Setup a quick Yahoo Search page within a few minutes!

A few days ago the “old” Google web search API has stopped working for the web public. Not a big surprise after the release of the AJAX web search API. A customer of mine is using search results in his mini sites to give them a little more body. This is why I needed to look for some alternative. During the Zend PHP conference earlier this year, I got in touch with the Zend framework and learned that there is already a class to obtain results from the Yahoo search engine. The class has features to search the Yahoo API for web sites, image, news and the local search results.

Installing the library

I decided some time before to use the classes from the Zend framework for future projects because the classes are well written in PHP5. If you like to do the same you should install the lib on a central place on your web server to get access to the framework from all your websites. After uploading the files I added this row to .htaccess file for the website I’m working on:

php_value include_path ".:/home/mylocation_for_zend_framework/"

This way you’re able to access the classes without to think about the class paths. Of course you are free to add this include path to the php.ini file or to your apache configuration. Read the rest of this entry »

If you plan to sell physical products, digital products or even a large number of services from your website, you might be considering setting up a shopping cart. Many large eTailers offer checkout solutions for their websites, and as the internet has grown more “mature”, there are an increasing number of shopping cart solutions available.

However, before outright buying a shopping cart system for your website, there is something that you should consider. Mainly, whether you will run the shopping cart from your website or whether you will purchase, or “rent”, a shopping cart system from a third party website.

Remotely hosted shopping cart solution

Usually a hosted shopping cart solution requires little technical knowhow and less setup time than a shopping cart that you would run from your own website. Other than adding products, defining prices and setting up the shopping cart template, if this is an option, you’ll be up and running in a few days to as little as a few hours.

Some hosted shopping cart solutions offer optional marketing packages which may (or may not) help you drive targeted traffic to your shopping website. While these all-in-one shopping cart packages are normally pricey, they can certainly help the new online shop to get the most out of their new website right away without having to take the time to learn how to market on their own. Read the rest of this entry »

Like a lot of other weblogs this “Web Development Blog” has lost today 2 points in PageRank (went from 5 to 3). A week ago I had the idea that this blog will get a PR6 based on the information I got via the Google webmaster tools. After reading about PR drops from Andy Beard, Tim Nash, Darren Rowse and several others I noticed that all of them (including me) thought the reason could be some link sales. So maybe all of us tried to sell a link some time ago?

Text Link Ads

I think most of all websites with content for webmasters link to this website because they pay $money for referrals and I saw a lot of high quality blogs on their “Link Market Place”. Maybe is the affiliation with TLA is the reason for lot of this PR drops. TLA has a PR zero since several weeks and was maybe one of the first sites getting a PR drop (edit: they got a penalty from Google, you can’t find them on their company name). I remember me that TLA has send us new affiliate links using a TinyURL; some action to safe what was left? I removed my website from the TLA market place because I never earned something and also the prices from my TLA competitors are so high that I can’t believe that there are a lot of people making the “big” money there. I know some webdev site with a PR6 (or 7) was selling links for several hundred $ a month, this website has a PR 4 now. Read the rest of this entry »

Effectively marketing your website for better exposure to search engines, or search engine marketing (SEM), has certainly changed over the years. From the days when keyword focused Meta tags were the de-facto method to grab top rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) to the recent days, and today still, when most major engines weigh the value of incoming links more heavily than any on page factors in their ranking algorithms; there’s been big changes in the methods used by website owners to take hold of their fair share of visitors from the major search engines. Today, there’s a new twist being thrown into the search engine marketing game, and that’s come about with the new concept of blended search results.

Blended search - mixing multiple media types with natural listings

It doesn’t really matter which major search engine you’ve decided to use as your portal to the World Wide Web; Google, Yahoo, Ask or MSN, they all have something in common. Something besides the obvious, that is. These major search engines, who grab nearly 100% of the daily search engine user base worldwide, are all starting to offer their own forms of blended search results. Instead of the plain-old text based website listings that used to be displayed when performing a search, users are seeing related images, blog posts, links to news stories, related videos and a whole slew of other topically related media attached to these searches. Read the rest of this entry »