Articles by Florin Costache on ArticleSnatch.com

5 Worst Vacation Hotspots

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Everybody has a bad vacation story: bad hotel service, bad weather, some food poisoning or maybe even getting mugged. But you know what? If you really want to impress your friends and family you'll have to go a step further. So, what's the worst you could do? I don't know, maybe something like getting asthma, lung cancer, getting kidnapped and some limbs amputated or even dying. Not the smartest thing to do, but when you're trying to impress everybody you have to do a bang-up job! Let's see which 5 vacation spots are the worst: 1. Kwinana, Australia - this is actually a pretty nice spot, close to Perth. Long sandy beaches, nice weather, warm water; it's all fine and dandy unless you stay there for more than a few days. Kwinana is home to an Alcoa refinery, which emit carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, benzene and volatile organic compounds. These things affect everything from fauna to flora and, of course, people. Officially there is no link between these chemicals and an increase in cancer plaguing Alcoa workers, but why don't you go there and test it for the rest of us? Pretty please? 2.** End Summary**

About the Author:
AA Travel is a Romanian travel agency ( agentie de turism ) that has low cost offers to Austrian ( Ski Austria ) and Bulgarian ( Ski Bulgaria ) ski resorts.

The 7 Most Unusual Hotels in the World

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

I don't know about you, but I'm really getting tired of the same old vacation spots! Yes, the golden sand and clear,warm water are very enticing. Yes, the clear mountain air invites you to explore everything. But the problem is that sometimes you just want something different and the usual vacation spot just won't cut it anymore! Here are the top 7 most unusual hotels in the world, giving you a possible destination for your next great vacation: 1. Woodpecker Hotel (Vasteras, Sweden) Are you afraid of heights? If yes, this sure isn't the hotel for you! The Woodpecker hotel is 13 meters (42 feet) above ground in a 130 year old oak tree in the Vasaparken park. This is the work of Mikael Genberg, a Swedish artist, who at first planned for the hotel to be free to anyone. It soon became aparent that everyone wanted to sleep there so they began charging fees. The hotel is very small (consider the limitations) it's not without its creature comforts: toilet, small kitchen, library, comfortable bed and a chair and table on the veranda. 2.** End Summary**

About the Author:
AAtravel is a Romanian travel agency that offers cost effective trips to Tenerife ( charter Tenerife ), Palma de Mallorca( charter Palma de Mallorca ) and Ibiza ( charter Ibiza ).

Top 4 Extreme Vacations

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Sometimes just standing on the beach or going for a nice quiet walk in the mountains is not enough; if your job has you sitting behind a desk 8 or more hours a day on vacation you might want to be doing something else than standing around, no matter how beautiful the surroundings are. Some people are naturally adventurous, but in case you aren't maybe an extreme vacation will be the experience of a life time! Let's see how you can spice up your life the next time you go on vacation: 1. Shark diving - I don't know about you, but shark diving is as extreme as you could get! Yes, you are in a cage (sometimes, if you prefer) and yes, you get detailed instructions on what to do and what not to do. But let's face it, it wouldn't be extreme if those sharks could be controlled and that danger is what is exciting. And how much are you going to pay to risk life and limb? Well, dig around for a few details and you will probably see packages for around $2500 per person. 2.** End Summary**

About the Author:
AATravel is a Romanian travel agency that has cost-effective offers for trips to Spain ( oferta Spania ), Egipt ( oferta Egipt ), Tenerife ( charter Tenerife ) and many other destination.

Top 5 Most Luxurious Hotels and Resorts

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400

So you want to take the holiday of your life, and to make that even more special you decided that there will be no expenses spared. If you still don't know where to go, here are 5 places that will surely rock your boat! 1. Altamer Resorts (Anguilla) - the 3 exclusive villas in the Altamer Resort are some of the finest in the world. Well, at $80,000 a night (this price was charged in December 2006 through January 2007, and is the most expensive) it really should be that way! Each villa has its own private swimming pool, hot tub, fitness center, home theater, an office with high speed internet access and wireless connection in the villa. You also get a personal butler and 8 dedicated staff, including a chef if the meal plan was selected. There are also 2 tennis courts that double as basketball courts and a volleyball court that are common for the 3 villas. If that won't satisfy you, the pristine beaches of Shoal Bay West will be what you are looking for. 2. Burj Al Arab (Dubai) - if you're visiting the United Arab Emirates this is the only place to stay!** End Summary**

About the Author:
AAtravel is a Romanian travel agency ( oferte turism ) that helps clients with bookings for various trips to Italy ( sejur Italia ) and Spain ( sejur Spania ).

Visiting Europe? Keep these 6 tips in mind!

