So, you’ve decided you’re knowledgeable enough now and would like to start selling SEO services. That’s great. Now if you are starting to sell your services to people who have ideas what SEO is, then usually a deal will be sealed and done without too much snags.
But what if your client has no inkling on what SEO is all about? How do you then sell SEO services? Usually, you have to do a crash course before you start rattling off the pricing for your services, making sure they understand what they are getting into. So better polish those layman terms and get ready to explain exactly what SEO is about.
1) Dispel the wrong notions of SEO outright. Believe it or not, there are still those who believe that SEO “will generate sure sales of their products” as soon as you get the site back up and running. Now the problem here is that when they don’t get an increase in sales immediately, the least they can do is to call you a thief or something to that effect. So dispel them right away.
2) Tell your clients what they are buying…. Slowly. Tell them what SEO is and what it is not. Don’t spew out jargon while explaining. Remember, these are people who don’t know SEO. So don’t go all out and start talking about Result Pages, redirects, keyword density. The idea here is to get the client understand what you are offering him by slowly getting into the details one by one.
a. Explain the Search Engine – So you start with search engines. Don’t even try to attempt to explain what algorithms are, as you would probably met with dazed looks. The best way to go about explaining search engines is by making it clear what they really are and how they arrive with such results, including the ranking. Once you’ve gotten past that hurdle, then it’s time to explain that each search engine is different from one another and that they return different search results.
b. Moving on to Links – “Aren’t these the ones you click on to get to another page?” Well, yeah, but when it comes to SEO, you also have to explain that these links are a factor when it comes to ranking your site on search engines. Now since you will be doing all the SEO work, you don’t have to go through all the topics regarding links. Once you have briefly explained in simple terms why links are important, then you can move on to the next topic which is…
c. Keywords – Quite a simple topic to discuss. Just explain the rudimentary principles behind keywords and how they work hand in hand with search engines. Also, put in the importance of keyword research just to give them an idea about another part of your job if ever they avail of your services.
There are thousands of CMS available for developers and you are getting a new one (mediocre or pro) almost every month. To name some really big ones you can highlight Joomla, Jaws, Drupal are some giants and extensively used over the world. But to be honest, for simple content based sites you really don’t need to install these feature-flooded cmses. All you need a simple panel for managing you content, design the layout (templating) and deliver the media files to your viewer.
Today in promising open source projects section we are focusing on PureEdit - a simple content management system released recently. It is based on PHP and MySQL and released under GPL. This is simple, under active development and has a good community support. Here is a comprehensive list of features of PureEdit
1. Open Source and Free (This is a greatest feature for any application, no?) 2. Usability is given the highest priority 3. UI is kept really smart and simple. 4. Easy designing of pages using nice with sector manager 5. An easy account manager to manage your users 6. Support of WYSIWYG Editor and an extensive media manager
In overall, This CMS is really simple and provide the functionalities needed for simple content based site and worths giving a try.
Like what they always say, not everyday is Christmas day, even if you are dealing with SEO. And if you are one of those who feel that they haven’t been getting enough successes in their SEO campaigns, here are some of the points you have to check out to see if you are indeed doing enough SEO for your site:
Keywords, keywords and keywords – Yes, that’s right. Doing keyword research once for your entire campaign is never enough. Why, you may ask. Because the internet is constantly in flux, changing trends rather quickly. And because of this, here are some points you have to consider when dealing with keyword researching
Are there new keywords you are unaware of? These keywords are what you can consider as fresh, which could easily help your site gain that coveted traffic. Be aware of new keywords by researching regularly.
Research on popularity trends. Yes, even old popular keyword trends can be mighty useful in your campaign. Check out the subtopics of past trends and try to find out if any of them will resurface in popularity any time soon. You can also keep watch for emerging, newsworthy trends that you can piggy-back on.
Prioritize your strengths. Do you have a strong keyword which has the most success in ranking? Then work on it! A common mistake is to focus on your weaknesses, leaving the strong keyword untouched. Capitalize on the keyword that you have had the most ranking success with, and find others that perform equally well.
Check out the competition. When you started out, you might have done competitive research. Well, do one again. Did the arena change? Are they still the same competitors from before? Or is there a new one emerging? If you see a new competitor emerging, then find out what makes his site rank well.
Tune-up for search engines. When we said that the internet is constantly in flux, this includes search engines as well. Or to be more precise, search engine algorithms. Google is one prime example who changes algorithms somewhat constantly. Usually these changes can have drastic effects in your ranking. So if you rely mostly on Google for traffic, then you better watch out for these updates and fix your site accordingly. Also, you might have taken note of the volume of traffic you are getting from other search engines as well. Time to check them out once more. Did the volume change? If so, did it decrease or increase? If it increased, then that’s so much the better. On the other hand, if it decreased, then it’s time to do some tracking. However, don’t forget that you shouldn’t focus all your attention to these weaknesses but instead, you should capitalize on your strengths.
Ever wondered how long your PHP scripts were taking to execute? Or maybe you’ve broken the maximum execution time limit on your server, as defined in your php.ini’s max_execution_time directive. Well, dealing with PHP script execution time is actually quite easy. In this mini tutorial, I’ll show you how to measure your PHP script execution time, include monitoring at different stages of the process, and work around your max execution time limit. (more…)
Developing in PHP isn’t a textbook science. There’s skill to it, and that skill comes from experience. Now, you could try your hand at every single PHP development challenge out there, or you could learn from the experiences of others, widely published on the web in blogs and developer portals. Here are seven websites you should visit frequently to become a better PHP developer.
