Title tags and keywords

The title tags of a web page appear to be very important for all search engines.  For each web page create a different title tag that reflects its content but also contains keywords applicable to that page.  Search engines use the title tag as the main link to the page and hence it should contain words that reflect the content.

First write you web page which will contain key phrases.  It is usually better to do this before you look at the critical title tag content.  Once completed, you can write a well defined title line.  However, don’t be tempted to just copy a line of text form the web page, try to create a unique title of up to 10 words.

Blog software like WordPress can make things difficult in that they create the title tag for you out of various combinations of text strings made from the site name, the cateogry or the item title.  To overcome this with WordPress you can use the free SOE Title Tag plug in by Stephan Spencer.  This enables you to create your own title tags and make the pages more search engine friendly.

This can be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-title-tag/ and includes full description and installation.

PHP-eSeller is able to set the title tag of each dynamic shopping cart web page together with a meta description.

Posted in SOE

PayPal and eChecks

An eCheck is when the customer only has a bank account, and not a credit card or additional form of payment to back up their account should their account be overdrawn when PayPal tries to debit it, so PayPal doesn’t pay you for 3-5 days while they wait for the money to transfer.

All withinweb applications (PHP-SecureArea, PHP-eSeller, or PHP-Keycodes) are able to handle Checks and in addition, will automatically send an email to the purchaser informing them that they have paid by eCheck and that there will be a delay before purchase is complete. Once the eCheck has cleared the application (PHP-SecureArea, PHP-eSeller, or PHP-Keycodes) will complete the process in the normal way and send the appropriate emails to the customer all without intervention by yourself.

When we recieve an eCheck purchase we often send an additional email to the customer just to further explain the situation and maintain a relationship with the customer.

In fact there are many situations where there can be a delay in payment being completed. All these situations are automatically handled by Withinweb.com applications.

There can be customer service nightmares when people use eChecks in PayPal. Most customers don’t know what it is, and PayPal appears not to warn them. Providing that you inform the customer, there should not be a problem and you can maintain your relationship with the customer.

Finding the full path name (absolute path) of a folder

With many applications it is neccessary to find the full path name of a folder and then enter it into the admin area of the application. This is required in PHP-eSeller to identify the location of the digital files, and it is required in PHP-SecureArea to define the secure folders.

Download, unzip, and ftp to the location of the folder and then call the file in your browser – http://www.example.com/images/absolutepath.php

Click here to download the file absolutepath.zip

Another way of finding the full path name is to log in to the admin pages of PHP-eSeller or PHP-SecureArea and click on the menu item ‘PHP Info’ and look for SCRIPT_FILENAME. That will give you the full file name of that file you are looking at. From that you should beable to work backwards to the root of your web site or to any other part of your site.

Note that the full path name of the folder is not the same as the http url of the folder directory – it will not work.

New Product : PHP-KeyCodes, sell license codes online

PHP-KeyCodes is a new product which is used to sell software license key codes, pin numbers or any pre-generated codes using PayPal.  The key codes are entered into the item details and when a customer makes a purchase, the first key code is removed and sent by email to the customer.  This leaves the next key code ready for the next purchase. When the number of codes reach a lower limit, an email is sent to the site administrator.

The code for the ‘buy now’ buttons can be displayed in the admin interface and then copied on to your web pages.

PHP-KeyCodes is based on PHP-eSeller and includes many of its features including transaction list, sales reports and email newsletter facility.

For details refer to:

https://www.withinweb.com/phpkeycodes/

 

How do I reset the admin password in my application?

I have had a few users forget their password that they use to login to the admin area of either PHP-eSeller, PHP-SecureArea or PHP-KeyCodes.

The best way to reset the admin password is by using the myPHPAdmin facility in your server control panel. If you log in to your server control panel and find myPHPAdmin, then find the database for the application, and then click on SQL tab you will be presented with a box to enter sql.

Enter

UPDATE name_of_password_table_here SET userpassword = md5('admin') WHERE username = 'xxxxxx'

The name of the password table will either be ipn_tblpasswords, or sec_tblpasswords or key_tblpasswords depending on the application, and xxxxx is the username which is in the table.

This will then set the password to ‘admin’ for that username.

Further desciption of search system in PHP-eSeller templates

If you use PHP-eSeller and use the template system, the following describes the search function in a bit more detail.

The search system in the templates use the mySQL FULLTEXT search using the MATCH keyword.

The fields that are searched are in tblitems and are item_name, item_title, item_description, item_description_full and keywords

First, all MySQL stop words are ignored in the keyword phrase used in a search. Stopwords are commonly used words that generally do not add anything useful to a search phrase.

Second, alphabetic character case is ignored in a MySQL search, so you do not have to convert anything to all upper or lower case in order to search.

Third, any word found in more than 50% of the rows in the index will be ignored when you use the text search.

Fourth, the results will be automatically sorted by relevancy, so the more times the search words appear in a row in the index, the more relevant that particular entry will be.

Fifth, remember that MySQL does not index any words that are 3 or less characters in length, so very short words are ignored.

Sixth, hyphenated words are treated as separate words.

The important point is probably the third. What this means is that if you have 100 rows where each row has the word ‘computer’ in it, and you do a search for the word ‘computer’, you will get zero result. This is because the search term is not specific enough and hence is unable to return specific rows.