This article was excerpted from Inside Dreamweaver UltraDev, by Sean Nicholson.

Creating a Data Source Name (DSN) Entry
After you have built your database and have it located on your Web server, the first step in building your database-driven site is to create an avenue of communication between your Web server and the database. While this can be accomplished using drivers designed specifically for your flavor of database, it is much easier to use the Open Database Connectivity Driver (ODBC) or the Java Database Connectivity Driver (JDBC) to accomplish the task.

ODBC and JDBC are standards that have been developed for communicating with modern databases. Most of today’s databases, including Access, SQL Server, and DB2, are capable of using the ODBC driver. Other databases are capable of using the JDBC driver. For instance, MySQL can either use the standard JDBC driver or connect through the ODBC driver using an additional program called MyODBC.

How Many Drivers Do You Need?
An ODBC or JDBC driver must be set up for each database that you want to connect to the Web.UltraDev also requires that you have the most recent ODBC drivers available in order to function properly. If you have not already installed the latest Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC), I highly recommend that you take a moment and download them from MDAC and install them on your workstation.

Article Exercise: Establishing an ODBC Data Source for Your Database
Setting up an ODBC data source on your workstation differs among operating systems. If the machine that you set up as your Web server is a Windows 9x machine, click Start/Settings/Control Panel. In the Control Panel, select ODBC Data Sources (32bit). If you are using Windows NT, select Start/Settings/Control Panel and select the Data Sources (ODBC) icon. If, however, your machine is using Windows 2000, you should select Start/Settings/Control Panel and choose the Administrative Tools icon. Within the Administrative Tools window, choose the Data Sources (ODBC) icon.

Choose the System DSN tab from the ODBC Data Source Administrator dialog box, shown in , and click the Add button.The System DSN tab allows you to create a data source that can be shared on the Internet. Using a System DSN

Caution: To make a database available to your Web page visitors, you must create the ODBC source under the System DSN tab.

Select the Microsoft Access driver and click Finish.In the ODBC Microsoft Access Setup dialog box, shown below, type the name you wish to use for your data source name in the Data Source Name field.In the Database panel of the ODBC Microsoft Access Setup dialog box, click the Select button.

Navigate to the location of your database on your Web server and click OK

Click the Options>> button located in the lower-right corner of the ODBC Microsoft Access Setup dialog box. In the Page Timeout field, type 5000.

Changing the Default Page Timeout

Caution: It is especially important that you change the default page timeout setting if you are using Windows 2000 as your Web server and an Access database. Failing to change this value can result in permission problems when accessing database-driven Web pages. For more information on this potential problem, visit Microsoft.

Click OK to close the ODBC Microsoft Access Setup dialog box.

As shown in the screenshot below the ODBC Data Source Administrator dialog box now shows a data source for your database.

A data source has been created for your database.

The ODBC Microsoft Access Setup box.
Before you can build pages that are database driven, you must first establish a connection between your Web server and your database. In the Windows operating system, this process is relatively straightforward, but there are several potential pitfalls that can keep your pages from effectively communicating with your database. This article shows you the step-by-step process of setting up a data source name for your database.

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Once your new Web site is launched, you can submit it to Web directories and noncompetitive, industry-related Web sites. Once a Web site has some high-quality link development, the commercial search engines should easily discover your site through the natural crawling of the Web. However, submission is not the end of the optimization, design, and marketing processes. Individual Web page effectiveness must be monitored as well.

Understanding Link Development

Objective, third party link development is a key component to effective, long-term search engine optimization. Link development is one of the most overlooked components of a successful optimization campaign. Web site owners can write keyword-focused content and provide search engines with easy access to that content. But without well-planned and carefully implemented link development, search engine visibility is often short lived.

Link popularity vs. click-through popularity

To review, link popularity is the number and quality of objective, third party links pointing to a URL. The quality of a link carries far more weight than the quantity of links. Personally, I have seen many Web sites receive long-term, qualified search engine traffic with less than 50 links pointing to a site’s home page. And I have seen sites with over 1000 low-quality links receive little or no qualified search engine traffic. Therefore, quality is certainly more important than quantity.

Click-through (or click-thru) popularity is the measurement of the number of clicks that a Web page receives from a search engine results page (SERP), and how long the searcher stayed on the Web site after clicking on the link from the SERP. If a searcher clicks on a SERP link and continues to browse the Web site, then it might be assumed that the searcher found the information he desired and did not need to return to the SERP to view other Web pages. However, if a searcher clicks on a SERP link and quickly returns to the SERP, then it might be assumed that the searcher did not find the information he desired on the Web page and/or site.

Unfortunately, some Web developers and programmers have created clickbots to deceive the search engines into calculating more clicks to a Web site, making it seem as if a Web page receives more qualified clicks from human beings. In other words, the clicks do not come from actual searchers; they come from cleverly designed software.

Due to the rise in click fraud in both organic search results and search engine advertising, click-through popularity is a less important or a nonexistent factor in determining a Web page’s relevancy. Search engines do measure click-through popularity; however, it has little or no value for determining positions in the main search results.

Thus, when search engine optimizers refer to link popularity, they are referring to the number and quality of links pointing to a URL, not click-through popularity.

Link development, or the popularity component, is off-the-page criteria because Web site owners do not ultimately control how other people link to their sites’ content. Web site owners can influence how other people link to their sites’ content by using keyword-focused titles, headings, meta-tag descriptions, and page abstracts.

In the end, though, other people will determine how they prefer to link to a site’s content.

True long-term link development is difficult to imitate. Copywriting, information architecture, and site design can be easily imitated. All too often, the imitation constitutes a violation of copyright. Even so, it has not stopped a large number of search engine optimizers from stealing another site’s content and site design. Cloaking, a form of search engine spam, often hides copyright infringement.

Unique link development is equally important as keyword-focused text and an intuitive information architecture for obtaining long-term search engine visibility.

What I like about the entire link development concept is that Web sites will not be able to maintain search engine visibility unless they contain unique content and are easy to use.

If two sites contain similar unique content, the one that is easier to use is more likely to receive more objective, third party links.

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2. Copy and Paste the entire list of blog links below.
3. Add any blogs that you want to include near the top of the list. (This isn’t compulsory, so you can either add as many blogs as you want or none at all.)
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6. Make sure that all links point to each blog’s homepage.
7. Publish the Post.

Do note that you can join the Z-List even if your blog isn’t listed below. Just copy and paste any or both of the lists below, add something about everything… (my blog) and any other blogs you want to share on the list and publish it as a post in your blog.

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