Open Source Technologies At Work

Link exchange is one of the earliest and most popular SEO technique among smaller websites to get inbound links (urls pointing to your website). Basically, what a web master does is to exchange urls of his website with another website.  There are a few variations to link exchange, ie it could be 2-way, 3-way, 4-way…etc.  2-way link exchange means site A exchange links with site B (This is the most common definition of link exchange). 3-way means A link to B, B link to C, and C link to A. You could figure out the rest of the variations easily… 

The most complex link exchange today is a Link Exchange Network. In the network, you post a url of another website in your site and the server will post your url in another person’s website based on a merit or point system. There are also people who incorporate the idea of MLM into link exchange, turning the whole linking system into a pyramid. Why the hassle? The whole idea is not to let the search spiders detect your linking strategies.

Link Exchange Is Often Abused

Search engines want to display the most relevant search results with the most important websites ranked first. If the number of links pointing to the website is the only criteria to determine the importance of the website, then search engine results could be manipulated easily. Nobody knows the exact Google, MSN or Yahoo ranking algorithm but we do know that Google especially, take strong measures to prevent people from manipulating search ranking results.

Many small companies are often blamed for manipulating search results because they are able to get alot of inbound links without spending any money using the link exchange technique. The link exchange boom makes everybody to post and exchange links in blogs, link directories and affliate pages… Almost everyone would want to incorporate a link directory in their website just for SEO purpose. As such, we also witness a boom in link directories.

Even if you can get 1000 links overnight, does it really mean that your website is important? Does the amount of links pointing to your website really equate to the importance of your website? These are debatable tough questions which is hard to answer in a short time.

Is Link Exchange Ethical?

Many people believe that Google and Yahoo have already started penalising web sites that does link exchange in a large scale but we do not know the extend of it. In my opinon, it is very hard to justify whether link exchange is ethical or not. Everyone will have a case to say but generally, all of us would agree that websites that get large amounts of links within a short time, has many outbound and inbound links to and from many unrelated websites are trying to manipulate search results but again, there can be exceptions.

It does not make sense to me to punish website A, B or/and C if they are practising 2, 3 or whatever ways link exchange; doesn’t matter if their websites are related or not. There are many real life examples. If my friend Andy is web designer and he has a web design blog and another friend of mine Joe loves swimming and he has a swimming blog. Both of the sites are totally different in nature but they are friends and they want to link to each other. If this is not permissible in the SEO context, then it will be a sad news for everyone of us.    

Search Engines Is Evolving But SEO Travels Back In Time

Search engines, like human being, are evolving everyday. they are getting more intelligent and are able to pick up websites that are trying to hack the ranking system. With enough computing power and time, I believe they would one day be able to detect more complex linking systems. Many experts believe that search engines are too clever to be manipulated and started advocating “Natural Search Engine Optimisation” – NSEO. The word “Natural” is important because it means that you are trying to optimise your website legally. In NSEO, you write content naturally, link to pages naturally and so on. To withstand the test of time, the practise of NSEO is highly recommended.

Natural Links

Many believe that links to a website will still be an important factor in calculating its searched ranking in major search engines. Therefore, link exchange and other SEO techniques to get inbound links should still be important. The only problem is that the inbound links have to be natural. Personally, I would think that natural links should have certain features:

1. The Ratio of Text to Links
If I have a 5 page website and 5 pages of links, do you think that there is something wrong with the site? I have seen many professional websites having a full section dedicated to link exchange and there are actually more link exchange content as compared to the site’s main content. Unless it is a link directory, I would personally devalue the site’s importance. 

2. The Density of Links 
If all the links are cramped together in one corner, I would think that the site is running a link exchange network or something similar. Natual linking means that you link at certain point in your content where you feel that it is important, ie you do not normally insert alot of links at one go. To me, 4 or 5 links together would be considered as unnatural. 

3. Google PageRank
Websites that only have high PR linking to them seems unnatural. It could be that the owner of the site is buying PR or is trying to manipulate the PR system. Why shouldn’t I link to Mr. Nobody when Mr. Nobody has good content in his site? I would think that a natural site should have a mixture of websites with different PR linking to it.

4. Quality Is Better Than Quantity
Many SEO packages in the web offers many one way links from different websites. The more money you can afford, the more links you can get. Buying links is a common SEO tactic nowsadays but whether the links occur naturally or not is questionable. I don’t like to think that buying links is wrong. To me, “Buying Links” is just the crude word for online advertising and it is wrong to penalise people for advertising online. I would like to think that a natural link in MSN is so much valuable that 10000 links from web directories. 

