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Simple Steps to Learning Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is a necessity when it comes to making a site visible on the internet. If you would like your material and products to be seen without having to spend all your money on advertising, you will need to learn SEO strategies. The whole process is quite simple, although many internet gurus would like you to think the opposite because they prey on SEO beginners. They try to keep it a secret that you could simply improve the rankings of your blog across the net with easy SEO strategies. With the right optimization work, your website could have high rankings on search engines, obtain a better pagerank and get a lot of targeted visitors.

There are three primary steps you should write into your SEO campaign. Each step is crucial to the overall success of your web marketing blueprint. Without one step, the other may not reach the results you desire. You want your website to reach authority status and hard work will prove successful. Remember, you do have sites to outrank no matter what niche you pick. Your competitors are on track to taking the crucial steps to gain top search engine placements and they are being rewarded with all the benefits.

Step 1. Proper Keyword Research

Choosing keywords for your site is extremely vital in today’s internet age. In past days, it was not much of a concern since there was not as many sites that were focused on beating competition. However, today there are hundreds of new sites being published each and every day. A lot of these sites are competing for popular keyword terms that are almost impossible to rank for. What many web developers don’t realize is that there are an abundance of long-tail keywords that are very easy to rank for. The web creators who already gained this info have done their keywords research to find the long-tail keywords that have a huge search volume, but a small amount of competition. Once you find a few primary keywords, you should include them in your website content and backlinks you build off-site.

Step 2. On-Page Optimization

Optimizing the written material found on your site is a necessary part of having a successful SEO campaign. It is the single most important factor in improving your websites visibility on search engines. You focus on on-page optimization only and still find your site ranking well on search engines by writing unique, compelling content that engages users. People type queries into a search form and use specific keyword strings. If your written content contains that exact string and no other site has, your site has the potential of appearing in search results for that query. Optimizing your content involves building content that is in your own words and not copying and pasting a copied article. Copying another person’s work is considered plagiarism and many websites frown upon it. Write your content naturally and place your primary keywords in paragraphs, meta tags and heading tags.

Step 3. Create Backlinks

Optimizing off-site content by building backlinks from authoritative websites will help give a bit of a push steps 1 and 2. When a link to your domain name is placed on a website that a search engine tag as an authority, your site gets noticed. When there are many websites with the same kind of authority that link to your website, search engines think your content is valuable and they re-evaluate your in search result listings. The more backlinks you make, the more likely your sites chances are of also being considered an authority on the net. The search engines take into consideration the anchor text you choose, how many other sites are being linked to, the pagerank of the linking site and more. To gain better rankings easily, be sure to use the primary keywords you added to your on-site content.

How to get a self signed certificate?

SSL makes use of what is known as asymmetric cryptography, commonly referred to as public key cryptography (PKI). With public key cryptography, two keys are created, one public, one private. Anything encrypted with either key can only be decrypted with its corresponding key. Thus if a message or data stream were encrypted with the server’s private key, it can be decrypted only using its corresponding public key, ensuring that the data only could have come from the server.

If SSL utilizes public key cryptography to encrypt the data stream traveling over the Internet, why is a certificate necessary? The technical answer to that question is that a certificate is not really necessary – the data is secure and cannot easily be decrypted by a third party. However, certificates do serve a crucial role in the communication process. The certificate, signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA), ensures that the certificate holder is really who he claims to be. Without a trusted signed certificate, your data may be encrypted; however, the party you are communicating with may not be whom you think. Without certificates, impersonation attacks would be much more common.

Step 1: Generate a Private Key

The openssl toolkit is used to generate an RSA Private Key and CSR (Certificate Signing Request). It can also be used to generate self-signed certificates which can be used for testing purposes or internal usage.

The first step is to create your RSA Private Key. This key is a 1024 bit RSA key which is encrypted using Triple-DES and stored in a PEM format so that it is readable as ASCII text.

Step 2: Generate a CSR (Certificate Signing Request)

Once the private key is generated a Certificate Signing Request can be generated. The CSR is then used in one of two ways. Ideally, the CSR will be sent to a Certificate Authority, such as Thawte or Verisign who will verify the identity of the requestor and issue a signed certificate. The second option is to self-sign the CSR, which will be demonstrated in the next section.

During the generation of the CSR, you will be prompted for several pieces of information. These are the X.509 attributes of the certificate. One of the prompts will be for “Common Name (e.g., YOUR name)”. It is important that this field be filled in with the fully qualified domain name of the server to be protected by SSL. If the website to be protected will be https://public.akadia.com, then enter public.akadia.com at this prompt.

