Similar to a house or a specific location, a website must also have an address, this is because of the fact that the internet or the cloud is composed of millions if not billions of websites and finding a specific website would be very tedious because solely of the number of websites present. A websites’ address is first registered before one can utilise it and the name or main identifier of the website address is  called the domain name. When developing a website, it is important to incorporate into the website blueprint the proposed domain name of the website. This is because of the fact that domain names can also help in the SEO campaign of the website, this is most important especially if the website was designed for business purposes. Determining the Domain names in the point of view of SEO companies and SEO consultants is very important because of the fact that search engines can use the domain name as an index or a category to index the website, this is why when observing the search results of the website you will see that search engines highlights even the domain name if the search query or keywords is integrated in the domain name.  Determining the domain name however is not outright, several criteria must be determined and these are the following:

1. When naming your site your domain name must not contain dashes, underscores and other special meaningless characters.
2. The Domain name must be kept as short as possible, this is because of the fact that a longer name would mean a higher incidence of misspellings. It would also mean that users will have a hard time memorising the domain name.
3. As much as possible use a .com domain name, although there are other top level domains available a .com domain name is the best choice because of the fact that it is the most common top level domain.

So what’s in a domain name? well a lot! When we talk about Search engine optimisation.

Google which is a large internet company and considered to be a search engine giant is using Microsoft operating system on their computers or at least was using Microsof Operating system on their company computers. Microsoft is known to be a Google competitor as the former is competing with Google in terms of the search engine market by launching an aggressive advertisement campaign for the launching of it’s Bing search engine. This competition did not stop at the search engine level but Google also retaliated by battling Microsoft in its turf, the operating systems by developing the Chrome Operating system which is going to be offered for free to the public which is unlike with that of Microsoft which delivers their product only to those who can afford to pay for a license. To add damage to the Operating system giant Google recently announced that they  will massively discard the use of Microsoft operating systems in their company computers and have given their employees the option to use either Mac or PC/Linux. This move is also seen as a preparation for the rolling out of its new Chrome Operating System which is expected to be made public Fall of this year. Google enumerated several reasons why they are going to change their operating system and why they are discarding the use of Microsoft’s operating system and these are the following:

1. For security reasons – it should be remembered that Google China Gmail accounts were hacked because of an Internet Explorer 6 flaw which is a bundled software with a Microsoft Operating system. In addition to that since Microsoft is the most popular operating system as of present it is the target of most malware which unlike for a Mac OS where few malwares were developed to attack the Mac Operating system.
2. In preparation for Chrome Operating System – this stage can be viewed as a transition phase for the search engine giant in terms of their operating systems where they will be using their own OS once it is finished fall of this year.
3. Financial Reason – Microsoft Charges license fee for every operating system installed in a computer by switching to a free operating system the company is expected to save millions of dollars.

These are just some of the reasons for Google to change operating systems the implication of this in SEO? Well it would be a good time for SEO companies and SEO consultants on what the new Chrome OS’ role will be in the field of search engine optimisation.

The advent of Web 2.0 brought about the introduction of different websites in the internet. Enthusiasts have seen the birth of social media networks such as MySpace and Facebook, the introduction of video websites such as the very popular YouTube is also prominent over the web and microblogging site such as Twitter also emerged. Twitter, the microblogging site is slowly establishing itself not only as a microblog but also as a viable site that may be used by SEO companies and SEO consultants for their search engine optimisation campaign efforts.

Recognising this fact and along with the exponential increase in the websites’ users, Twitter have started integrating several marketing strategies, among them was the fact that Twitter is already starting to plan for integrating tweets with advertisements. Another feature that proves to be helpful for search engine optimisation consultants and companies is Twitters’ trending feature, the trending feature of Twitter helps SEO companies and SEO consultants in determining which of the different keywords are currently popular among users and that this data can be utilised for increasing SEO campaigns on such popular keyword.

The trending feature of Twitter is accomplished through its algorithm that gathers data on the different tweets and displays the most popular or the tweet that is widely visited. Twitter recognises the importance of their trending topics feature which thus led them to incorporate improvements on such feature. Twitter modified or improved their algorithm by breaking or categorising the Trends into two sub-features and these are the “most breaking” and the “immediately popular” tweets. Twitter confirmed this improvement in their tweets and the existence of these two new categories. It can be recalled that Twitter previously was only giving importance on popular tweets but with the improvements in the algorithm the most current and the newest tweets will be highlighted.

There are a lot of speculations about how to increase a websites’ page ranking and  most of the time such speculations would even decrease your page ranking instead of increasing it. Page ranking is one of the most sought after output in search engine optimisation by the SEO companies and SEO consultants, this is because of the fact that such would establish the reputation of your website. Some have even released several online tools that you can use to allegedly increase your page ranking. These tools comes with a price and sometimes payment is done on a monthly renewal basis which makes it a lot expensive, and most of the time such tools are a complete waste of your time and money. Some unscrupulous SEO company on the other hand would develop a campaign that would circumvent the rules in SEO, using the so-called black hat SEO technique, yes it might easily get your website to be indexed but such would be short-lived because most search engine algorithms can detect black-hat techniques thus risking your website to be banned.

