The Real Ryan J. Parker

If you’re looking to get content ideas for your website consider using SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool as a starting point.

If you’re not familiar with this tool, it provides a list of related keyword phrases to a keyword phrase you enter, and its primary target is for people trying to find keyword phrases to use in a PPC advertising campaign.

PPC advertising campaigns, however, aren’t the only applications this tool can be used for. By entering your own website’s keyword phrases you can find other keyword phrases people are searching for that will help you come up with content ideas that might be beneficial to have on your website.

Depending on how competitive the market is for some of the keyword phrases, you can potentially attract a lot of free traffic if you can fill a void in information people are looking for.

I’ve used this tool to add to my roadmap for implementing more related content at Which Team Wins?, as I’m currently in a competitive keyword nightmare. Adding some not so competitive content that people are looking for should help the website from a SEO perspective.

I’m interested in hearing if anyone else has had much success using a keyword suggestion tool like this one to come up with content ideas for your website, and I’m also interested in hearing about any success you may have found with it.

Tags: seo book, keyword suggestion tool, content ideas

I’m going to share with you something I do when working on my websites that I hope you can apply to your own website development and growth.

This isn’t some special website design or a neat coding trick, but rather it’s a way of looking at the hard work you’re doing and making sure it’s going to prove worthwhile over the long haul.

All you have to do is ask yourself this simple question when building new content for your website: Is this something that’s unique?

If you answer yes to this question then your organic growth will be much better than if you answer no.

If you’ve ever tried to build a website in a highly competitive market then you know it’s very hard to do without spending a lot of money to drive traffic to your website. These are the types of websites that typically answer no to this question, and they’re hard to organically build a sound user base.

You can use this question to help you focus on the pieces of your website in which you answer yes to. There will be times in which you need to incorporate some necessary pieces that aren’t unique, but by focusing on the unique pieces you can expect your website to grow much faster than it would otherwise.

A majority of people on the web visit your website for the information it provides, and if you don’t have something unique then they’ll find their way to someone else’s website.

This is something that shows itself in two websites I’m currently developing:

The first website, Which Team Wins?, does not get much organic traffic at the moment because a majority of the content I have on the website isn’t all that unique. This will change as I build something worth visiting, but if you’ve got a website that requires you to lay a foundation without unique content then to get traffic in the early stages you’ll need to advertise because not much organic traffic will be sent your way.

The second website, Probability Calculators, isn’t as old, and it doesn’t have any working probability calculators at the moment. It does, however, get three times the organic traffic that Which Team Wins? does. Why? Because the content is unique.

The same holds true for other websites I work on, and I’m sure it does for your websites, too.

If you’re stuck in a rut and are running out of ideas as to how you can generate traffic to your website then try coming up with some content and see if they pass the Is this something that’s unique? test. If they do then build them in and patiently wait as the organic traffic slowly starts to build!

The Simple AJAX Toolkit, or SAJAX for short, is a library you can use to quickly build AJAX applications in PHP, Perl, ASP, and many other languages.

Using SAJAX with Wordpress can be tricky, because if you don’t initialize SAJAX or handle client requests at the correct time you’ll break Wordpress, your SAJAX applications, or both, and this guide will help keep you from doing both.

If you haven’t done so already, you should strongly consider integrating a custom PHP library into Wordpress. This isn’t a prerequisite, but it allows you to easily integrate your own SAJAX functions into Wordpress.

Integrating SAJAX Initialization into Wordpress

To use SAJAX with Wordpress without a custom PHP library you’ll need to edit wp-config.php, but to use SAJAX with Wordpress with a custom PHP library you’ll need to edit lib/LIB.php.

The instructions below apply to both variations, but if you’re editing wp-config.php make sure you place your SAJAX code right before the ending ?> line.

1. Include the SAJAX library with include("Sajax.php"); and initialize the SAJAX library with sajax_init();
2. After initializing SAJAX you’ll want to include your SAJAX functions with the appropriate sajax_export() declarations.
3. Once you’ve exported all of your SAJAX functions add sajax_handle_client_request(); to handle all SAJAX requests before they’re passed to Wordpress. If Wordpress tries to handle the request it’ll have no idea what to do and your SAJAX application won’t work!

Once you’ve got SAJAX integrated into Wordpress you’ll need to edit your template so that you can use the JavaScript SAJAX provides.

