SEO_SERIES_9_Understanding keyword distribution

- Keyword distribution is the process of assigning keywords to specific pages on your website.This is an important step in the content creation process and results in the content on a page being aligned and relevant to the keyword you're targeting for that page. You can't have an optimized page unless you know what keyword you're optimizing it for. Once you've identified all your target keywords through the keyword research process, we found that working in Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet program allows you to create this mapping of keywords to the pages in your site structure in an organized way.

And it has the added benefit of keeping a record of which pages are targeting which keywords to refer back to in the future. Of course, you'll be listing out all the current pages of your website. But keep in mind that for many of your target keywords you won't yet have a page and you'll need to create one. By using a spreadsheet, you can easily see where in your site's architecture you'll want to put it, and define some key pieces of information about it before you even start writing. Here's an example of a spreadsheet that we've created for a fictitious sample winery.

Feel free to format your spreadsheet any way you like, but there are some common fields here that you should include. Down the left-hand side, we like to use cells or tabbing to show us the hierarchy of the various sections and pages of our site. As you can see, for each page, we have a column for the keyword that we'll be targeting with the page,the URL of the page, the title tag, the meta description, and the H1 header. We've even used Excel's length function to count our characters so that we can see how close we are to our general targets.

Again, our target of 65 characters for a title and 156 characters for a description, are not hard limits by any means. But they're guidelines that will avoid search engines truncating this information on the search engine results page. The first step is to populate the spreadsheet with your existing web pages. Be sure to include every page of your site including your home page, your about page, your location page, your contact page, and any other general kinds of content pages. Remember, search engines want to see unique information for each and every page and listing them all out here is a good way to quickly spot any duplication.

The second step is to take a look at the keyword from your keyword research list and find the most appropriate pages of your site for each of the keywords. You should make sure to try to distribute one keyword per page and not try to force anything. Remember, search engines prefer unique and relevant content. So, if you have a keyword that doesn't match any page of your site, you want to just create a new page.When you add a new page to your spreadsheet, the good news is that you have a blank canvas.

You can define the SEO-friendly URL, title, description, and header right here in the spreadsheet and that will define this new page of content writing that content out when you know the keyword you're optimizing for upfront allows you to really dial in on all the best practices of content writing for keywords that we'll be covering. Remember, the meat of each page is the body copy and you'll probably need to go back through your existing pages to make sure that they're really optimized for the keyword you've defined as a target. Now that you got your target keyword in mind, now is a pretty good time to head over to one of the on-page analysis tools that we'll talk about a bit later in the course.

The suggestions from these tools can really help guide the changes you'll be making to your pages. Using a keyword distribution spreadsheet will help you in a number of different ways. First, it gives you one place to organize and document the contents of your site that will support the keywords you're targeting. Second, it serves as an excellent resource for your copywriters and will help streamline workflows across all the different members of your website production team. And treating this as a living document will ensure that you can quickly adapt to the changing nature of the search landscape and keep your content strategy on track month after month and year after year.on track month after month and year after year.

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SEO_SERIES_8_Understanding keyword attributes

- There's an enormous amount of data available to us about the keywords that people are typing into search engines, and it's important to be able to evaluate the different attributes of a keyword before we decide whether or not to target one with our SEO strategy. There are three things you'll need to consider when choosing your keywords; relevance, search volume, and competition. Let's start with relevance. The first thing you need to do when you're deciding whether a keyword is relevant to your business is to ask yourself one simple question. Does the keyword you found accurately reflect the nature of the products and services you offer? If so, you've probably nailed it.

The number one objective of a search engine is to find and deliver the most relevant content to its users for a given search term. The best way to understand your customers' search behavior is to put yourself in their shoes. Remember the NOKIA example we looked at earlier in this SERIES? If you were in the market to buy a NOKIA, how would you use a search engine? You probably would not go to Google and type the word NOKIA in and click Search. Instead, you'd probably refine your search down to something very specific that narrows down what you're looking for, maybe like used 2013 NOKIA.

Now, if you're an organization that's selling 2013 used NOKIA 123, and you have a page on your website dedicated to them, then that's a relevant keyword. The best part about relevant keywords is that they're much more likely to drive conversion actions on your website than more generic ones. The second item to look at is search volume. While a used 2013 NOKIA 123 might be extremely relevant to your business and likely to lead to a sale, it's also not typed into a search engine that often.