Link exchanges may work but only if you exchange links with websites that are relevant to yours, if your website is about travel then do not exchange links with a website about shoes. Link exchanges may also be a waste of effort because of the fact that the only website that you can link with may be your competitor and you wouldn’t want to share your traffic with your competitor.

The best way to increase your page ranking is to still follow the different white hat SEO strategies as well as the fundamental rules of website design and development, such as using the robot.txt file in your server and activating their do-follow function of webpages that you want the bots to crawl. Use the title tag and make sure it’s content would be relevant to the contents of the web page. Use JavaScript and Flash sparingly as bots cannot crawl webpages developed with such language or application respectively. Finally, make sure that you always have fresh content as well as relevant links because these two are the main ranking factors as of present.

Google, the so-called internet industry giant or the search engine giant is continuously revising its search engine algorithm. This is not a new thing for SEO companies and SEO consultants that is why such SEO consultants and SEO companies are also continuously improving their SEO strategies. Late last year Google announced that there are several features that would be integrated into their search engine and recently this was realised through the launching of the Google Caffeine. Google Caffeine is Google’s newest search engine which has been given several features.

Submitting sites to Google for indexing before would take several weeks to several months. Sometimes a website may not even be indexed because of the fact that the website may be lacking some elements, this event is called sandboxing. Many SEO companies and SEO consultants are developing websites and are conducting an aggressive SEO campaign because of the fact that they would like their site to be indexed the soonest possible time, in order for such SEO Companies and SEO consultants to start with the second part of their SEO campaign and that is getting the website to rank high in the search engine results page ranking. With the advent of new internet technologies brought about by the Web 2.0 Google have been given an avenue to make faster indexing possible.

With the launching of Google Caffeine, the search engine company has announced that the search engine can deliver faster updates, expandability and searches which is brought about by faster indexing of websites. This is made possible by Google linking with several real-time feeds such as from Blogs, RSS Feeds or RSS Clouds and from Microblogs such as Twitter. Social media networking sites can also contribute to the faster indexing of websites this is why SEO companies and SEO Consultants are now contemplating on dealing with the social media optimisation.

For the past months since the last quarter of 2009 Google have been acquiring startup companies or small information technology and advertising companies. Recently Google acquired Admob which is an advertising company that is focused on delivering mobile advertisements. Google is not only known for being a search engine but also a company that focuses on advertising specifically internet advertising. The advertising business is where Google is getting one huge part of it’s revenue and it is therefore fitting for Google to acquire companies that will help augment the advertising power of Google.

Realising the importance of reinforcing its advertising capabilities Google again recently acquired another startup advertising company, this is despite of the fact that Google’s acquisition of Admob was almost put to waste after the U.S. government conducted a probe which eventually approved of the acquisition. Google acquired InviteMedia which is a New-York based startup company. Invite media is different with Admob since it does not deal directly on advertisements on mobile phones, instead Invite Media developed a system or a technology that would allow advertisers to bid for an ad display space which is done in real-time. The benefit of which is of course to give the publishers or advertisers to easily optimise their ad campaigns which can all be done through a user friendly interface.

This type of advertising is called display advertising which is now the focus of Google since the advent of the different real-time technologies that emanated as a result of the Web 2.0. The acquisition of Invite Media is marred by different speculations one of which is that since Invite Media has a large client base or list it is the motivating factor why Google was willing to pay seventy million dollars ($70Million) for the acquisition of Invite Media. Whatever the reason is one thing is for sure Google users are going to benefit.

According to the latest report Search engine optimisation is one of the fastest rising industries in the online world. This is maybe attributed with the fact that Search engine optimisation benefits most if not all online businesses. The number of online businesses going live daily is increasing in an exponential rate and the only way for those new websites to be “visible” over the internet is to make them search engine friendly which can only be achieved through the process of search engine optimisation.

This increase for the need of search engine optimisation have led to the establishment of SEO companies and the presence of a career known as an SEO consultant. Although search engine optimisation is a process that can be learned by anyone, many website owners are turning to SEO companies and SEO consultants to aide them in their SEO campaign. One might think that since SEO can be learned would it not be cost-efficient and cost-saving if the search engine optimisation is done in-house? Well that maybe so but there is one big obstacle that may block you from conducting your in-house SEO campaign and that is undergoing a high learning curve and the big possibility of doing more harm than good to your website’s search engine ranking.

Should you desire to develop your own SEO strategy you would have to learn SEO from the very first stage, although learning is good the fact is you are racing against time if you want to increase your website’s search engine ranking. This is because of the fact that as I’ve said a while ago, the rate of websites going live everyday is increasing exponentially, thus while you are still learning all the corners of Search engine optimisation other new websites may have already been indexed or ranked in the first page. Further, with the fact that SEO algorithms are being updated constantly what you have learned may not already be efficient at present.

Second, since you will be “experimenting” on your website there is a great chance that you might commit an error that might result to the suspension of your website from being indexed or ranked by search engines, one cause maybe you might unknowingly utilise a black hat technique which is an SEO technique that will cause your website from being banned or suspended.

