When a user got his web hosting account with PHP and mySQL support, then he/she can easily do free programming and scripts so as to enjoy the benefit of their powerful combined capabilities.

Generally all the web hosting providers either paid or free always add some free pre-installed scripts to their customers in the way of guest books, counters and calendars. The users who are searching around can find out the toys and bells and whistles that they can install on their web pages including hundreds of scripts and applications. The user can set up one of dozens of forums, which they can choose from many image galleries and photo albums, and also can serve classified ads, offering auction listings and dating services - in brief just about everything the user can do on the Internet, and also about what he/she can do with a free PHP script from his/her web hosting provider.

There are many free services but one of the best free services to look for is Fantastico, which is a web-based script installer that allows user to add any of dozens of free goodies to his/her web site and that is just by a click of a mouse. If the web hosting provider offers Fantastico with its hosting accounts, user can get access to over a dozen different content management systems, half a dozen user forums, several different blog packages, shopping carts, including Zen Cart and OS Commerce, an easy FAQ maker and six different customer support options so as to enable user to offer help and support on his/her web site.

Two of the handiest types of free tools that many web hosting companies offer for free are:

Portals and Content Management Systems

They make easy for the user to add and remove pages and information to and from their web site. Most of them include modules that allows user to add discussion boards, shopping carts, polls and instant messaging, as well as user authentication and security to his/her web site easily. Mambo, Post-Nuke, Xoops and Drupal are among the content management systems that webhosting company are offering for free. All are open source software with a lot of user support beyond the support offered by user’s web hosting company. Thus there are always new modules and new tricks being offered for all of them.

Blogs

Blogs are online publishing tools by which the user can easily update their website whenever he/she wants. They automatically put the latest entries up and move older entries down in the reading queue. WordPress is one of the most commonly used, which many web hosting providers include as a free setup script with users web hosting account. Thus one should always try to avail all the perks being offered by the web host providers.

Website is related to Business - Finance and Investment. I need to find “free” directories that relate to the listed topic. Where the link is to be placed must have a page rank of 1 or better. Any ideas how to find these directories?

Creating keyword rich website pages is the key to optimizing your site for search engines and getting higher search engine ranking. Keyword rich pages are pages that fulfil two criteria:

1. They offer the reader valuable content

2. They contain specific keywords that are interspersed throughout the pages several number of times to ensure that the pages get top ranking for those particular keywords.

If your company deals with marketing packaged tours to Singapore, ideally you would want to target the keyword-phrase “Book a Cruise”in the title tag, the meta-description tag, the meta-keyword tag and the page body. Here’s how you would go about creating your Keyword rich pages to get the desired result.

Title Tag

An appropriate title tag is of utmost importance. It needs to be search engine friendly so that it catches the eye of the spider. Using the keyword phrase at the beginning of the title tag increases its search engine ranking exponentially. The title tag also needs to be catchy enough for human readers, because that is the name they will see displayed on the page that lists the results of their search.

For your site, “Book a Cruise and sail the wide open seas” could be an appropriate title tag. It places the keyword at the beginning of the title tag and also gives the reader a quick glimpse into what to expect. You would of course have to choose a title tag that is most appropriate to the content on your site.

Meta Description Tag

Search engines use the Meta description tag to offer readers a brief introduction to the content matter of the site. The criteria for choosing a Meta description tag for your page is the same as that for choosing a title tag. The Meta description tag for your site could go something like this “Book a Cruise- We make all the necessary arrangements keeping your requirements in mind”.

It meets the search engine requirements and also gives the reader a little more information than the title tag.

Meta Keywords Tag

The importance of Meta keywords tag for search engine optimization has been steadily decreasing. Several sites manage to achieve top rankings even in the absence of Meta keywords tag. However it does not hurt to include one; it could increase your chances of achieving a higher ranking. The rules for Meta Keywords can be summed up thus:

1. A keyword should not be repeated more than twice in the Meta keywords tag

2. Keywords should not follow each other simultaneously

One of the choices for your Meta keywords tag for your site could be - “Book a cruise, sail the seas; book a cruise, see the whales and dolphins, BOOK A CRUISE”

Body of the page

There are several ways of optimizing the body of the page for higher search engine rankings:

- Get an appropriate picture that is just the right size; neither too large nor too small.

- The picture’s Alt tag should have the keyword featured just once.

- The Alt tag could feature only the key word phrase or you could add a few extra words if you wished.

- Create an appropriate heading using the H1 tag.

- Depending on your purpose you would have to design the page to either re-direct the visitors to another site or perhaps expound the benefits of whatever program the website owner is an affiliate of.

- The first few lines of the text should attract the attention of internet surfers.

- Ensure that plenty of sentences feature the keyword phrase in a natural manner.

- Keep your paragraphs short.

- Get reciprocal links from relevant sites.

I doing SEO for a large site (20+ pages). What are the best practices in regards to the sub-pages of the site? Should I put keywords for sub-pages, and if yes how similar can they be to my home page keywords? What about description and page title, how long should those be and how similar to the home page? Is there anything else that can be done for SEO optimization?

You might have not given it much thought, but the browser your website is viewed on can completely change its appearance. Today there are two main types of browsers: Internet Explorer and Firefox. The purpose of this week’s article is not to get you to change over to Firefox, listing about why it has tabbed browsing, blocks popups, and is generally more stable. No, today we will discuss how the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox affect your website.

If you haven’t recognized yet by the tone of this email, Internet Explorer 6 (IE 7 is getting better) is a curse on browsing the internet. Besides being a regular target for hackers and bugs, IE has a difficult time loading webpages the way they should be displayed. If you are designing a standard website with flat images you’re fine for the most part, but as soon as you start trying to work with transparent images, or arrangements of images that make your site look polished, Internet Explorer puts the caibosh on your dreams of layered images by filling in any transparent screen with an ugly gray box.

Also if you ever want to line up your site’s content using tables and you would like to left justify your content, sometimes IE doesn’t recognize this and centers all your content until you go into the code and figure it out. Firefox, on the other hand is great, it shows the page the way it was made to be seen, without silly images glitches and the like.

I know that many of you are saying to yourselves: “but hey! aren’t there are other browsers out there like Netscape or Safari?” Basically they are all falling in line with Firefox’s platform and are far less used than Firefox or IE. The stark facts remain, until Microsoft stops installing IE on applications of windows, we will continue to have cross-browser conflicts. At present, 54% of the visitors to QTweb.ca use Internet Explorer.

So what does that mean for you and your website? Not a heck of a lot, if you are a client of QT Web Designs - since we constantly check your website against defects on all current and past versions of major browsers and try to build your site in a way that is accessible and consistent for all. Contact us today if you would like us to see how your site works across several different browser platforms. If you are designing a site yourself, our best advice is to always preview your site on multiple browsers since you never know how it might translate.

For more information about QT Web Designs or our products visit us online at www.qtweb.ca