Step 3: Remove Passphrase from Key

One unfortunate side-effect of the pass-phrased private key is that Apache will ask for the pass-phrase each time the web server is started. Obviously this is not necessarily convenient as someone will not always be around to type in the pass-phrase, such as after a reboot or crash. mod_ssl includes the ability to use an external program in place of the built-in pass-phrase dialog, however, this is not necessarily the most secure option either. It is possible to remove the Triple-DES encryption from the key, thereby no longer needing to type in a pass-phrase. If the private key is no longer encrypted, it is critical that this file only be readable by the root user! If your system is ever compromised and a third party obtains your unencrypted private key, the corresponding certificate will need to be revoked.

Step 4: Generating a Self-Signed Certificate

At this point you will need to generate a self-signed certificate because you either don’t plan on having your certificate signed by a CA, or you wish to test your new SSL implementation while the CA is signing your certificate. This temporary certificate will generate an error in the client browser to the effect that the signing certificate authority is unknown and not trusted.

Step 5: Installing the Private Key and Certificate

When Apache with mod_ssl is installed, it creates several directories in the Apache config directory. The location of this directory will differ depending on how Apache was compiled.

Step 6: Configuring SSL Enabled Virtual Hosts

Step 7: Restart Apache and Test

How to get a self signed certificate?

SSL makes use of what is known as asymmetric cryptography, commonly referred to as public key cryptography (PKI). With public key cryptography, two keys are created, one public, one private. Anything encrypted with either key can only be decrypted with its corresponding key. Thus if a message or data stream were encrypted with the server’s private key, it can be decrypted only using its corresponding public key, ensuring that the data only could have come from the server.

If SSL utilizes public key cryptography to encrypt the data stream traveling over the Internet, why is a certificate necessary? The technical answer to that question is that a certificate is not really necessary – the data is secure and cannot easily be decrypted by a third party. However, certificates do serve a crucial role in the communication process. The certificate, signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA), ensures that the certificate holder is really who he claims to be. Without a trusted signed certificate, your data may be encrypted; however, the party you are communicating with may not be whom you think. Without certificates, impersonation attacks would be much more common.

Step 1: Generate a Private Key

The openssl toolkit is used to generate an RSA Private Key and CSR (Certificate Signing Request). It can also be used to generate self-signed certificates which can be used for testing purposes or internal usage.

The first step is to create your RSA Private Key. This key is a 1024 bit RSA key which is encrypted using Triple-DES and stored in a PEM format so that it is readable as ASCII text.

Step 2: Generate a CSR (Certificate Signing Request)

Once the private key is generated a Certificate Signing Request can be generated. The CSR is then used in one of two ways. Ideally, the CSR will be sent to a Certificate Authority, such as Thawte or Verisign who will verify the identity of the requestor and issue a signed certificate. The second option is to self-sign the CSR, which will be demonstrated in the next section.

During the generation of the CSR, you will be prompted for several pieces of information. These are the X.509 attributes of the certificate. One of the prompts will be for “Common Name (e.g., YOUR name)”. It is important that this field be filled in with the fully qualified domain name of the server to be protected by SSL. If the website to be protected will be https://public.akadia.com, then enter public.akadia.com at this prompt.

Step 3: Remove Passphrase from Key

One unfortunate side-effect of the pass-phrased private key is that Apache will ask for the pass-phrase each time the web server is started. Obviously this is not necessarily convenient as someone will not always be around to type in the pass-phrase, such as after a reboot or crash. mod_ssl includes the ability to use an external program in place of the built-in pass-phrase dialog, however, this is not necessarily the most secure option either. It is possible to remove the Triple-DES encryption from the key, thereby no longer needing to type in a pass-phrase. If the private key is no longer encrypted, it is critical that this file only be readable by the root user! If your system is ever compromised and a third party obtains your unencrypted private key, the corresponding certificate will need to be revoked.

Step 4: Generating a Self-Signed Certificate

At this point you will need to generate a self-signed certificate because you either don’t plan on having your certificate signed by a CA, or you wish to test your new SSL implementation while the CA is signing your certificate. This temporary certificate will generate an error in the client browser to the effect that the signing certificate authority is unknown and not trusted.

Step 5: Installing the Private Key and Certificate

When Apache with mod_ssl is installed, it creates several directories in the Apache config directory. The location of this directory will differ depending on how Apache was compiled.

Step 6: Configuring SSL Enabled Virtual Hosts

Step 7: Restart Apache and Test