The "CurrencyRates" SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tool

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)


Note! Owing to a change in the the source of the rates used, versions of this tool below 2.00 will no longer work. You must use that version (or later) for correct results!

Providing Search Engines With "Fresh" Pages

One of the points on which there seems to be general agreement in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community is that search engines--and especially Google®--like to see fresh content--which is to say pages whose content changes frequently.

There is a package on this site--BookAdder--that can provide you with thousands of relevant, daily-changing pages. But those pages are more or less a world unto themselves; what would also be useful to most webmasters is something simple they could just paste into their "regular" site pages that would automatically provide frequently changing content of a sort that would actually be at least interesting and possibly useful to their site visitors.

The tool provided here is one of a series of possible answers for that need. (See this site's main page for other possibilities.) This one, CurrencyRates, provides a one-line statement that you can place on any web page that will drop into that page a box showing the exchange rates to and from some selected currency (any one of the nearly four dozen that the International Monetary Fund reports can be selected) and a selectable set of other currencies; you can even, if you choose, display cute little national flags.

(Obviously, this too's usefulness to you depends on the degree to which international currency-exchange data are relevant--or at least not obviously irrelevant--to the theme of your site. As noted above, I have other such tools, so that the chances of your finding one that will marry well with your pages increases.)

To give you an idea of what the dropin looks like, here is an operative sample. Note well, please, that you can vary the number of currencies display, the identity (and display order) of the particular currencies, the base (to/from) currency, the background color of the display, and the color of the display text.


To convert values in U.S. Dollars to foreign currency:
To get:
 
Multiply
USD by: 		EU
Euro

0.7268 		British
Pound

0.6582 		Japanese
Yen

90.46 		Canadian
Dollar

1.0189 		Mexican
Peso

12.545 		Swiss
Franc

1.0575
To convert values in foreign currency to U.S. Dollars:
Multiply:
 
 
     by: 		EU
Euro

1.3759 		British
Pound

1.5193 		Japanese
Yen

0.0111 		Canadian
Dollar

0.9815 		Mexican
Peso

0.0797 		Swiss
Franc

0.9456
(Code by SEO Toys)


Here is another example--the currencies of some Commonwealth nations--made to "fade into" the page by using an identical background color (and, for novelty, green lettering):



To convert values in U.S. Dollars to foreign currency:
To get:
 
Multiply
USD by: 		British
Pound

0.6582 		Canadian
Dollar

1.0189 		Australian
Dollar

1.0923 		New Zealand
Dollar

1.4261
To convert values in foreign currency to U.S. Dollars:
Multiply:
 
 
     by: 		British
Pound

1.5193 		Canadian
Dollar

0.9815 		Australian
Dollar

0.9155 		New Zealand
Dollar

0.7012
(Code by SEO Toys)




(Here is the "Rates" v. 2.00 tool package as a single ZIP file.)


Change History:

0.10: initial release

0.11: removed forgotten (non-critical) non-php from imfsee.php

0.20: substantially upgraded install routine and docfiles.

0.30: major rewrite to imfget.php to accomodate (unannounced) drastic change in IMF exchange-rates data file.

0.40: major rewrite to take advantage of the IMF's now updating data throughout the business day (instead of once daily); combined two old scripts (imfget.php and imfsee.php) into a single new rates.php that grabs live data at evry call.

0.41: fixed dumb error so flags will now display OK.

0.50: changed timeout values so if IMF datafile is missing altogether toy will not hang unduly long (c. 15 secs.).

1.00: major rewrite: much smarter caching, added in new currencies from IMF, greatly simplified installation, added "transparent background" option.

1.01: major rewrite: switched from IMF to NYFRB as data source. Lost a few minor currencies, but data is much more reliably available.

2.00: major rewrite: switched from NYFRB--which unexpectedly dropped daily quotations--to CNN as data source. Lost a couple of minor currencies, gained a couple of others, but data is (again) reliably available.


To link to this page, please copy and paste this exact code:
<strong><a href="http://seo-toys.com/currency-rates-tool/rate-exchange-tool.shtml">the "Rates" SEO Tool </a></strong>

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