Open Source PHP is an easy to browse gallery for open source PHP projects. PHP is one of the mainly popular web languages in the world. Face book is an example of the capabilities of PHP. Anyone can submit or download the PHP projects from this site. So it’s really open in terms of downloading as well as contribution.

The website is divided into two parts, gallery and upcoming. The projects are showing in thumbnails, which show a screenshot of the respective projects. These projects can be rated out of 5 stars. If you sign up for Open Source PHP, you can also bookmark any project you want. Users can comment on the projects, view screenshots and download the code as well. There are also relations for Direct Demos of some projects which makes it easier for you to try it out before downloading it and setting it up. Anyone can upload screenshots of the projects. The project and license details are also available in the sidebar when you open up any project’s page. The projects featured on Open Source PHP are great too, which range from bookmaking websites to web mail.

Each user has a profile where his/her activities, ratings, submitted projects and bookmarks are shown, hence giving a public touch to this excellent gallery. There aren’t any messaging options between users yet though, which should probably be implemented soon. Searching is also very simple, as every project is tagged.

Search engine optimization is really not a hard task. You must be aware, though, that guidelines and techniques that used to work years ago are no longer effective.

Taking a cue from the Yellow Pages trick of adding “AAAAAA1111111″ before the company name to be placed first, there was a time when it was enough to stuff your favorite keywords hundreds of times in your meta tags and page copy to rank high with the search engines. Not any more.  Search engines now penalize sites that do things like that.

The best way to achieve high rankings today is by getting a significant amount of inbound links from quality pages related to your site’s topic, with your keywords in the anchor text.

Link exchanges and reciprocal linking are slowly becoming a thing of the past as this technique has been abused, and search engines have increased their capabilities to detect it. There is strong verification that search engines give more weight to one-way links (like links from directories or links to your page from the body of articles).

The recent support of the ‘no-follow’ tag in blog comments by the major search engines has closed yet another loophole: webmasters that used to plant links in blog comment fields (practice known as blog comment spam) now find that those links are not followed or counted by the search engines.

Other way search engines are penalizing unnatural or manipulative linking patterns is by checking the Class C IP Address of the page where the link originates. What this principally means is that search engines give more value to links from pages hosted in a different server. If you have a network of sites linked to each other, and they’re all hosted with the same company, the search engines will get a hint that the pages are somehow related and will discount the value of those links.

Search engines are also becoming good at detecting the speed at which a site acquires links. If you just launched a site and it suddenly shows a large amount of high page rank pages pointing to it, the search engines will think that you are relying heavily on link buying or link renting, and will not give your page full credit for those links.

These are just a few tips that underscore how dangerous it is to rely on outdated information when it comes to search engine optimization. Whether you appoint in SEO for business or just as a hobby, it is always a good idea to visit search engine forums and blogs regularly, or to subscribe to a few good SEO ezines or newsfeeds, so that you are always up to date.