As I look around forums, membership sites and even blogs, I see a lot of talk about Pay Per Click for Affiliates, yet very little information on Search Engine Optimization. What's the deal? Is SEO no good for Affiliate Marketers these days?..

The cost of Pay-Per-Click advertising is high and rising. Click fraud (estimated by some to be as high as 35%) just makes things worse and increases click costs. And now, more and more people are saying they do not click on sponsored ads. Why you ask? Simple, they do not trust they will get relevant information when they click on a sponsored ad versus an organic link. Web surfers now understand through personal experience that PPC ads simply go to the highest bidder pretty much without regard for relevancy. In the early days (i.e. - 3 to 5 years ago); this was not the case. Back then, relevancy mattered (Overture, now Yahoo, was a leader in this area)..

Reciprocal linking has been so abused by webmasters and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts (term used loosely when it comes to reciprocal linking) that the larger search engines have begun the process of disregarding reciprocal links as irrelevant.

Regular expressions is a very powerful instrument to manipulate and extract strings. However not all PHP developers know how to use regular expressions, so this simple tutorial is intended to everyone who wants to learn them.

PHP has several built-in functions for dealing with regular expressions. We'll examine only the PCRE functions (preg_replace, preg_match_all), which use a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, as they are often faster than POSIX alternatives (ereg, ereg_replace, etc.)..