Search volume is the number of searches per month for a particular keyword. If you use a tool like the Google Keyword Planner, it's represented as the average number of searches for the last 12 months. Because this number is a rolling average, seasonality and other trend patterns are not accounted for. So if your business is seasonal, you'll want to take a look at the Search Volume Trends feature in the Keyword Planner, or even Google Trends when you're analyzing your keywords. Now, let's have a look at competition, and what we mean by that is essentially just how difficult it's going to be for us to rank in front of our competition on a search engine results page.

on a search engine results page. Unless you're introducing a new product or technology to the market, then you're probably going to find content similar to yours already out there on the web,and we can look at things like the number of pages about a given topic or authority and trust of the websites competing with you, backlinks to their sites and more, and there are some great paid tools out there that can help you really dig into some of these competitive metrics like Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool. Let's type in three varying levels of specificity here for this NOKIA theme. for this NOKIA theme. This tool makes it easy for us to see that trade-off between volume and competition. We can even drill deeper into the SERP analysis reports to get a feel for the competitive aspects of the pages that are currently ranking for these terms. This kind of analysis can give us a gut check, and a realistic look at just what it would take for us to rank for a keyword that we're researching. But even without a paid tool like this one, one way to look at competition is by evaluating the keyword in the paid search, or the cost-per-click markets.

The number of search advertisers actively bidding on a keyword can be a good proxy for just how difficult a keyword is going to be on the organic side. The Google Keyword Planner has a competition column that shows you this. While the interface gives you only low, medium, or high ratings, as a little trick if you download the list, you'll actually get a much more accurate number on a zero to one scale for the competition metric. And don't forget to use the sort and filter functions of Excel to find more of those long-tail, less competitive, and extremely relevant keywords.

less competitive, and extremely relevant keywords. Let's tie it all together by going back over this quick example with respect to the three pillars of keyword research; relevance, volume, and competition. We saw how terms like used 2013 NOKIA 123 would actually be considered much more relevant to a company selling 2013 NOKIA 123 than a generic word like NOKIA, or used NOKIA. And on the competition side, we also saw just how competitive those generic terms are. We also saw clearly the trade-off between search volume against relevance and competition.

and competition. Hopefully, you're now seeing that for many organizations, finding lots and lots of these specific types of keywords that don't get a lot of search volume, but are very relevant can be a solid strategy to guide their SEO efforts. Often, if you add up all those relevant less competitive keywords together, you'll find that you can be attracting lots and lots of highly relevant, likely-to-convert visitors to your website. So let your competitors spend all their budgets going after the keyword NOKIA, and used NOKIA, and let your keyword research be your guide as you balance how to get as much relevant search volume as you possibly can with the least competition. with the least competition.

SEO_SERIES_7_Tools to help you analyze keywords

- Now that we understand the basics around how we conduct keyword research let's dive into the tools that will help us find more keywords and collect all the data we need. While there are quite a few tools out there perhaps the one that gets the most use is the Google Keyword Planner. Not only does this tool provide a good measure on search volume but improvements on keyword suggestion has made it a more favorable keyword research tool in the SEO community and the best part about it is that it's free. An AdWords account is required to get access to the Keyword Planner so even if you have to plans to use Google AdWords for advertising purposes you can sign up for a free account and never spend a dime.

From AdWords you can then access the Keyword Planner from the tools drop down. After you log in to the Keyword Planner you'll be presented with four options. For our Keyword research purposes we're going to click on the first option, search for new keywords and ad groups.Before we do a search though, let's take a look at some of the options we have available to us.Geographically you can choose to see data for the entire world or just the locations you select.And you can also choose the language of your keyword results. There are plenty of other options and features here too like a negative keywords filter that lets you tell Google which keywords not to include in your results.

tell Google which keywords not to include in your results. And you can also choose to filter your results for things like certain levels of competition or a specific search volumes. Under keyword filters though you'll want to select "Only show ideas closely "related to my search terms," which will ensure that we're getting data that's really relevant for the keywords we're researching. Now we're ready to get started and there are a few ways we can do it. For now though we'll keep things simple and just type in "NOKIA cases" and click on "Get ideas."Clicking on the Keyword ideas tab as you can see the Google Keyword Planner is a great suggestion tool.

is a great suggestion tool. From this one term we start to discover that people are also searching for things like best NOKIA cases, cheap NOKIA cases, and Speck NOKIA cases.And we can also see just how many times these words are getting typed into Google. And note that if you've used any of the location filters the average monthly searches will only show data for the locations you've selected. Right from this tool you can also download a list of the raw data in csv format where you can work with the keywords offline in a tool like Excel.

in a tool like Excel. And it's important to remember that this tool was developed for AdWords advertisers and there are more options that we haven't talked about here that have more to do with paid search advertising through the AdWords network and not necessarily organic SEO. But I'd encourage you to spend some time with this tool and dig around more lots and lots of keyword ideas and data. Another great tool to get even more information about a keyword is Google Trends which can be found at google.com/trends/explore.

