PHP Convert String SEO Friendly

This tutorial explains how to create SEO friendly URL using PHP. Friendly URLs improves your site's search engines ranking. To make a SEO friendly URL a string must be sanitized for certain things like...

• URL should be in lower case
• All spaces should be replaced with a dash or hyphen (-)
• URL must only contains letters and numbers.
• NO HTML is allowed.

I found a very quick and clean way to do this.

function Make_SEO_Friendly_URL($string)
{
  // replace all non letters or digits with -
  $string = preg_replace('/\W+/', '-', $string);

  // trim and lowercase
  $string = strtolower(trim($string, '-'));
  return $string;
}

Example

$string="making String SEO Friendly with PHP is easy, isnt?";

echo Make_SEO_Friendly_URL($string);

//OUTPUT
making-string-seo-friendly-with-php-is-easy-isnt

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What is Google PageRank

PageRank algorithm developed by Larry Page, hence Page Rank, is a link analysis algorithm mostly refferd to as Google PageRank. It allot a numerical weight to every element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the world wide web, with the intetion of calculating the importance of a document within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.

It is a known fact that Google assigns every single website page a Google Page rank, which is based on a PageRank algorithm. Pages are ranked on a scale with zero as the lowest and ten as the highest. Interlinking of websites – external as well as inter – holds value so far as PageRank is concerned.

Google View

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance

How it Works

If the site X links to the site Y, the latter gets credited with a percentage of Site X’s Page Rank which kind of gets passed cover to it. The Site X loses nothing so far as Page Rank is concerned – unless and until the link is to a bad neighborhood or a banned area.

An example to understand the situation better. Site X had a Page Rank of 5, there were only 2 outbound links to Site X. One of the outbound Links was intended to brand new Site Y. Brand new Site Y had 4 outgoing links, with NO other Incoming Links, apart from the one from Site X. Google awarded Site Y a Page Rank of 5.

From this example in real life, it is evident that fewer outbound links on a per page basis means a higher Page Rank.

If Site X in the above example had a huge amount of outgoing links on the page, in that case the percentage of Page Rank passed would have been smaller and the New Site Y would have received a lower rank than the equal rank that was passed.

What it mean

• PageRank tells how important a page is, relatively speaking, compared to other pages.
• PageRank is just one of MANY ranking factors used to determine ranking in search results.
• High PageRank does NOT guarantee a high search ranking for any particular term. If it did, then PR10 sites like Adobe would always show up for any search you do. They don’t.
• The anchor text of a link is often far more important than whether it’s on a high PageRank page.
• If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for. See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best

How to get Hight PageRank

Page Rank improves over time. Though not very often, Google does update the Page Rank, once in say every four to eight months. So link exchange with like-themed sites or quality sites is the best possible SEO strategy.

While engaging in reciprocal linking, make sure you check the amount of outbound links that not only the page has but the overall site as well. Search engines such as Google doesn’t like pornography sites, gambling sites and Link Farms that have thousands of links on them. Unless that is your business, don’t link to any of those types of sites.

You can lose Page Rank and Search Engine Results if you link to sites that are considered Bad Neighborhoods or are Banned. Be alert and make sure you check before linking. Though sometimes you may not be “punished”, you won’t be gaining any benefits and the loss in PR of your site is not at all worth it.

Be aware of which sites the outbound links are linking your site to. Check your outbound links from time to time, ensuring that they are:

• Still an active website
• Still a resource for the reason you linked to them in the first place
• They have not changed formats or the theme and continue to be a quality site.

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Types of SEO

SEO comes in three flavors.Some better than others:

1. Search Engine Optimization
Ensuring that your code and content is appropriately organized and easy for search engines to interpret accurately.
2. Search Engine Exaggeration
Reinforcing your desired keywords through frequent repetition, hidden keywords, etc
3. Search Engine Deception
Creating content, pages, etc., that aren’t intended for human consumption, but are instead designed only to pull in search engine traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO means that you’ve accurately portrayed your website’s content through clean code*, wellwritten content*, and wellorganized web sites*.

All of these practices will not only help your readers better understand your site, they’ll also help search engines index and interpret your site well, which in turn leads to better rankings.

Focus on: Relevance

User-centered (as opposed to engine-centered) SEO will never go out of style. Google has an army of scientists analyzing ways to determine the quality of web site content, and the most effective long-term method for looking relevant to their algorithms is simply to be relevant.

Search Engine Exaggeration

This is where things start to get a bit shady. Onceyou realize how search engines work, there’s a great temptation to give them what they want by pumping up the keywords in your text, adding hidden keywords on your pages, etc.

The problem with this approach is that search engines know people do this, and they’re continually working on ways to identify and eliminate it. Remember “meta tags”? Site owners used to pump these full of keywords in order to get more search traffic, until the search engines caught on and dramatically reduced their importance in the ranking process.

If you build your site around the idea that you can throw on some cologne instead of taking a shower, you can only get so far before every realizes you’re just posing. How often have you searched for something, and then clicked through on the top results only to find a junk page crammed with keywords but little useful content? Did you stick around? Did you buy anything?

It’s an issue of quality vs. quantity. You might be able to increase your hits, but you’ll receive a lower percentage of conversions because your pages don’t match the
expectations held by users clicking through from search engines.

Search Engine Deception

It’s easy to be lured into the trap of flat-out lying to search engines. This is the realm of link farms, content generators, gateway pages, blog comment spam, and
other practices that ignore users’ needs (i.e., relevant, well-organized content) and instead focus on doing whatever it takes to get people in the door.

The most significant problem with these techniques is that search engines are becoming increasingly adept in their attempts to detect them, and violating the terms set out by the engines can (and often does) result in sites being severely penalized in their rankings, or in the worst cases, becoming blacklisted (a search engine’s way of removing your site from search results entirely).

Because search engines are constantly updating their ranking criteria, what works today may bite you in the butt tomorrow. Be very wary of practices that exploit currentsearch engine weakness, particularly if your business depends on your website, because you never know when they’re going to find out and come after you.

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How Search Engine Works

Understanding how search engines works, how they see a website is very important for anyone who want to learn and do SEO. Search Engines, marvelous human creations, mainly does four things...

1. Crawling
2. Building an Index
3. Calculation relevancy and rankings
4. Serving Results

Crawling

Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system.Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other document types). Search engines need a way to "crawl" the entire path to a stop, they user best paths for their route to the stop i.e. links

Through link search engine's automated robots also know as "crwalers" or "spiders", they reach to billions of interconnected pages or documents.

Indexing

Once the engines find these pages, their next job is to parse the code from them and store selected pieces of the pages in massive hard drives, to be recalled when needed in a query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engines have constructed massive data-centers in cities all over the world.

These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing unimaginably large quantities of information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results immediately even a couple of seconds delay can cause dissatisfaction so the search engines work hard to provide answers as fat as possible.

Calculation relevancy & rankings

Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users’ satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.

Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually (and thank goodness, because those trillions of man-hours would require earth’s entire population as a workforce). Instead, the engines craft careful, mathematical equations – algorithms – to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat’s value). These algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field, we often refer to them as "ranking factors".

Serving Results

When a person searches for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things – first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived value (or importance). It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of search engine optimization is meant to influence.

To the search engines, relevance means more than simply having a page with the words you searched for prominently displayed. In the early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and found that their results suffered as a consequence. Thus, through iterative evolution, smart engineers at the various engines devised better ways to find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, hundreds of factors influence relevance.

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Understanding Google Page Rank

An excellent guide how Google page rank works form zippycart.com, must to understand for web developers especially for Search Engine Optimizers...

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