Excessive repetition and use of keywords

Overuse of mirror sites (same sites that point to different URLs)

Identical or nearly identical pages.

Submitting to an inappropriate category (for directories)

Never use link farms. Link farm are those services that generically link to your site if you agree to link to everyone else’s site that participates in the link exchange service. Theoretically, more the members of that service, more your link popularity.

Conclusions

Build a Search Engine friendly website. Do not break any search engine rules keep your site clean surely will earn a place in the search engines. Make your pages the best they can be for your users and search engines in general, and your site will do great!

About the Author: Hash is the president club member of SFIMG. A work at home business site.

http://www.work-home-business.com