Search Engine Friendly Pages

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot's job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

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Ebook on Computer Programming : Linux Web Solution php mySql Apache.pdf

Abstract
Of all the web servers on the market today, Apache is most popular because it supplies basic web server functionality right out of the box. Yet, many customers want a more sophisticated website, one with SQL database functionality, search capabilities, and server-side scripting. The complexity and interdependencies of these packages make it difficult for independent software vendors, solution developers, and website administrators to put together a solution. Customizing the Apache server with additional functionality can be complex on the Linux platform. The solutions for extending functionality are just not obvious. This technical guide demonstrates how to integrate PHP, MySQL, and ht://Dig with the Apache server. Independent software vendors, solution developers, programmers, and website administrators can use this guide to plan and deploy advanced Apache web servers on the Linux platform.

This document describes how to install, configure, and deploy a sophisticated Apache website on the Linux operating system. Such a website includes the powerful, server-side scripting language, PHP3, access to the full-featured SQL database, MySQL and the ht://Dig search engine. All of the software packages described in this document are open source applications. What makes open source software so attractive? First of all, it is free. Secondly, you get copies of the software source code, which frees you to control the software to meet your short-term and long-term requirements. The key points of open source software restrictions are that no one:

• Distributes the product without the source code (or, a list of differences between the modified version and the original) and a copy of all related documentation
• Charges for the software itself (only for its distribution)
• Can impose restriction on its distribution

For more information on licensing, refer to the regulations defined by the Open Source Initiative organization at: http://www.opensource.org/osd.html.

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Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you're designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

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