People think what I do or what I know is good however everything I do with web sites and everything I know with SEO (and I don't mean to sound like I know a great deal!) is useless if you do not have good content. Content is the key to a good site. Content will make or break your rankings in the Search Engines (providing everything else is optimised for them that is), and of course content is there for your visitors to read, further their interest in your web site and hopefully convince them to return at a later date.

But herein lies the problem. How do you write great content? You can sit and do your market research, research your key phrases for the spiders to pick up on, but how do you write around those phrases and make your content flow naturally? To me it's the hardest part of a web site. I can use Photoshop (if I have to!), I can write CSS and strict XHTML, I can do the dynamic pages in PHP. Good structure, research the phrases and do the market research. It's all possible to do this and to learn how to do it. But write good content? That's a gift, a talent that you either have or don't. Whilst I can read content and determine if it's good or not, correct spelling and grammar easily enough, I cannot create it, and it's very frustrating!

I have to work with a PR & Marketing Guy for my contract job. It's his job to supply the content for the works websites, yet what he supplies me is just repetitive with a couple of word changes here and there. He seems to think that pasting a long list of job titles (it's a recruitment agency) will do the job. It's highly annoying because he's meant to be the pro at copy writing and I'm just the developer, so my opinion cannot be right. I'm sure, despite my lack of ability to write content, that what he produces is far worse.

I've been looking into ideas for monetising the Tattoo site. I have a couple of possible sites/people to contact about dropshipping to however right now I think the site doesn't really have much to offer besides the average 200 visitors a day. It currently has one article, courtesey of Wikipedia.org, which doesn't help with the old duplicate content penalty in Google, a few product pages and some link pages. If I was looking to approve a site to sell my products I wouldn't approve the Tattoo site right now. Nothing is exactly original. Whilst I want to create a really good resource site and I realise sometimes it's just a case of bringing the information, links and products to one central place which is what we're beginning to do, I still don't think there's anything original on it. Trouble is my ability to write content coupled with the fact that I know nothing about Tattoos (no I'm not going to get one to find out about them!). But it's definitely something I need to sort out before approaching any companies. I've found one affiliate shop, but I'd rather be a reseller over an affiliate.

I've also been studying the stats for my osCommerce Templates site. It's getting visitors in from country specific Google searches but it's only really ranking of osCommerce eBooks, and only on the 4th page according to Digital Point. I didn't really think about it until today (bad on my part I know) but the site has very little content. Again it's a subject I don't know much about as I've only played a little bit with the application (I know, great reason for buying a site selling products for it!). I need to sit down, learn the software, read the eBooks I affiliate with, and start writing some decent content for it. Luckily it's a little bit more of a technical subject which I can write a bit better about I think.

Sorry I've not really answered the question of how to write good content, because I simply don't know. I guess I don't tend to have much of a problem rambling on this blog so perhaps that's the key. Know everything there is to know about your chosen subject and the content will flow.

I've spent pretty much zero time on my AIS sites this month. With client work mounting and spending every spare hour trying to clear that I've not been able to do much at all for my own sites. But aside from no work or effort on my part I've already topped December's earnings on Adsense for my sites with 3 days to spare. Quite happy with that.

And another loop for you to try is the for() loop. This repeats for a specified number of times.

$num = 10
for ($i=0; $i < $num; $i++) {
print $num;
print "<br />";
}


This will print out the numbers 0 to 9, each on a new line. With this loop we can also use it to combine variable variables to iterate through a series of repetitive form fields eg. name1, name2 and name3.

For example:

for ($i=1; $i < $num_fields; $i++) {
$temp = "name".$i;
print $$temp."<br />";
}


As you can see you create a dynamic variable name using the value of $i (1, 2, 3 etc) and then save this string in the variable $temp. Therefore on the first iteration $temp contains "name1". To get this to display the content of $name1 you need to use two dollar signs to get the variable variable ie. $$temp. This is very handy when you do not know how many text boxes may be coming from a form, such as in an ecommerce shopping basket. This way if each box has a generic name plus a number on the end which increments each time, it is easy to pass through the count of fields from the form page (which is then stored as $num_fields) and then it can display the code. Plus imagine having 20 text boxes. Compare 20 lines of code to just 4!

Additional Note: To access the form fields you would use slightly different code as below

for ($i=1; $i < $num_fields; $i++) {
print $_POST['name'.$i]."<br />";
}


The simplest loop is the while loop. Simple format and repeats while the condition is true.

[source:php]$num = 0;
while ($num < 10) {
print $num;
$num++;
}
[/source]

This of course would print the numbers from 0 to 9 in one long line ie. 0123456789

I'm actually posting this so I don't waste an hour finding the answer yet again when I next format my computer and can just come back here! I prefer to use Windows Explorer when browsing my computer but I'm just not into the whole right click and explore malarky. So here's how to make the Explore option default…

Go to Control Panel – Folder Options – File Types
Reorder the list of file types by name and scroll down to 'Folder' which has a type of N/A
Click on it and then click Advanced
Here in the white box below you have "explore" and "open". Click on "explore" and click on Set Default

Voila