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These are dark times for sites that avail of text link ads, Review Me, and PayPerPost. Blogs that use these mechanisms is penalized by Google, and they receive a slap or two in their Google PageRank. In order to find alternatives to these mechanisms to avoid the penalties, we turn to private advertisers. Now these private advertisers can be a picky lot. So how do you seal that deal?
Choose Targets Wisely Before you can start rattling packages that you offer for advertising, you must find your potential advertiser first. Do some research using other blogs or sites that cover the same niche. See who advertises there and add those as potential customers. However, choose wisely. Sure, you deal with computers in your blog, but that doesn’t mean you set your sights to Dell, Hewlett-Packard or IBM as advertisers to your site immediately. For the big fish, you have to build up your reputation. Try to get small companies as your advertisers and once traffic builds up, then you can start moving up the ladder.
It’s time to crunch in some numbers Once you have your target, it’s time for some number crunching. Private advertisers love to see numbers. One of these numbers is the traffic your site is getting. After all, any self-respecting businessman would want to reach the largest amount of audience as possible with their ads. So show them your traffic numbers in graphs or tables. If you feel you don’t have enough traffic yet, then try to build it up.
Another kind of number that advertisers would want to see would be statistics of your audience, or the demographics. Who accesses your site? Would it be viable for the advertiser to reach your audience? Would their product sell with your audience? Expect these questions and prepare an answer. And most of all, don’t forget the statistics of your site.
Be transparent with what they are getting The way advertisers think goes very much like “so what do we get in return?” It’s important that you make clear what they get when they sign up as an advertiser. If you can, compile all the necessary data, numbers and if you have specific advertising packages, throw it in for convenience as well.
Once you have established your site’s reputation as a great place to advertise in, advertisers will be knocking on your doorstep regularly. Happy hunting!
I was recently working on an enterprise project in which I needed to detect the text inside a Word Document. Now, I could have got rid of all the non-standard characters from the .doc file and hoped I got something reasonable at the end. I could have tried to run Word 2007 via command line to save the file as a .docx. Or I could just talk to any copy of MS Word via COM and have it do all the dirty work for me.
Naturally, I chose the latter. Here’s ten lines of code that do just that.
Ah, experts. We immediately look for one when we need to partake of a certain service. After all, we would want only the best for our projects, don’t we? The same goes for SEO. Who would want to let a not-so-known SEO practitioner tinker with our sites in the hopes of getting higher ranking?
I know I wouldn’t.
But what does it take to be an expert? If you are in the SEO business, how can you then position yourself as an “expert” in the field? If you want to turn that “not-so-known” tag there replaced with “expert,” then read on my friend…
Writing eBooks can go a long way. Yes, eBooks, even for free, can certainly up your “expert” status several notches up, fast. When you publish eBooks, people will see you as someone with authority to talk about SEO. However, make sure that you know what you are talking about, as other experts in the field can look at your book and make very public criticisms. So be sure that what you’ve written is well-researched and well thought out.
Put your name in print. Aside from eBooks, you can publish articles online and offline to build up your expert status. You can post a blog on your business site, submit guest articles to other SEO sites, or even write about SEO for a local magazine.
Offer consultations for SEO matters. If you think you know enough, then you can offer consulting in your field of expertise. Again, seeing that you give out consultations (and getting good feedback at that) will put you in the eyes of many as an expert.
Sign up for an interview via Radio or Podcast. No, you don’t need to be Aaron Wall or Shoemoney just to be interviewed. Many shows allow people that have knowledge in specialized areas to be their guests in their talk shows. Plenty of opportunities exist for those who seek.
Yahoo provides excellent web services for geocoding which is precise and has a rich database of places around the world. Using this web service you can find latitude and longitude of any places. This web service comes with intelligence and is able to accept normal addresses. For example you can pass “White House, Washington”, “Beverly Hills” or “JFK Airport”. Beside that it has a very rich database compared to other available geocoding services like google. Today we will see how to use this API using PHP.
The access point of yahoo geocoding API is http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode and it takes two parameter to find the geo code of any place. These are
1. appid : Which is a unique identifier string of your application. Keep it a readable one. 2. location: This is the address of the place you are searching for
Lets have a look at the following PHP function. It can take any place as a parameter and return an array of latitude and longitude using this web service.
function getGeoCode($address) { $_url = 'http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode'; $_url .= sprintf('?appid=%s&location=%s',"DeveloperTutorials",rawurlencode($address)); $_result = false; if($_result = file_get_contents($_url)) { preg_match('!<Latitude>(.*)</Latitude><Longitude>(.*)</Longitude>!U', $_result, $_match); $lng = $_match[2]; $lat = $_match[1]; return array("lat"=>$lat,"lng"=>$lng,"address"=>$address); } else return false; }
When you call it like this
print_r(getGeoCode("White House"));
you will get the following output
Array ( [lat] => 38.897610 [lng] => -77.036377 [address] => White House )
Or if you pass “Buckingham Palace” you will get the following output
Array ( [lat] => 51.500919 [lng] => -0.141360 [address] => Buckingham palace )
With the web 2.0 craze finally taking hold of our employers, it seems everyone wants us to add some nifty Javascript to the web applications we build. Of course, we aren’t Javascript developers, we’re PHP developers, and given we have one of the most complex languages to work with ourselves, we’re all too familiar with the problems that can arise from not knowing how to achieve common tasks in a particular language.
With that in mind, Kevin van Zonneveld has for quite some time been working on the PHP.JS project, which aims to port a lot of common PHP functions we use regularly to Javascript. If you’ve ever been longing for the simplicty and high-level power of PHP in your Javascript, Kevin just saved your life. He’s got everything from base64_encode() to explode(), file_get_contents() to parse_str() and even soundex(). Check it out or dive right in to the source