Thus if you decide to do your SEO campaign, in-house, think twice  and weigh the pros and cons. If you doubt your abilities then it would be best for you to go with where you are sure and that is hiring an SEO company or an SEO consultant to plan, implement and maintain your SEO campaign.

PHP is a powerful technology, used by a large percentage of the online programming community. Its constantly growing and evolving and consistently provides developers with ripe methods to build web page, and now with the GUI, offline applications for general use and even professional use.

But today we are going to learn how to scan a directory of files and return a list, or index, of all the files contained in the directory. Although we are not going to go into recursive scanning (maybe in another tutorial?)

Its actually really simple and you can even use wildcards (isn’t PHP just a god send?) See the code below, this is using the glob functionality and a simple foreach loop.

//the * symbol represents a wildcard, meaning show everything
$files = glob('directory/to/my/files/*');
//the foreach loop is very simple
foreach($files as $file){
echo "{$file}<br />";
}

Its a very small amount of code that can produce large amounts of data very quickly, we at SEO Positive use this particular function for a lot of our automation (although, we secure ours down a lot more)

Its great for including bulk images, see the example below for a slightly more complex version that includes the most common image types

//the * symbol represents a wildcard, meaning show everything
$files = glob('directory/to/my/files/{*.jpg,*.png,*.gif,*.bmp}', GLOB_BRACE);
//the foreach loop is very simple
foreach($files as $file){
echo "{$file}<br />";
}

The above example uses a filter, GLOB_BRACE. The filter searches for each matching file contained in the braces to its direct left. This example will include all jpg, png, gif and bitmap images in the supplied directory.

The function is not limited to the above examples, but they are a good start and example of this functions amazing capability for simplifying directory scanning.

Investing in an online business does not stop with the website going live over the internet, after a tedious website and web development process the journey to search engine optimisation starts. Why is there a need for search engine optimisation? Search engine optimisation is needed because of the fact that the best way to get traffic for your website is through the search engines, search engines are website applications that helps internet users find what they are looking for in the internet, search engines would base their search through the keywords or search queries entered by the internet user. Getting traffic can both be tedious as well as financially draining, however finding the right technique could catapult your website into a high search engine results page ranking and thus allowing you to get a lot of traffic to your website. The question however is what would be the best way of getting traffic through SEO is it through an In-house SEO? Or through the hiring of the services of an SEO consultant or an SEO company?

SEO companies and SEO consultants are well trained and have an extensive experience in the field of SEO this means also therefore that they already have the mechanisms or the tools needed to accomplish the SEO task brought upon them, although SEO consultants and SEO companies cannot guarantee as well as assure one hundred percent page one ranking it could guarantee traffic and a solid search engine optimisation campaign.

For an in-house SEO this may come cheaper only if you already have the tools, the experience and the expertise that the SEO company and SEO consultants have. If your company does not have all the elements as stated above then your SEO campaign will surely be one of the most expensive SEO campaign. You have to bear in mind the following steps of financial challenges that you have to go through in an in-house SEO campaign, first is that you will have to be in a high learning curve trying to learn all the tenets of SEO, second you have to purchase necessary SEO tools or tools that you think might help you in your campaign and if such tools are not actually tested prior to purchase you might end up purchasing a useless tool.

These are the advantages and disadvantages of an in-house SEO and hiring an SEO company for your SEO needs, at the end of the day your decision would make the main difference so choose wisely.

With the emerging internet technologies, especially those that involves search engine optimisation many SEO companies and SEO consultants are getting preoccupied on how to develop SEO strategies that would exploit the new internet technologies. When this happens many SEO companies and SEO consultants are not fully delivering the complete SEO service. This is because of the fact that in order to deliver a complete SEO service it is important that the SEO company and SEO consultants must always start with the basic guidelines, jumping ahead of the process may speed up the SEO campaign but it does not give a solid foundation on the SEO credibility or reliability of the website. Going back to the basic aspects of Search engine optimisation is always a requirement as it would help build a solid foundation for your SEO campaign, it may not assure an outright first page ranking in the search engine results page but it will assure a solid traction whenever there are changes in the search engine algorithm. The following are the basic guidelines in SEO.

1. Decide on your Niche – deciding on your niche would also require researching for the different niches available. Establishing a niche would then help you start your SEO campaign, it gives direction on what your SEO campaigns’ approach would be.
2. Research for the Appropriate Keywords – next step is for your to build a strong keyword-base. Keywords are utilised by search engines when categorising the different websites thus keywords are essential in SEO, however one must not blindly create the list of keywords it must always be a product of extensive research.
3. Research your competition – the internet is a vast business playground, most likely the niche that you have chosen may not be unique thus it means that you will be having competitors. Look for competitors that are already ranking well in the said niche and take their strong SEO points and plan on how you can use or integrate it in your website’s SEO campaign.
4. Implement your SEO strategies – implementing your SEO strategies is not the end of your SEO campaign, since search engine algorithms are always kept secret it is important for you to monitor your strategies and check those strategies that might be working and those that are not working.