5. Time
An important website can withstand the test of time and will have its inbound links building up slowly. Unless the website is about a special event like world Web Design competition…etc, it is very hard to explain why a website is able to attain many links overnight.

Conclusion

I think the list for “The features of Natural Links” could go on. So back to the ultimate question… Is Link Exchange dead? My personal opinion is more inclined towards a ‘No’ but we have to start practising natural linking when doing link exchange. One think to keep in mind is that search engine spiders are getting more intelligent everyday.

If we are more careful with links, search engines will have an easier task of displaying relevant search results. Let us all make internet free from spam!

* Note: I use SEO to refer to Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizers in this article to cut short the typing time. The opinions expressed in this article is purely personal and speculative.

In this article, I am going to cover the key elements in getting your articles accepted by major internet article publishers, how to write succesful articles and get them noticed.

Finding A Topic

When most writers write their articles, they do not do any research before writing. Doing research before writing your article is the most important part of the article writing process because it determines the food for your target audience. If your website is about internet marketing, your obvious customers will be internet advertisers, marketing professionals and so on… Even if you are a good web designer, you do not want to write an article on web design because you do not want to attract the wrong people to your website.
Do some keywords search in google, yahoo or msn and you could see that many people might have already wrote something on what you had in mind. You could use those materials and ideas for your articles but becareful of plagarism. You could also try visiting forums to see what other people are talking about and looking for. A good idea for the topic of your article is to identify a problem, and write an article that resolves the problem.

Choosing An Appropriate Article Title

Your article title should hopefully contain the keywords your want for your article. Using the same internet marketing example as above, your article should probably contain the keywords Internet Marketing. If you can, make your title grab the reader’s attention. The best thing to do when trying to come up with an article title is to write the benefits that your reader will receive by reading your article. An example of a good title is “How to market your website” rather than “Internet Marketing”. Write down a few variations of the title and ask other people’s opinion. You will be surprised by their reply.

Writing Good Content

Most of the articles out there are nothing more than sale pitches or materials that do not contain any valuable information. Such articles are basically useless to the reader. As mentioned before, if what you want is only to get back links, you need worry too much about your content. However, with your reputation at stake, you might want to provide good information in the article and improve your credibility in the internet. What do we mean by good content? It simply means that your article must be helpful to the reader and in most cases, unique.
Unique content is hard to find. If your article is unique, many people will link to it and many publishers will want it. Writing unique articles is the key to generating great number of back links to your website.
Many people like to use articles as a way to promote their affliate programs. It is undeniable that this is the best way to do it. However, the bad news is that most publishers today do not accept affliate links. Some even do not accept html tags in the body of the article. It is therefore advisable not to include any html tags in the body of your article if you decide to mass publish it.

Publishing Your Aticle

If you want to make some cash with your internet article, then at the end of it in your bio, provide a link back to the page of the service or product that you are promoting and put your affliate link in that page. Use appropriate term in the link in your bio. For example, a www link like www.sitecritic.net/web_articles.php is not good enough. www.sitecritic.net/web_articles.php is a web page about internet articles, so the text link should be internet articles instead.
As mentioned previously, many publishers nowsadays do not allow links in the body, so many writers have no choice but to stuff links in the bio. This to me is a big mistake because experienced publishers do not want too many out going links from their website and if they see that you have 5 out going links in just one article, do you think they will want to host your article? I too host a few article websites. It is sad that I could not publish many good articles because there were too many links in the bio section.

There are many softwares or internet services that allow you to mass publish your articles in many article directories or websites which could save you alot of time and manual work. Use it. One advice though, more back links does not mean better ranking or higher click throughs. An article published in 1000 article directories might not be as effective as an article published in just one well recognized website.

About the Author
Sitecritic.net Internet Articles is formed by a group of web addicts. The team consisting of web designers and developers from all over the world. The primary goal of Sitecritic.net is to make the knowledge of creating effective websites accessible to everyone in the internet.

Once a client has committed to building a new website, it’s time to dig in and learn a little about the business and the specific requirements. This can be done through a simple questionnaire for smaller sites, or may require many hours of consultation for larger ones. Some of the questions asked include: website goals and objectives, target audience, color and style preferences, examples of preferred websites, etc. If a client already has specific text and images that they would like to have included (maybe from an existing brochure or catalog) it is time to share the files and information with the designer, and the designer will in turn review it and share an objective opinion on the usefulness and quality of the customer supplied materials. If a domain name does not already exist for the site, this would be a good time to decide on a name and have it registered. The designer can help as little or as much as necessary in this area. Once all information has been received, work will commence immediately on the custom website design. Idea sharing and customer involvement is always welcomed and encouraged.