To do this you’ll need to add the following code to the template file(s) you wish to use SAJAX in:

<script type="text/javascript">
<?php sajax_show_javascript(); ?>
</script>

If you want to use SAJAX in every page of your site then consider placing this in header.php.

Using the steps above you can now start calling the SAJAX JavaScript functions to dynamically interact with your web server and update the page’s content.

More Information

For more information about SAJAX visit the official SAJAX website where the SAJAX FAQ should get you started.

If you’re building web applications you now have no reason to miss out on the interactivity AJAX provides you, as SAJAX and Wordpress make building AJAX applications a snap.

Tags: sajax, wordpress, php, library

Ever since starting my first Wordpress blog in December 2005 I’ve come to appreciate what Wordpress brings to the table right out of the box.

From then to now I’ve started using Wordpress with websites where blogging is simply an added benefit; the main focus of the websites is something other than a blog.

As a one man show, Wordpress can be invaluable for creating websites that aren’t blog-centric.

You could always create your own repository of reusable website code and templates, but Wordpress gives you so much more: a broad user base that finds and quickly patches bugs, useful 3rd party plugins that you don’t have to develop yourself, and a plethora of themes that you can use to help get your website running (especially if you’re not a color guy like myself).

There is, however, one component you’ll need to build yourself when you want to use Wordpress for a website with dynamic content: a custom PHP library.

Integrating Your Own PHP Library into Wordpress

Integrating a custom PHP library into Wordpress can be done in three simple steps:

1. Create a lib directory in the Wordpress root directory.
2. Create a PHP script called LIB.php in the lib directory created in the first step.
3. Modify wp-config.php and add the line include(”lib/LIB.php”); at the end of the file (before the ending ?> line).

The custom PHP library is now integrated into Wordpress, and you can now start building your custom PHP scripts and include them in the lib/LIB.php file.

Once you’ve built your library of functions you can add them into your Wordpress templates so that they show up on your site.

Other Reasons for Creating a Custom PHP Library

Other than managing dynamic data, you’ll also want to create a custom PHP library if you want to override any default Wordpress functions.

For example: one site I have overrides the get_the_title() and the_permalink() functions to do as I please.

Note that you’ll need to make sure you comment out the existing functions inside of the appropriate files located in the wp-includes directory.

Why Not Build a Plugin Instead?

Wordpress has a feature rich plugin interface, but if you’ve already got a custom PHP library then it’s much easier to integrate it into Wordpress using the methodology above.

Also, if you want to use your custom PHP library with more than just Wordpress (for performing background data parsing, for example) then using this method will give you the ability to perform this type of functionality with ease.

The only drawback to using this method is that you can’t easily attach menus to the Wordpress Site Admin interface as far as I can tell (although I’ve never tried), but I don’t have a need for this functionality, so it’s not a big deal for me (and hopefully not you, too).

Hopefully you find this guide useful when building your next Wordpress based website that’s more than just a plain old blog.

Tags: wordpress, php, custom, library

I recently received an e-mail from an internet marketer I purchased an eBook from that was touting a $7 eBook about cloaking affiliate URLs, so instead of buying the useless guide I decided to make this post.

Now let me first say I don’t have a problem with using these techniques to shorten URLs as sending an affiliate link via an e-mail can potentially cause the URL to be split up and not work properly. (Keep in mind that you should never use these types of URLs in hopes to trick people into following your spam.)

Charging someone $7 for this type of guide is robbery, mostly because this type of information is freely available on the internet.

You could probably piece this together on your own by searching Google, but I hope this post makes for a quick reference guide to shortening links using a few different methods.

One way to shorten a link is to use plain ol’ HTML:

<html><head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.theurl.com"></head></html>

Another way of shortening a link is to use JavaScript:

<html><body>
<script language="javascript">
<!--
window.location.href="http://www.theurl.com";
//-->
</script>
</body></html>

You can use these techniques to redirect the typical user, but to redirect everyone you might consider a server side technique using PHP or Perl.

To redirect someone with PHP use the following code:

<?php location("http://www.theurl.com"); ?>

To redirect someone with Perl use the following code:

#!/path/to/perl
print "Location: http://www.theurl.com\n\n";

Would you pay $7 for that type of information? Maybe, but in this world of everyone wants to make a buck I’ll give these to you for free.

To see these different methods in action use the following redirects to CNN.com:

HTML: cnn.html
JavaScript: cnn_js.html
PHP: cnn.php
Perl: cnn.pl

Tags: shorten, cloak, links, urls, affiliate