Web Development

 by: Tom Worsley

Everyone has heard that content is king when it comes to search engine optimization and just good old plain web site marketing smarts. But how you present that content on your site can also make a world of difference.

PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language that lets you create dynamic web pages. PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages.

Now here is were it gets interesting. Search engines like Google Yahoo and MSN love fresh new content that is changing on a daily basis. But if you are using a java script snippet the search engines will not be able to read the content. If however you are using a PHP type script the content will automatically be transformed into HTML and the search engines will be able to pick it up and read it.

The first thing you will need to do before you jump onto the PHP bandwagon is to make sure your web host provider has PHP support. Most do but if you are only paying for basic services or using a free host you may have to pay for an upgrade. It’s well worth it trust me.

One of the best PHP based scripts you can add to any web site is the forum or bulletin board. Forums will take on a life of their own after several 100 members have joined and are posting threads on a daily basis. If 100 members seems like a lot think again. I have one work from home internet business forum and after just 2 month I already have over 70 members. Each time someone posts to the forum the HTML changes and the search engines treat it as new content.

Another great PHP script you can add is the link directory. You can actually set up a categorized reciprocal link directory with 20 links on each page and the process is completely automated. I have mine set up so that I have to approve each link first but if you want you could by pass this so that once your script is set up the directory will just start to grow all on its own with no additional work on your part. Again each time someone adds a new link you HTML page is changing. Make sure you add categories that are relative to your main theme. My directory for example has categories for work from home , internet business and business opportunities because that’s what my web site is all about. Also make sure you have added instructions on how they can link back to you. This is the reason why I like to approve all my liks first. No reciprocal link back to my site NO directory listing.

PHP can also be used for blogging. Wordpress is one of the most popular PHP script based blogging tools. I have not used Wordpress but I do use blogger for all my blogging. A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". With a blog or web log you can make daily posts on almost any subject matter creating new content for the search engines to crawl. To date Yahoo seems to be giving a bit of an edge to all my blogs incuding my work form home internet business news site. Ironically most of the post on that blog come from yahoo and or Google news. This is a great way to get free content on a daily basis for your blog. Just go to Google news or yahoo news and type in the keywords you are using for your blog. Each day there will be a new news article that you can legally use on your blog.

There are many more PHP scripts that you can use on your website to automatically create fresh new content with. The ones listed above are the ones I have downloaded for free and installed to my web host. If you are not using PHP now is a good time to get started.