When creating content for your website, it's best to be careful about where you get your content from, whether it's from a freelancer or from another website. You do not want to get on the wrong side of the law or get on someone's bad books when it comes to their copyrighted work.

Unless you take articles from article directories, you must contact the author and ask for their permission. There is no way around that. Sure, the author would like to receive the free publicity, but it's best to let him or her know before you use their work. It's common courtesy.

I'm a heavy article author and marketer, so I know the tricks people pull to get articles on their websites. Some will include links which don't work, don't include the resource box, or just plain spin my articles into their own by changing the title and leaving everything else the same. I usually don' take much action unless it's a major case, because I've got better things to do with my time, like marketing my business and serving my customers, but others might do things differently. They'll certainly take action if they feel it warrants it.

I can tell you from personal experience; trust is low on the Internet and people are willing to take legal action (my freelancer is doing that just now to someone else who copied her work). So it's best to stay on the safe side and play by the rules. Don't ever plagiarize someone else's work and you'll avoid any copyright issues!

Don't be fooled by seeming simplicity. A lot of developers get comfortable with a certain way of designing a database for their web applications that they miss out on techniques they should rather employ to make things run faster and more efficiently. A lot of developers don't bear in mnd that the small site they are creating now might grow into something incredibly large and complex, and the database they designed has become bloated and doesn't scale well to meet the demands of the increased traffic.

This article hopes to provide web developers with a few techniques to help make their database and queries faster and more efficient.

1. Avoid Character Types

When you are designing a database, it is so easy to set all data types to the VARCHAR type as it can then contain any data you want; numbers or text. But character data is amongst the most inefficient data type you can get. If a field is only going to contain numbers, then make it one of the appropriate types (INT, DOUBLE, etc).

Also, wherever possible in your web development code, try to use numeric data types as opposed to characters. One of the most common things a script has to store are flags like whether someone answered yes or no to a question, etc. You could of course store it as 'Y' or 'N' but why not store it as 0 and 1?

The reason this makes a difference is when you have a database, for example, with over 500 000 entries, and are running a SELECT on that field, comparisons are processed a lot faster for numeric data types than character types. Also, if you need to return data to the calling script, numeric data is less memory intensive than character data. In addition, your web development language (PHP, ASP, etc) would also be able to process and perform functions on numeric data better than character data.

I am not trying to convince you never to use character data types. Sometimes it is a necessity, but if you can find ways to reduce the amount of character data processed by your SQL database, the better your server will cope.

2. Normalization

Normalizing a database is really quite a complex process. It is a process that describes a way to design a database structure to avoid repetition of data in your database and can lead to significant performance benefits if employed correctly. However, the entire process of normalisation is a bit beyond the scope of this article as it can fill books on its own, but any developer designing a database should seriously consider becoming knowledgable about normalisation and employing it in their own designs.

For a good tutorial on this process: http://www.keithjbrown.co.uk/vworks/mysql/mysql_p7.php

3. DateTime vs Timestamp fields

This actually relates to 1. a bit. The big difference to bear in mind here is that a field of type DATETIME is actually stored as a series of characters. A field of type TIMESTAMP is actually stored as an integer. So therefore, a more efficient way of storing dates is using the timestamp method. The timestamp has its drawbacks however. For one, you cannot store a date early than 1 January, 1970. Also, timestamps in your script will need recalculating to get to the character format. Because of this recalculation, it may not be better to store as timestamp. It really is a case of testing which format works better for your needs.

4. Use LIMIT where possible

In your queries, if you are doing a SELECT to a database and you only expect a certain number of results, using the LIMIT statement can speed your query up incredibly.

For example, if you have a table of users and you need to run a query to search for one users record, you can use a query like:

SELECT user_name FROM users WHERE user_id = 453;

This query is perfectly valid and will return the right result. But you also know there will only be ONE result. The query above will search the database, find what you want, but then still continue searching after that. It would run a lot faster if you could tell the query that once it has found what you are looking for to stop searching. LIMIT can do this, as this query shows:

SELECT user_name FROM users WHERE user_id = 453 LIMIT 1;

Imagine this scenario. You have a table called logins, that records every login from a user. It currently contains over 2 000 000 records, and you want to find the first time a user logged in. Now bear in mind that because this table inserts data over time, it is already sorted for by date. You could do the following query:

SELECT MIN(login_date) FROM logins WHERE user_id = 4876;

This will return the record you want, but SQL will now have to get all dates for that user, sort them and then return the lowest value to you. Our table is already date sorted simply because of the way it records data for us. So using LIMIT can be more effective:

SELECT login_date FROM logins WHERE user_id = 4876 LIMIT 1;

Because it is sorted, the first one will always be a users first login.