This lets you type in different keywords and see all kinds of information about how that keyword is being typed into Google searches over time. At the top of the page you can filter this data by the type of search, geography, time period, and even category. Let's stick NOKIA cases in here and see what we can learn. Here we see a graph of how this term has been searched for over the years, along with key pieces of news that can help us figure out what might have caused certain spikes or troughs. Well there's been a pretty good upward trend over the years across the world.

over the years across the world. Let's get a little more specific and select just the UK for the last 12 months and let's compare it to the singular version of this keyword, "NOKIA case".." Here we can see exactly when our demand picked up and we can see that more people are typing in the singular version than the plural. Scrolling down we can see state by state interest through the heat map and below that we can even get more keyword ideas in the top and rising searches section. Putting some of these back into the Google Keyword Planner can start a whole new iteration of research.

can start a whole new iteration of research. Using tools like the Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends allow us to discover new keywords and understand just what people are typing into search engines. This exploration and data collection is the backbone of our keyword research process and can provide us with wonderful insights and ideas around which keywords we'll focus on as part of our SEO strategy.

SEO_SERIES_6_How to research keywords

- Everyone will eventually develop their own approach and process to doing keyword research, and you'll ultimately need to find something that works for you. But the most important part of keyword research is to forget about you and your business and put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. The process typically begins with brainstorming and answering some key questions. This stage is important from an organizational perspective because it will force you to look at different areas of your business. Start with answering, what services do you offer? Be as comprehensive as possible and list out as many keywords and phrases as you can.

But make sure that you do it from a customer's perspective. As people who work in our business as every single day, we might have a very different way of explaining our products and services. Take for example, a discount travel website. You might be tempted to write down keywords like high-value air transport and G76 eligible discount ticket, but at the end of the day, no one in the world is typing that into a search engine. While those things make sense to you, your customers are looking for cheap flights.

Well brainstorming can get you started. We'll look at some tools that can find and suggest similar keywords and expand your list of possibilities considerably. Once you've got that list of potential keywords, the next thing you'll need to do is take look at search volume metrics and see what kind of a demand there is for those phrases. As you do this, you'll notice that while a handful of keywords get typed in thousands and thousands of times per day, there are a whole lot more that don't get typed in nearly as often. These might be more descriptive keywords or less common variations but the important thing to note is that these are known as long-tail keywords.

is that these are known as long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords in SEO are incredibly useful.They let us go after a much larger amount of less competitive keywords that tend to be extremely relevant to our business objectives. And while individually there's not a lot of search volume on each individual term, they each do have some search volume. For example, if I were selling iPhone cases, I may start looking into the keyword iPhone cases, a term that gets typed into search engines a lot. It's extremely competitive and it's probably going to be very difficult to rank for.

going to be very difficult to rank for. But I might also take a look at more long-tail keywords like blue iPhone 5s cases. It's going to be extremely relevant, less competitive and easier to rank for at the expense of raw search volume. But here's the important part. You might be able to find hundreds or thousands of these long-tail keywords that together have the potential to get you more traffic than ranking for iPhone cases would have from the start. Finally, you want to add some meaning and organization around the keywords that you've collected.

You can do this by identifying themes or topics to group your keywords around, a process known as keyword categorization. Back to the example with the blue iPhone case. We may want to create a group that will just be about blue iPhone cases, that includes all the different models of the iPhone. Alternatively, we could categorize these not by phone model but instead by color. There's no right or wrong way to do this, only the way that works for you and allows you to manage these groups of keywords as you optimize for them.

