I’ve been working on a personal business site of mine (I’ll post the link once I’m done), it has been listed in googles index recently and to my surprise I’ve forgotten to optimize the urls on the site and only got the main page indexed. Google ignores everything after the ? for example, http://johny.org/index.php?post=2&bla=3, in this url google will only index http://johny.org/index.php and everything after the ? will be ignored. This is bad if your pages are dynamically generated (like most new websites).

To fix this, you need to create a new file on the root of your website and name it “.htaccess”. In this file we will put the redirection rules. This is what mine looks like

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^montreal/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)\.html$ index.php?cat=$1&page=$2

The first line is required to enable rewrites.

The second line is the rule I’m using for the redirects, it looks complicated but it’s actually very simple! RewriteRule has 2 parts, the first part, the from part, “^montreal/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)\.html$” is to tell apache that if you get a url which looks like this, redirect it to the second part, the to part, which in my case is “index.php?cat=$1&page=$2“

The links on my page are **.com/montreal/category_example/page_example.html so when someone clicks on it, apache will redirect them to **.com/index.php?cat=category_example&page=page_example. In the from part I have 2 variables which are alpha-numeric, I’ve defined them by “([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)” (from a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _-]+)) the variable ends as soon as a character is reached which is not in the range I’ve defined, in this case it’s the ‘/’, then the second variable starts which is for the pages. As you can see in my case, I’m mainly targeting clients from Montreal, that’s because my main clientele is from there and this keyword inserted in all my links will give me a fair amount of boost in the search engines for the “montreal” keyword (which is a must have in my case).

Hope this helps someone out, let me know if you need any help

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I’ve been a beta (actually even pre-alpha :P) user of Woopra for a while (one of the first, if not the first), so it’s now time to pay my dues by posting a video about it, the video was made with intent to be modified (some editing and adding step by step explanation) and placed on the Woopra demo page but due to lack of time it stayed as scrap and in the meanwhile newer version of Woopra got released and therefore I decided to post it before it becomes totally useless

If you haven’t heard of Woopra yet, “Woopra provides real-time stats delivered via a revolutionary client-server application, and includes unique features such as the ability to identify and chat real time with visitors to the monitored site. The beta version of Woopra was quietly unveiled to a select audience of 200 at WordCamp Dallas, but news rapidly spread to over 2 million as buzz began to grow.”

Enjoy!

For those interested in an invite to Woopra, I have a small challenge, download the high quality video from Vimeo (on the videos page) and edit it. The best edit will receive an invite!

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Author: Raymond Abdallah

It’s been a long while since I’ve been thinking to change my Windows Live Messenger account from my old Hotmail account to my Gmail one! I wanted to migrate totally from the Microsoft Corp (not totally since in the end I’m still using WLM)! I searched the net over and over to know how to export my Hotmail contacts to import them into Gmail, but none of the sites had a clue about what the new Windows Live Mail was hiding since you can find many sites on how to export contacts from the old Hotmail service!

(more…)

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Section: II
Level: Beginner - Intermediate

In the first section, we learned how to register a domain name and a host. In this section, we will take a look on how we can start having a website using that domain name and host.

The objectives of this section:

1. Upload Wordpress
2. Create a database
3. Install Wordpress

By the end of this section, you should have a clear knowledge on how to install a Content Management System (CMS), in this case Wordpress but they all have very similar installation methods. Good Luck!
(more…)

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• Section: I
• Level: Beginner

In this section, we’ll take a look on:

1. Why we need a domain name and a host
2. Prices
3. Some personal tips

By reading this section, you will learn what a domain name and a host is and how you can register one. (more…)

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I’ve always had this in mind but never had the patience to write it, yet when someone asks me “can you help me out with a new website?” I happily sit down and help them out by guiding them step by step. I finally decided to write this guide to help those who don’t know where to start from.

This guide will start by being for the ultimate clueless, such as domain name and hosting registration.

The second section would concern the installation and usage of WordPress. Uploading files, creating a database, setting up Wordpress.

In the third section, we’ll see how we can write new posts, how to install templates, how to install plugins, how to filter comments from spam, how to make the links search engine friendly and so on, the basics to start using the website.

The fourth section would teach web analytics with the use of Google Web Analytics tool. In this section we will take a look on how you can track the visitors on your site, how they got to your site, what they checked, so on and so forth.

In the fifth section, we’ll see how we can generate some traffic to our new website, we’ll also take a look on how we can get high ranking in search engines, how we can get a high page rank from Google…

Once we get some descent traffic, we can start by making some money from our website through advertising. Therefore the last section ( sixth week) will consist of making some cash from the website, we’ll take a look at Google Adsense, i’ll teach you some optimization techniques I’ve learned along the years.

(more…)

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