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Travelling to Europe can be a wonderful and life-changing experience, but many people don't enjoy it the way they could and should because of the little annoyances that pop up during the trip. Here are a few tips to ensure you can make the most of your travel through Europe: 1. Instead of taking a taxi to your hotel it might be a lot better to share an airport shuttle with a few other travellers. Airport taxis are usually more expensive and some unscrupulous drivers will take side routes or even mess with the meter just to get more money out of your pocket. With an airport shuttle you save money and you don't have to worry about directions or finding the hotel; plus, you can get picked up again at the end of your stay and dropped off at the airport. 2. Take your time when travelling! Some people go on vacation doing a speed tour of every city and location they can think of, and this really is not the way to travel anywhere. Travelling this way will only exhaust you and you won't get to enjoy each city the way you should.** End Summary**

About the Author:
AAtravel is a Romanian travel agency that offers helps clients with booking ( cazare ) for various trips to Italy ( circuit Italia ) and Spain ( circuit Spania ).

How to Seo Your Wordpress Blog

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Wordpress is one of the most seo friendly publishing systems today, but to get the best results you still need to tinker with it a little bit! So let's see what steps you need to take to modify Wordpress so it will turn into a true seo CMS: 1. Permalinks structure: the default structure is no good at all - although search engines have no problem in indexing pages that have urls with variables, it's very clear that they prefer clean urls. The best results I have seen are when permalinks structure is set to "%postname%", and only that. This is something to keep in mind for any site you build, Wordpress or any other CMS. 2. Related posts plugin ( tinyurl.com/262ao4 ): this is good for both your visitors and the search engines. It automatically finds related posts and displays them in a list - very useful when visitors arrive on a page looking for something and they get more info on the same subject. 3. Metatags plugin ( tinyurl.com/2fxota ): you simply can't let the search engines handle the text your visitors see in the search engine result pages.** End Summary**

About the Author:
Florin Costache is a Romanian webmaster that writes on search engine optimization ( optimizare motoare de cautare ). He also provides Romanian site owners with top notch seo services ( optimizare web )!

How to Seo Your Joomla Site

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

So you have a great design, great content and even a few links to your Joomla site but it still seems that you aren't going nowhere in the search engines. Well, there is a reason: although Joomla is a great CMS it isn't that good with SEO. Let's see what we can do so Joomla will become the Search Engines' best friend: 1. Enable SEF urls: this is almost critical for good rankings. Even though search engines are very good at indexing dynamic urls many webmasters have seen better results when using search engine friendly urls. Here is how to enable it: log in the administrator backend and look for the "Global Configuration" icon. Now click it and in the upper right part you must enable "Search Engine Friendly URLs". Also, if your site runs on an Apache server than you must rename the "htaccess.txt" file to ".htaccess". Although Joomla's built-in SEF component is rather limited the output is still seen very well by the Search Engines. But it gets even better with the next module. 2. OpenSEF ( tinyurl.com/2oeogw ): this the best SEF component for Joomla.** End Summary**

About the Author:
Florin Costache is a Romanian webmaster that writes on search engine optimization for Google ( optimizare Google ). He also provides Romanian site owners with top notch seo services ( optimizare web )!

Looking to invest? Try Romanian real estate!

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Are you looking for a safe market to invest your money? It may not have crossed your mind, but the Romanian real estate market has shown a huge and stable growth of over 25 percent in the last 4 years. It could possibly be the best real estate investment opportunity in the world! Here are 6 facts that show why the Romanian real estate market is perfect for investment: 1. From 2003 to 2007 there has been a constant growth of over 25% per year. Think about this: an apartment in the center of Bucharest in 2003 was worth about 30,000 dollars you will now buy it for over 130,000 dollars. What caused this massive increase in price? This is when banks started to mortgage loans - people were able to put up as collateral the apartment or house they bought. This opened up a lot of possibilities, as many buyers are young families with wages above medium but with no other significant possessions. 2. In the first day of 2007 Romania joined the European Union. This is a huge social and economic step for Romania, and will bring much sought after stability.** End Summary**

About the Author:
Agi Total Construct is a Romanian construction company ( case la cheie ) specialized in constructing houses and villas ( case vile ).

Why you need a real estate appraisal!

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Whether you are selling, buying or renting a piece of property, whatever it may be, stop what you're doing and get a real estate appraisal - it is a crucial step in every real estate transaction! Now I know what you're thinking - you don't need an appraisal: extra cost on the whole transaction (it's not as expensive as you might think) just to see that maybe you were right all along. But what if you weren't right and you just lost a big pile of cash? This can happen to both sellers and buyers: sellers underestimate the property value and sell lower and buyers overestimate, sometimes going overboard with prices! Ok, now let's see what an appraiser does and how he/she does it: An appraiser's job is to interpret many types of market value such as fair market value, insurance value, tax value and value in use and then place an estimated price on the appraised property. Some of the commonly used methods in appraisal: 1. The cost approach (also known as summation approach) is the land value, plus the cost to reconstruct any improvements, less the depreciation on those improvements. 2.** End Summary**

About the Author:
Eval Corp is one of the top Romanian real estate appraisal companies ( evaluator Bucuresti ) that operates primarily in and around Bucharest ( evaluator imobiliar ).