SEO_SERIES_5_Why you need a keyword-research plan

- Before you can optimize your website, you need to know what you're optimizing for. Finding the right key words to focus your SEO efforts on can be challenging. But fortunately, there's a lot of data out there and a structured approach that we can use for our keyword research.Keywords are what searchers type into a search engine. Search engines like Google and Bingwill go out and fetch the most relevant results for your search query based on everything they know about you and all the content on the entire internet. But it's important to remember that search engines have a hard time understanding what a user is really after unless it's really spelled out.

it's really spelled out. This is why you've probably followed up one search with another more descriptive search, more than a few times in your life. You try one key word, but it doesn't give you just what you're looking for. So you get more specific or you try it another way. The bottom line, is that people all over the world, are typing in all kinds of key words, every second, of every hour, of every day. And it's important for us to understand what they type in so that we can optimize our pages to be in the search results for those terms. Formal keyword research is the foundational piece in SEO that will help you understand what people are typing into search engines, how frequently they do it, how relevant those terms are to your business objectives,and how competitive those terms will be to try to rank for it.

will be to try to rank for it. Let's take an example. Say you sell mobile. You might think that the key word "mobile" is something that you want to rank for. But after you've done a little keyword research, you'll probably find that it won't make your list. Why? Well, even though that word gets typed into search engines with a very high frequency, think about its relevance. How many reasons could someone type the word "mobile" into a search engine? They might be looking for toys or a place for repairs or a rental car. Any one of hundreds of things that have nothing to do with actually buying a mobile.

nothing to do with actually buying a mobile. And think of all the people out there that are also trying to rank for the word "mobile" in the search engines. This is an extremely competitive term.A phrase like, "buy used NOKIA", might not get typed in as much, but it's extremely relevant and probably not that competitive. Keywords like this will very likely end upon your list of keywords to optimize for. Now that we understand a bit more about keywords and keyword research, it's time to talk about planning.

An effective keyword research plan involves having a sound and structured approach that will lead to the discovery of keywords that you can use in the content of your website. Ultimately, a keyword research plan will give you the data you need to make decisions about which keywords will give you the biggest bang for your buck and have the highest likelihood of being both relevant and profitable for your business. With billions of queries searched each month,it's important that we understand the goals of the keyword research, what we're looking for, and how we collect and analyze that data to make decisions on our website.

SEO_SERIES_4_How SEO affects your business

- If you are a business, there are some very real and specific benefits to having a consistent,ongoing search engine optimization strategy. For the first time in the history of marketing, users are offering up their actual intent through the words that they type into search engines. And more than ever before, you can measure the results of your SEO efforts as a marketing channel.While search engines don't charge you for listing your web pages, planning and implementing SEO in your organization is certainly not free. You'll need to spend the time, money, and resources to do this the right way.

The good news is that this can help you obtain a tremendous marketing reach, attract more targeted visitors, and measure the impact of your efforts in terms of a return on your investment.More and more content appears on the web every second of every day. And your customers need search engines to help make sense of it all. In fact, the bigger the web gets, the more search engine usage continues to grow. People search to find answers to their questions. To buy products, to find a place to eat, to book their travel, to get their news.

Just about everything we do online starts with a search. And it's not just done around the family PC anymore. The explosion of connected mobile and tablet devices means that we have access to search just about everywhere in the world. What people search for says a lot about their intentions, or what actions they intend to do or take at some specific moment in time. And this has been traditionally the holy grail of marketing research. If someone searches for "IPHONE," or "where to buy a iphone," it's very easy as a marketer to understand exactly what they're looking for.

The role of search engines is to match those user search queries to pages that match that topic.And if you sell cameras, well, what that means to you, is that you can create relevant content that meets the needs of the searcher at exactly the right moment. Good SEO can essentially provide you a stream of some of the most targeted, intentional traffic that you could possibly ask for. But more than that, one of the biggest benefits of search engine optimization is the ability to actually measure your results. You can use your website analytics data to find out exactly how successful you are in acquiring search engine users.

And you can see if those user's actions are in line with your business goals. You can evaluate the effectiveness of your content in attracting and advancing the users through your sales funnel, and you can measure what they do and what they don't do on your website and beyond.By attaching real dollars,ruppes and cents to those actions that began with a simple search, you'll be able to truly measure return on your investment from the SEO channel.

SEO_SERIES_3_Setting SEO expectations

- Search Engine Optimization is a process that requires a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of patience. Throughout this SEO SERIES, we'll dive in to more about how to do SEO. But before that, it's important to set some expectations. SEO is a bit different than other marketing strategies and understanding these differences will help us to stay on course for running and measuring a successful SEO campaign. Patience is a virtue. And that couldn't be more true than with SEO. Approach this as a long term process that builds long term value.

There's a reason that all those rank-number-one-in-Google-tomorrow scams are called scams. It takes time to develop and execute on your strategy. Research your keywords, create new unique content, build more links and authority, and to resolve any technical issues with your site. And it's a never ending process. There's always work to be done. SEO is not a one time project. It's a process that you'll continue for the long haul. You also wanna keep in mind that search engines don't necessarily interact with your website immediately.

