I’ve applied PHP to my projects for a number of years, and have created a few applications that serve specific niche purposes that appropriately fit the context of my business: SEO or search engine optimization. I came across Zend’s certification for PHP 5.3 when doing some searches seeking out certifications available for any popular languages. I decided I hoped to move more into development. Credibility of certification varies from company to company, obviously.

The Zend PHP 5.3 cert appeared to me as being a lot more credible than many others because of Zend’s reputation as “the PHP company” (see Wikipedia). Getting certified in PHP 5.3 was also a little bit of a more realistic challenge to shoot for due to my pre-existing familiarity. My intent, however, was to use certification as a method of setting a goal to become more familiar with the intricacies of a given language through a structured approach. Getting a neat sheet of paper with a stamp on it was just the cream on top.

I’m really glad I did this. It induced me to follow the topics listed in the study guide meticulously and develop my knowledge on topics I was a little less familiar with within PHP: O.O.P., the PDO class, and certain security issues I wasn’t as deeply versed on. Aside from the bits and pieces in the study guide, I also followed a lot of the advice I’d seen floating around the internet to ensure a really good fluency with all of the string, array, and preg functions.

The exam was actually surprisingly difficult at points, despite plenty of studying. My study strategy was pretty cut and dry. I made Anki memory cards for common functions, and made sure I knew the correct syntax order and what the functions did. Then I went through the PHP 5.3 study guide and picked out everything I was not already familiar with and spent a lot of time probing through it to make absolutely sure I actually understood it.

The Zend PHP certification comes with some great perks: listing in Zend’s certified engineer yellow pages, membership of the Zend Linkedin group, and a license for Zend’s eclipse-based ZendStudio integrated development environment.

There exists a wide variety of other similarly credible certifications for programming and development: Java, Linux from Linux Professional Institute, MySQL from Oracle. The obvious next certification to go after based on some of my experience would be the MySQL one which comes in several levels. After grabbing the Oracle MySQL DBA certification, the Linux from LPI one is the next up.

Thanks for reading this article. If you’re interested in doing some more reading checkout: zend and Charlotte Real Estate.

If you are interested in SEO tools, you’ll find that you have two options – free tools or paid tools. There are some tools out there that are free for everyone to use, allowing you to check out your back links, the measure various things on your site, and some that even do keyword research for you. However, in many cases, you’ll actually find that the paid tools are often much better than the free ones. Why? Well, here are just a few reasons that make the case for paid tools over free ones.

Paid Tools Are Generally More Reliable Than Free Ones – One of the important differences between free and paid SEO tools is that paid SEO tools usually are much more reliable than are free ones. This is because with free tools, the developers do not have nearly as much of an incentive to keep their tools properly maintained.

Paid Tools Offer More Accuracy – As far as accuracy goes, paid tools usually do a lot better than the free alternatives. The developers of free SEO tools are not as motivated as the creators of paid tools to keep their software finely tuned and providing optimal performance. If the developers behind paid tools are not providing accuracy, they are likely to hear about it from their customers and work t make the necessary changes.

Paid SEO Tools Are More Convenient – Paid SEO tools are generally far more convenient and easy to use than are their free counterparts, especially when you can find all of the tools you need on one website, which is often the case with paid SEO tools.

Paid SEO Tools Offer Easier Integration – There are a multitude of different free SEO tools scattered all over the web; this can be difficult since they all work differently and rarely, if ever are possible to integrate with one another. Paid tools offer better interoperability, so you can save a lot of time and frustration.

Technical Support -Free SEO tools usually have little to no technical support. Paid tools of course do have some support behind them and in fact in many cases the technical support offered is excellent with turnaround times of 24 hours or less. If you run into any trouble with your SEO software, technical support is a big plus and can be well worth the purchase price all by itself.

There are of course some excellent free SEO tools out there, but the case for using paid SEO tools is very compelling. Technical support, convenience and easier integration makes paid SEO tools a favored option by many webmasters. Read the rest of this entry