Now that you know what Google is looking for, you need to know what to put into these areas. As it stands, I have found out hard way that it is a must for you to use alt text and heading tags.

The text you need to insert into these areas would be most relevant search terms that surfers are typing into search engines that relate to that particular page. It's that easy! Not really but if you have not set your pages in this manner or if you are missing any one of combinations you might be loosing points from Google and other search engines page ranking system. There are plenty of tools on market that can help with page optimization. One of my favorites is Web Position Gold. Web Position Gold will generate pages that are automatically optimized. The program also has a tool called Page Critic which will analyze your existing pages and offer suggestions for better optimization. You can try program for free at http://www.nadmedia.net/store. If you have any questions about page optimization just give me an email, or read some of my other articles on page optimization at nadmedia.net. Happy page building!

If you want to go ahead and shorten URL even further, you can even use letters "F" and "L" instead of firstname and lastname.

For example, try this in your page:

And then use this URL (substituting with your correct URL, of course):

http://www.your.host/sales.php?f=Oscar&l=Grouch

The result is same. I think we want our URLs to look a little better, though.

The format I used in that above example was:

http://www.your.host/sales.php?f=Big&l=Bird

Now, problem with this is that this link looks really ugly. Another setback with this format is that anything to right of "?" won't be indexed by some of smaller search engines.

Here's a way to change this:

http://www.your.host/sales.php?f=Firstname&l=Lastname

To this:

http://www.your.host/sales.php/f=Firstname/l=Lastname

It's really easy. Just change your script to this:

$myvars = explode("/",$REQUEST_URI); for ($i=0;$iecho "$f $l";

?>

And in just a few lines of code, your personalized PHP script's URL just looked a whole lot better.

I won't bore you with details of what that script does, but it basically chops up URL you gave it and picks out pieces it wants using array exploding and variable-variables.

This snippet can also be used on almost any PHP script as well. (I used this method when I coded Brian Garvin's Lightning Track ad tracker... if you ever see a URL anywhere with "go.php/etc" in it, that's my script.)

Hopefully we all learned something today. This mini-tutorial was brought to you by letters "P-H-P."

Article by Robert Plank

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