It takes them time to discover changes to your content, new links to your pages, and overall structure of your website. And it will take them more time to put all those factors and their algorithms to re-assess your relevancy and authority before those changes are reflected in the search results. Being patient and true to your strategy will help you stay focused on the SEO process that you will have laid out. Another thing to expect with SEO is change within the search engines. And it's important to realize and accept that we have no control over this.

Search engines are always trying to improve their product to help deliver results that people want. And they're always trying new things. Sometimes, these changes are algorithmic. Other changes are more about features or different ways of presenting different kinds of contents to users. Search engines will keep making changes to enhance the experience for their users. So it's in our best interest to work with these changes as best we can. But one of the biggest expectations for a successful SEO campaign is to realize that you're really optimizing for two audiences; the search engine and real human beings.

It's really easy to focus in on what we think the search engines will like about our site, but the real audience that generates business on your website are people. While they may never find us if we don't show up on a search engine results page, it's people that drive the bottom line. The fortunate thing is that the search engines know that. Search engines have the ultimate goal to generate search results that people will find useful and helpful. If you build your authority and create content that's interesting to people, and if you do it in a way that's friendly to the computerized audience as well, the long term and consistent goal of the search engines is to reward that.

SEO_SERIES_2_Reading search engine result pages

- Before we dive into working on getting your website to show up in the search results, it's important to understand what those search results actually look like. Although there are a lot of search engines around the world, and they all have some distinct differences, there are some common characteristics that their Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs may have. One thing that were going to probably find are some paid listings. Paid listings are very different than the traditional organic, or natural listings that we'll be focusing on for our SEO efforts. These paid listings are actually advertisements, and programs like Google's AdWords or Microsoft's Bing Ads, allow advertisers to bid on and place these ads in the search results pages.

A typical search engine results page will have 10 organic results that link out to different web pages. Each result might look a little different, but they'll all have at least a headline, a description, and a visible URL. It's important to know what these components look like because later in this SEO SERIES we'll be modifying and optimizing these particular elements that may appear for an individual result. One important thing to point out is that the internet has changed a lotsince search engines first appeared, and there's a lot of content on the web beyond just text and web pages.

Search engines have done a good job of keeping pace, and while we still view web page results, they also return things like video, images, news, products, and maps, on a search engine results page. A common way of describing this, would be that we now have blended search results that include all kinds of different content. Sometimes the blended results will have a group of video clips that match a users query, or it might show a list of local businesses accompanied by a map. It could be a group of images and prices for a particular product that you can buy.

Social signals allow search engines to return more personalized results, like a news article that your friends have shared. These results can show up in a variety of different ways based on what the search engines think is relevant and appropriate to the users search query. In some search results, a visual carousel of results may appear. Others may include enhanced results such as Google's Knowledge Graph. These results are generated from a variety of sources like Wikipedia, Freebase, or even the CIA's Factbook, and they can provide instant answers to a searcher's query. The important thing to remember is that you have a lot of opportunities to have your content show up in the Search Engine Results Pages, and the more you understand how search engines decide to show results to users, the more you'll understand how to get the search engines to show your content above the rest.

SEO_SERIES_1_What is SEO?

Another term that you're likely to encounter again and again when working with content management systems is SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is a method of structuring sites and site content in a way that improves a web site's relevance and visibility to search engines. Now theoretically this allows your site be listed higher in a search engine's result list, which is the goal of almost every site owner. In reality, SEO is one of the most abused terms on the web, with so many different marketing firms and vendors selling tools and strategies that the term has almost been diluted to little more than appear marketing cliche.

Looking at the term practically, however, in order to optimize a site for search engines, you need to understand how those search engines work. Although most search engines guard their methodology quite closely, there are some almost universally accepted techniques that will assist in helping your site become more search engine friendly. First, your site should contain clean, well-structured HTML code that doesn't present any barriers to search engines indexing the site. Site content, including pages, should be tagged with metadata that extends the meaning of the content and explains the page's relevance.

Sites can also increase the amount of inbound and outbound links to make sure the links themselves use terms relevant to the subject matter. Finally, the site should focus on creating consistent, clear content that is relevant to the focus of the site. Now, oddly enough, you would think that that last point would take care of itself, but it's usually one of the techniques that organizations fail to stress when discussing search engine optimization. In the early days of content management systems, the SEO of CMS-managed sites was not really that great.