Best 5 Free Seo Tools

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Let's face the facts: search engine optimization, for the most part, is hellishly boring. Doing the research, making the on-page changes, writing content and syndicating it is all tedious and time consuming. Fortunately I am not the only one, and like-minded web developers have come up with some great, and best of all, free seo tools. Let's have a look at some of the best tools for any optimizer: 1. 7search.com Advertiser Tools ( www.tinyurl.com/2wj5ac ): as always, keyword research is the basis of any seo project - you have to get the right keywords or your work will be useless. This is one of the best free keyword research tools out there, and although the traffic numbers aren't accurate, their related searches suggestions are the best! 2. Back Link Analyzer ( www.tinyurl.com/86hk8 ): this free link analyzer, courtesy of Aaron Wall, is an absolute jewel! The best way to use this is to actually spy on your competition and see where they are getting all that link juice from.** End Summary**

About the Author:
Florin Costache offers seo services ( servicii optimizare ) through his seo blog called Optimizare ; a very good resource for optimizers is his seo web directory ( director web ).

Now You can have a High Tech Home for Less

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Ever since the first computer was invented someone thought it could be put to good use inside the home, to make life better and easier. The biggest problem with this integration of technology was, until recently, the prohibitive cost. Now the situation has changed - technology of every type is mainstream and transforming your home into a high-tech marvel is much cheaper than it was 5 years ago. So let's see how we can improve our home: 1. Home cinema - this can be a very expensive part of your project. A Plasma TV can set you back some $1,200 (tv stand not included, which can cost up to $1,000) for a 42 inch model and up to $14,000 for a top of the line 60 inch model. This is clearly not going to cut it, so let's see how we can minimize the costs and still have a great system.** End Summary**

About the Author:
Agi Total Construct is a Romanian construction company specialized in house constructions ( constructii case ) and villa constructions ( constructii vile ) at affordable prices ( preturi case ).

Optimizing with Firefox

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

One piece of software any optimizer should love is Firefox. Now some may say "Why Firefox, it's only a browser?" Yes, it's a browser, but one that supports a big variety of plugins, some of them very useful for search engine optimization. So let's see what those plugins are: 1. SEOpen ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/ ): this is one of the best and most used Firefox seo plugins, and has many tools that make it a favorite of mine. So let's see what it can do: * in Google it can check for: backlinks, indexed pages, related pages, cache and PageRank. * in Yahoo and MSN: backlinks and indexed pages. * for Alexa: overview, traffic details, backlinks and related sites. * keyword density of the most used words on the page. * DMOZ checker: see if the site is included in the directory. * check for robots.txt. * validator to check your page for errors (it uses the validator from www.w3.org). There are other things, but these are the most important. 2. SEO Links ( http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/ ) is another extension I use everyday.** End Summary**

About the Author:
The author of this article -- Florin Costache -- also writes on Optimizare , a seo blog for Romanian webmasters. Another good resource for Romanian webmasters is the webmaster directory ( director web ).

The Secret of Black hat seo

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Are your seo efforts at a standstill while everyone else seems to be getting results? Maybe it's time to take some tips from the guys that know the limits of optimization and the benefits of playing in the grey area. So let's see what black hats do to get traffic: 1. Go for the long tail - black hats do this because it's easier to rank for a 4,5 or even 6 keyword search that has no direct competition than it is to rank for a search phrase that has hundreds of thousands or millions of results. Of course, spam sites have the advantage of massive numbers of pages, so even if that page only brings one visitor per month it's still enough - spam sites are created in only a couple of hours and usually have from 30 000 pages and up. But if you keep writing daily (or even more than once a day), it will add up. This brings us to the next point: 2.** End Summary**

About the Author:
Florin Costache is the webmaster of a Romanian seo site called Optimizare motoare de cautare which has an optimization guide ( etape optimizare ) and web directory ( director web ).

Who Else Wants Massive Traffic Really Fast?

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Picture this: you've launched your website for a couple of months now and your traffic has never gone over 100 visits a day, but today, after submitting a link to 5 websites, your server just crashed because it can't handle the traffic. How would that happen? It almost surely isn't search engine optimization, considering that these techniques take from 1 week to 3 or 4 months for their effects to show. The answer: Social Bookmarking. Remember these two words, they are going to save your website! Now lets take a look at the top 5 sites that can bring you a ton of traffic when you need it - right now. 1. Digg.com - this is the Big Daddy of social bookmarking. Although not the first of its kind, it surely is the biggest one out there. Getting on the front page will submit your site to the so called "digg effect", which can bring down even dedicated servers. 2. del.icio.us - it may not bring as many visitors as Digg, but it's the second best out there and it still gets the respect of every webmaster blessed with a front page posting. 3. Slashdot.** End Summary**

About the Author:
Florin Costache is the webmaster of Optimizare , a romanian search engine optimization blog.

Articles by Florin Costache on ArticleSnatch.com

5 Worst Vacation Hotspots

The 7 Most Unusual Hotels in the World

Top 4 Extreme Vacations

Top 5 Most Luxurious Hotels and Resorts

Visiting Europe? Keep these 6 tips in mind!

How to Seo Your Wordpress Blog

How to Seo Your Joomla Site

Looking to invest? Try Romanian real estate!

Why you need a real estate appraisal!

Best 5 Free Seo Tools

Now You can have a High Tech Home for Less

Optimizing with Firefox

The Secret of Black hat seo

Who Else Wants Massive Traffic Really Fast?

Top 5 ways to get Inbound Links