Step 2: Review design concepts and pick a direction

Normally, a customer will have initial design concepts to review within a few days. Some projects can take substantially longer to reach this initial stage, depending on the level of research and discovery being done for the customer in other related and possibly interdependent areas, such as designing a new corporate identity (logo and entire brand) or building an information systems solution into the website. The design and layout of the home page and first-level inner pages come first. This offers the customer a view of the possibilities and how different ideas work together at different levels. Then, one will be selected for further refinement. Existing works by the designer can often be used as a starting ground and modified to create a unique, yet familiar, look and feel. In the case that the customer is indecisive or doesn’t fall in love with one of the initial concepts, additional designs will be presented. After a design and layout concept has been chosen, revisions to that design and layout concept will be made until the customer is completely satisfied.

Step 3: Review revisions and ask for feedback

Once the design and layout has been approved and finalized, detailed content will be entered utilizing the selected design guidelines for consistency and beauty. Content can be supplied in almost any electronic format such as email, Word or even scanned text. In the case of larger consultative web projects, content can be created for the customer as part of an overall marketing and branding campaign. For images, content can be shot by the design team, supplied by the client, or in some cases purchased or custom created by the designer. There is also the option of choosing imagery from a gallery of quality royalty-free work at no additional cost. Just describe what is wanted, and the designer will pick the perfect images for the job. Or, if preferred, the client may choose the images themselves and the designer will certainly assist in the process a level with which the customer is comfortable. Customer supplied content can be supplied as soon as it is acquired – there’s no reason to wait until the web pages have been designed. In fact, often times the best design concepts are born of the content.

Step 4: Finalize your website.

All concepts and revisions can be viewed online and there is always an open channel of communication to the designer. Once the customer is completely satisfied with the finished website, high-quality website hosting is offered, or the website can be implemented at a third party host of the client’s choosing, as long as appropriate security access and necessary software tools are available.

Reliability and Performance
So far, I have no problems with the speed and reliability of the server. Most of my sites hosted by them were never down. If you have google toolbar installed, just take a look at their page rank. Bluehost has a page rank of 8 which is rare for a web hosting company. This just shows how popular they are in the web. If you look at their awards page, you will realized that they have a long history of awards. This is a plus point because it shows that they care about their customers and more importantly, their performance is consistent.

Support
They have a good support section in the website.  Based on my experience, most of their emails are answered within 2 working days. Though not the fastest around, their replies are honest and professional. Some hosts will answer you in such a way that you need to pay them more money to get your problems solved. Click here to visit their site.

Many people leave their urls when participating in blog discussions. Like forums, people who take time to read the blog are interested in the topic. Depending on the popularity of the blog, your url in the blog comments may provide you with quality traffic.

Article Submission
Article submission to websites and discussion groups can reap great rewards. If your article is unique and good, it might be duplicated in many websites and invites alot of targeted readers. If the readers are impressed with the content, the chances of them reading the bio at the end would be high, and hence there is a good chance that they will click on your url. Many people write articles for different reasons and I find that many people like to stuff links in their content and bio. I, too operate an article website and sometimes, I saw an article so well written that I wanted to use it in my website but the bio spoiled everything. There were too many links in the author bio. I can understand from the search engine optimisation perspective of putting links in the bio but it will become harmful to my website (I am stingy about out-going links) and annoying for the reader if the bio is stuffed with links. Some links aren’t even related to the author.

Online Advertisement / PPC Programs
Another proven technique is to advertise urls or banners in established websites. If you noticed, Dell loves to advertise their products in MSN. Just imagine how many people are surfing msn everyday and how many people are looking at the banner…Intelligent use of words and banners can lead to high volume of targeted leads to your website. Such advertisements can be effective but very costly. Therefore, most people tend to use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) programs whereby your urls will only be displayed when certain keywords are searched. The most notorious of all PPC programs is Google Adwords.

Good SERPS
Let us not all forget that the best way to get quality leads is via organic search engine results. Though it takes alot of hardwork and time to be ranked well in major search engines, the effort will be rewarded in a long run. Once you are ranked well in the Google especially, quality traffic becomes almost unstoppable.

Offline Advertisement
This is an area that is often overlooked. Sometimes words of mouth can be even more effective than all of the techniques mentioned above. I remembered how friendster used to spread like a virus sometime ago and everyone were talking about it everyday in schools, colleges..etc. This is how powerful peer pressure can be. As long as something becomes popular, everybody will go for it. Many traditional advertising techniques such as putting your urls in brochures, magazines, stands, t-shirts, cars…etc still works. Of all the offline advertising techniques, I found newspaper ads really effective especially if the newspaper is really popular. Offline advertisements may well worked better for people who do not use search engines alot.