Links were automatically generated with numeric identifiers instead of relevant text. Page code was messy, non-standards compliant, or needlessly complex, and tagging structures didn't accurately reflect the focus of the site's content. While some systems still produce non- search engine friendly sites, for the most part these glaring errors are a thing of the past. There are, however, some things that you want closely monitor when choosing a CMS to make sure that the sites generated with it produce the best SEO results possible.

First, examine the HTML code the CMS generates as it creates pages. Make sure it uses clean, standards-compliant code that's not weighed down with extraneous markup. Also, make sure you can customize tags and categories to reflect your site's content and focus. Good taxonomies and consistent content tagging will go a long way to describing to search engines what your site's focus is. Second, check to see what level of URL customization you're allowed to perform. In some CMSs, when pages are dynamically generated, the page URL is created with numeric identifiers that does not describe the page content at all.

Being able to customize URLs so that a link contains descriptive text is very important to SEO. This is also true for CMS-generated internal links. Another thing to check out is how a CMS generates descriptive text for site media, like alt text for images. By making sure that you can control these, you not only create more accessible sites, but one that provides more information to search engines as well. Perhaps the biggest SEO problem regarding content management systems is the idea of duplicate content.

If a search engine finds more than one copy of content on your site, it generally decides which one is the most important one, indexes it, and then throws away the references to the other copies. In a CMS-driven site, blog posts, marketing campaigns, and related content frequently result in duplicate content. Now often, you can modify pages and links with attribute values, such as no follow or no index, to prevent this problem, but understanding how and when to use these requires a good bit of research into how search engines actually operate.

Due to these specialized nature of SEO site requirements, many content management systems have SEO tools either built in to the core of the CMS or available as plug-ins or extensions. When researching a CMS, check out what types of tools it offers and the type of control they give you over how your site is indexed and optimized. If SEO is critically important to you, you might want to consider bringing in an outside contractor to assist you. Just be really careful about the claims that some vendors make when promoting SEO.

WYSIWYG editors

One of the most consistent features among all types of CMSs is a WYSIWYG editor. In most cases, the WYSIWYG editor forms the core of almost all CMS content-editing interfaces. This ubiquity tends to make people overlook these editors when researching a CMS, and that's a shame because they are such an important part of how teams and clients work with a CMS, they should be examined closely as part of the selection process. A WYSIWYG, or What You See is What You Get, editor allows users to add, edit, and format content without having to code HTML or CSS.

Most of the time, they look and feel very similar to a word processor, making it simple for anyone with basic word processing skills to add or edit content on a CMS. Here, for example, is the WYSIWYG editor for WordPress. Notice that it has a toolbar, and it allows me to do things like bolding my text and maybe italicizing it. I can format links. I could change the color of the text. All sorts of things. Really, all I have to do is type in my text, format it the way I want it using the toolbar, and simply publish it.

This simplicity leads people to believe that all WYSIWYG editors are the same, or at least produce the same results. That of course is simply not true. Perhaps the most obvious difference them is simply the amount of things they allow you to do. Some, like this one, are very minimal and only give you basic formatting options. Others offer a huge range of formatting options as well as advanced functionality like allowing users to print content, create tables, insert images, video, and other media directly into your content.

Looking for an editor that gives users the formatting options they need is a very important consideration when choosing a CMS. Keep in mind that you'll need to train your clients or your team members to use the editor. If you have too many options up there or a WYSIWYG toolbar populated with features that you don't need, that can prove difficult for non-technical users to grasp, or worse, result in pages that aren't formatted to your site's standards. Too few options could result in frustrated users who simply can't format content to match the rest of the site.

There's another capability that you need to examine when looking at a CMS's WYSIWYG Editor, and it's one that's really actually pretty easy to miss. Although they look and act like a word processor, they are in fact still generating code and then inserting that code into your site. Because of this, it's very important that you examine the code created by the WYSIWYG editor to make sure it generates clean code and meets the level of standards compliancy that you need for your site. Many of the editors give you the ability to switch from formatting text to writing code, and this allows you to see the code that's being generated and then tweak it if necessary.

If you are demoing or trying one of these editors out, format some text and then switch over and take a look at the code. Depending upon the editor, some of the formatting options will result in structuring the text with HTML, while others might result in the creation of inline styles. If your site has strict rules about the use of inline styles or strict guides on when and how structural tags should be used, you need to understand how the WYSIWYG editor formats your text and then train your clients or staff to use it in a way that generates clean code with the formatting that you need.