5. Avoid using LIKE

If you have tried to employ 1. above, then hopefully you will be in a scenario where you do not need to use LIKE all that much. LIKE is one of the most inefficient ways of searching a table. LIKE performs a text comparison search in a field and with no wildcards is as efficient as a direct comparison; i.e. WHERE name = 'Jane' is equivalent to WHERE name LIKE 'Jane'. It is when you start introducing the wildcard characters like '%' that things get really hairy.

If you do have to use LIKE, then at least try and make efficient use of the wildcards. These are '_' (underscore) and '%'. Let me explain all this with a real world example.

In a project I was involved in, we had a SQL database storing logs generated automatically from a mail server. Unfortunately, the mail server pretty much just dumped a very long string of text data into a field that contained the data we wanted. A script had to be written to find all logs that referred to a login by a user into the POP server. The only way we could do this was to search every record for a string in the msg field that had the text "User logged in" in it. The first query developed was something like this:

SELECT msg FROM logs WHERE msg LIKE '%User logged in%';

This query took on average of about 35 minutes to process. Obviously not an ideal situation. The way the LIKE worked here was that it had to parse through every single portion of each and every record in the msg field looking for text that matched "User logged in" anywhere in the text. We were able to determine eventually that the text "User logged in" occured at the end of that text in the msg field and so we altered the query:

SELECT msg FROM logs WHERE msg LIKE '%User logged in';

The '%' at the end was removed as we do not want to worry about text after because there is none. The query now only compares text to our string in the msg field at the end of the field and no longer parses through the entire piece of text stored in msg. The query now ran in under 2 minutes. (This was actually still too long, but how we optimised from there is a little beyond the scope of this article.)

Hopefully with all these elements put into practice on your next web development project, you can have a database that runs quickly, efficiently, uses as little resources as possible and wont grind to a halt when the load suddenly increases.

Keyword Research Tool

This is the most important tool if you want to make your website visible in the Search Engine (SE) like Google. The fact that 91% of Internet surfer are using SE to find information they want made the Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) as the most effective way to attract targeted visitors.

Besides that, the advanced keyword research tools can also indicate the keywords' profitability as well. As a result, you can focus on developing web pages surrounding those keywords for maximum profits. And these tools cost either $97 to $176 once-off payment or $167 to $599 yearly subscription.

Domain Name

You can get the cheapest domain names at 1and1 which cost $6.99 per year. However, it is limited to certain countries only. If your country is not listed in 1and1, you can still purchase cheap domain name at GoDaddy for only $9.99 per year.

But be very careful not to search your domain availability in Network Solutions. Otherwise, your preferred domain will be locked for few days which leave you with no options but to pay $34.99 per year for that domain name.

Web Hosting

For unlimited web space and bandwidth, you have to pay $119 per year. To have huge web space and bandwidth is important because you will need both to grow your online businesses. A part from that, you must choose hosting that offer the highest server uptime too so that your website is reliable.

Website Building Software

Website Builder can cost you anywhere from $97 to $766. It really depends on your needs e.g. build for Adsense income, affiliate marketing or eBay store. It is advisable that you choose one that fit your existing needs as well as other features for future business expansion. I prefer to use Site Build It since it require not HTML knowledge and fit to all monetization plans.

SE Submission Services

As mentioned before, SE plays a big role in the cyber world. To ensure that your website remain valid in the eye of SE giants like Google and Yahoo, you need to update them whenever you build new web pages. And SE submission service costs about $189 per year.

Other than submitting your website to the SEs, they will also advice you on ways to optimize your web pages for maximum SE Optimization (SEO) benefits.

SE Monitoring Tool

This tool will help you to gauge how your web pages are performing in the eye of SE. The way this tool works is that, it crawls pages that ranked top in SERP and supply you the SEO details on how it was ranked that high. This can cost you about $167.

Auto-responder

In today's situation, auto-responder is not an option anymore. If you are serious about making money online, this is the first thing you should consider to own after the website builder and keyword research tool. Despite the fact that you have to pay $179 per year for this service, the benefits will outweigh the cost incurred if you do it right.

These tools can easily cost you $661 per year on top of the $264 once-off payment. Of course it is a very expensive, but if you compare with the cost of building a successful business in the real world (offline); which takes $50,000 the least, it is so much affordable for most Infopreneurs.

But the good news is that, Site Build It is offering all the tools mentioned above for only $299 per year.