There are other ways to get traffic but most of them are not really effective. I will list 2 commonly used techniques nowsadays:

Guaranteed Targeted Hits
There are companies that promised certain amount of quality hits for certain amount of money. This service is very attractive for new website owners because it is hard for a new website to get traffic. How does it work? By using pop-up advertisements. There are also unethical companies using automated scripts to generate hits. A quick way to determine if this technique works for you is to check your web statistics. If all the visitors from the “Guaranteed Targeted Hits” program does not go beyond the landing page or generate sales, then you should consider quitting the program. There are also cases that this technique actually works for some webmasters. For me, I will block all “pop-ups”, “pop-downs”, “pop-unders”…etc whatever.

Hits Exchange Network
Some websites offer hit exchanges, ie you visit my website and I visit yours. It usually works on a point system. The more websites you visit, the more points you get and the system will show your links more frequently, bringing in more hits for you. There is usually a timer to make sure that you visit the site for at least 20 or 30secs before you can move on to the next. I must admit that this is a very good and cheap way to get free traffic but the traffic is not targeted. Most users in the network visit your site just to get points and they do not take your content seriously. I have joined many such networks and none actually works for me.

Conclusion
Quality Online Traffic is important for anyone who provides an online service or runs an online business. Visitors who arrived at your site with a purpose are more likely to make purchases. This article discussed some of the common ways to bring in quality traffic for your website, some online and some offline. There are of cause many other ways not covered in this article.

$usr = $_POST[‘username’];
$pwd = $_POST[‘password’];

Where “username” and “password” are the names of the textfields in your form.

How do you deal with these values?
You probably verify it against your database. If the username and password matches at least one record in the database, you will let this user proceed on to the secure area, else you will probably throw an error, prompting the user to re-login. During the verification process, your SQL statement might look like this:

SELECT * FROM `user_table`  where username=’$usr’ AND password=’$pwd’

Re-looking at the SQL statement, if someone leaves username empty and writes “ ‘  OR username LIKE ‘%” in the password field, then your whole SQL statement becomes:

SELECT * FROM `user_table`  where username=’ ‘ AND password=’ ‘ OR username LIKE ‘ % ‘

This statement means selecting all the records in the table. If your criteria of letting the user proceed is that the return number of records is more than 0 (at least one user found), then this SQL statement will return all records, meaning that the user will be able to slip pass through the verification process. This type of hacking is famously known as The SQL injection attacks.

One good way to prevent this from happening is to make sure the $_POST array is safe from escape strings such as ‘ and “. You can filter your $_POST array using

$usr = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST[‘username’]);
$pwd = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST[‘password’]);

There are of course other ways to do it but the idea is to let you know that you have to be very careful in handling the data retrieved from forms, epecially more so for usernames and passwords.

/root
This is the home directory of the adminstrator or super user.

/tmp
In addition to personal hard disk space in the home directories, users are also given special access to shared temporary space in the /tmp directory. Linux systems often implement quotas on user accounts to prevent anyone from using too much disk space. The /tmp directory allows all users access to additional space to meet short term needs without charging the space against their quota. All files placed in this directory are deleted automatically after a few days.

/etc
This directory stores all the configuration files needed for the operating system. For example, startup configuration scripts are found in /etc/rc.d and network configuration scripts are found in /etc/sysconfig. Normal users cannot modify the files in /etc.

/bin and /usr/bin
Most system commands are stored as binary files only in machine readable format. Commands appropriate for use by ordinary users are either placed in the /bin or /usr/bin directory. Core commands like rm, mv, ls, cd go into /bin while supplementary utilities like compilers, firefox browser and openoffice go into /usr/bin.

/sbin and /usr/sbin
Like /bin and /usr/bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin store commands to be used only by the super user, ie root user. These include commands for attaching and removing hardware, starting and stopping the system…etc.

/var
This directory stores all the frequently changed files in the system. For example, incoming, outgoing mails, system logs, websites, ftp file archives…etc.

Conlcusion
There are only a few directories to know to really start using Linux. If you understand what the main directories are, then exploring the sub-direectories becomes much easier. If you are lost while navigating the directories, always use “cd /” to return back the the root, “cd ..” to go up one level or use “pwd” to find out where you are. Another command “which xxx” tells you where certain commands are located.