In many cases, CMSs use the same WYSIWYG editor. If you want to take a closer look at some of the more popular editors and their capabilities, go check out TinyMCE, CKEditor, Open WYSIWYG, and InnovaStudio WYSIWYG editor. These sites will give you insight into the features and functionality behind the WYSIWYG editors found in some of the more popular content management systems, and hey, if you are a developer, give you some great options for integrating a WYSIWYG editor into your own projects.

What is MySQL?

Earlier when we discussed the LAMP stack, I mentioned MySQL as an important part of the open-source software stack used to power most open-source content management systems. At the time, I mentioned how MySQL helps us create and manage relational databases. Let's take a closer look at databases and their role in content management systems and then discuss why MySQL is such a popular means of managing those databases. A database is little more than a collection of data and can usually be represented as a table.

Relational databases, like those created by MySQL, store data in multiple tables that have the ability to relate to each other in some way, usually by sharing data keys or properties. In the case of content management systems, using relational databases allows them to easily store and organize content in an efficient way while linking that content together. This makes it simple to find all the articles written by a particular author or all articles written about a specific subject. This type of functionality can be used to power searches, display comments, or to construct pages that need a particular type of content.

This of course is where MySQL comes in. MySQL is an open-source SQL database management system that was released publicly in 1998 by the company MySQL AB. Although MySQL AB was acquired by Sun in 2008, MySQL remains available as a free and open-source solution under the GNU General Public License, although enterprise-level licenses are available. Since it's release, MySQL has emerged as the most widely used SQL database on the web. As the name suggests, MySQL uses SQL or structured query language to create, manage, and retrieve information from databases.

Although SQL is a fairly simple language to learn, for the most part you won't need to know it to use MySQL with your CMS. Most content management systems handle the creation and upkeep of their databases automatically, requiring very little input from you. However, there are times that you may need to tweak your database manually or create a new one, especially if you plan on doing your installs. For that you'll either need to learn the basics of SQL or use one of the popular graphical interfaces for MySQL, such as phpMyAdmin, as MySQL does not come with a user interface.

To learn more about MySQL, check out Oracle's MySQL site

What are WebDAV and FTP?

If you start comparing content management systems, eventually you're going to come across the phrase 'support for WebDAV and FTP'. While you're more likely to be familiar with FTP, both of these terms can be confusing to new users, so let's take a closer look at them, how they're related, and why they matter. WebDAV and FTP are both used to upload files to your sites, and usually at least one of these methods, if not both, are integrated directly into your CMS. FTP stands for file transfer protocol and is the most widely used protocol for sending and receiving files over the web.

It's incredibly common, and it's very easy to find FTP clients to transfer your files if your CMS doesn't come with one built in. WebDAV stands for web-based distributed authoring and versioning. It's a bit of a different animal then FTP. First, it's an extension of the HTTP protocol that allows both the reading and writing of documents on a web server. In practical terms, WebDAV provides you with a way to manage files on your web server that's very similar to using a local network drive. Most operating systems have WebDAV built into them, and even allow you to mount web servers just like any other disk.

Depending upon the client you're using, using WebDAV is as simple as dragging files from one folder to another. Of course, it's not always as simple as that, and not all CMSs handle file management the same. Most of the time, you'll simply set up your server information and username and password combination, and the CMS will use whichever protocol it supports or that you've set as a preference. In other instances, WebDAV is integrated directly into the CMS interface to handle versioning and file management. It's also not uncommon for a CMS to have a WebDAV extension or plug-in that will allow you to add this functionality to the system.

If no FTP or WebDAV integration is present, or if the CMS places a limit on the number or size of files that you need to upload, you may have to find and configure an FTP or WebDAV client yourself. Even though if you already have a means of transferring files, you might want to consider this option if available, as you can greatly simply managing files in your CMS. If you're looking at stand-alone transfer clients, some, like FileZilla, are pure FTP clients, while others, like Cyberduck, allow you to use either protocol. You could also use the clients built into most web authoring tools, like Dreamweaver or Aptana Studio.

There are literally hundreds of file management clients available, and most are free or low cost, so you're bound to find something that works for you. Either way, it's best to spend some time checking out the file management and transfer options for any CMS before making a decision as it's such an important part of the content management process.

What is a LAMP stack?

Occasionally, you are going to come across a term or two that everyone just seems to automatically assume you know. When you're learning more about content management systems, you're bound to hear the term LAMP, especially when dealing with open-source CMSs, and you're usually never really given a definition for what exactly a LAMP CMS is. LAMP is actually an acronym that represents a stack of open-source software that when used in conjunction with one another create application servers. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, although the scripting languages Pearl and Python often replace PHP in a LAMP stack.

So let's take a look at what each of these do within the stack and then discuss how this relates to content management systems. Linux is an open-source operating system that is commonly used to run servers. Due to the fact that it's free, open source, and really powerful, hosting companies frequently use it as their platform of choice. Linux isn't the only offering system used in conjunction with Apache, MySQL, and PHP however. When used with the Mac OS, the stack is referred to as MAMP. And when used with Windows, the stack is referred to as WAMP-- logically enough, of course.

Now the Apache HTTP server makes up the next part of the LAMP stack and is a free, open-source web server that has revolutionized the web since its release in 1995. It is by far the most popular web server in use today, and it's used to serve over 60 % of all web sites. MySQL, the next part of the LAMP stack, is often referred to as a type of database. That's not technically correct as MySQL is actually a relational database management system, and as the name implies, helps to create and manage relational databases as part of the LAMP stack.

Now whether the P in LAMP stands for PHP, Pearl, or Python, it represents a server-side scripting language that can be used to create web applications or dynamic web sites. Many open-source CMSs, including Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress, were built in PHP and are designed to work using the LAMP stack. For the most part, you won't need to understand exactly what the LAMP stack is in order to take advantage of it. Most of time, it's totally transparent to the end user. However, if you'll be configuring or setting up your own installations, it's helpful to understand how all the components fit together.

In many cases, you can download and install bundled servers for the LAMP, MAMP, and WAMP stacks based on the operating system that you're using. For more information on LAMP, check out www.lamphowto.com. If you're interested in installing the stack on other operating systems, check out wampserver.com and mamp.info for Windows and Mac respectively.

WHAT IS CMS ?

What is an open source CMS? I am going to discuss many of the terms and concepts that you'll come in contact with while researching or working with content management systems. Being familiar with these terms will make it easier to compare CMSs and give you a greater understanding of how they work. I want to start with a term that you here a lot as you'll be working with content management systems, 'open source'. Open-source CMSs are often listed as a separate category and even have entire web sites dedicated to the latest open-source CMS news and reviews.

So what exactly makes a CMS open source? To understand that, let's take a moment to go back and revisit the evolution of CMSs that we discussed earlier. In the mid to late '90s, an explosion a proprietary content management systems joined the market. A proprietary CMS is one that's developed by a single corporation and then licensed to clients that wish to use it. In many cases, the CMS would be customized specifically for that client and their workflow. As you can imagine, this type of service was not cheap.

At that time CMSs were seen as a powerful solution that was restricted to organizations with larger budgets. Now that's where open-source software comes in. While the term 'open source' gets thrown around a lot, there really is an organization, the Open Source Initiative, that is dedicated to promoting and codifying what open source means. Basically, open-source software is software that is released with licenses that allows the software to be distributed for free and without any royalty fees. Open-source software really began to take hold of the web with the release of PHP in the mid-90s.

Finally, a free general-purpose scripting language was available for web development. This dramatically lowered the cost of hosting dynamic web sites and set the stage for an explosion open-source web applications. It's only natural then the developers would soon turn their attention to content management systems. This democratized the world of web-based content management and made it a lot easier for individuals and smaller organizations to bring content management to their sites. It's no accident that Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress, all free open-source content management systems, are the three most popular CMSs on the market today.

So, does that mean that open-source CMSs are really free? Yes and no. If you're technically savvy, you can download the CMS for free, install it on your server, and begin using it to set up your site without spending a dime. Even better, many hosting companies offer a one-click install that will install the CMS on your server for you, freeing you from having to do that on your own. However, open-source software isn't without its drawbacks. As a general rule, a community of volunteer programmers develops open-source software. That means that updates are frequent, interfaces aren't always user friendly, and documentation can occasionally be hard to come by.

If you use open-source software, you should be prepared to either put in the time yourself to learn how it works or pay for a resource on staff or an outside consultant to make sure your install is handled properly. You'll also need to keep up with its development, so you can be aware of any major revisions and how they might affect your site.

PHP MYSQLI OOPS PROJECT SERIES 2

In this Video you can learn how to create table into the PHPMYADMIN , for our project

PHP MYSQLI OOPS PROJECT SERIES 1

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