» Smart Phones, Web Design, Google or whatever
Archive for October, 2010
SEO and the Importance of Choosing Keywords
Oct 29th
For SEO, the importance of choosing keywords for your web site cannot be over-emphasized enough, in my opinion.
WHEN TO START CHOOSING KEYWORDS
Hopefully you started considering your keywords for your future SEO efforts when you were deciding what domain to buy. If not, stop posting, writing or adding pages until you give keywords some serious thought! You’ll see why I say that below.
WHEN TO STOP CHOOSING KEYWORDS
Stop choosing keywords when you are going to take your website down, stop blogging, when you want your traffic to drop, when you have too much money and other things that essentially mean DON’T stop considering your keywords until you are done with your website and want to kill it, or want it to die away.
SEO KEYWORDS EXAMPLE
So let’s consider a fictional web site owner who lives in a small town outside of a large city or heavily populated suburban area, Feerkle’s Auto Repair and Maintenance Shop. So this fictional website owner buys feerklesautorepair.com and focuses SEO efforts on the keyword phrase “Feerkle’s Auto Repair”. Time passes and the new domain gets into the search engines and lo and behold Feerkle’s Auto Repair is first on Google and Yahoo!
A year passes and our fictional owner gets 2 phone calls from people that found his web site, and in each case he finds that his great work got him some word-of-mouth advertising that sent a couple of people to the internet looking for Mr. Feerkle’s Auto Repair shop.
Feerkle gets a little discouraged and calls his buddy at AAA Windshield Replacement and Brakes. His buddy explains that he had to start referring people to other mechanics in the area because he got dozens of calls each week. Feerkle asks what he did special on his website and his buddy replies that someone advised him that “windshield replacement” and “brake repair” would be pretty good keywords for his business, if he didn’t mind doing a lot of windshield and brake work.
THE SEO LESSON?
CLICK TO ENLARGE
The story of Mr Feerkle demonstrates an interesting and powerful SEO lesson – it doesn’t matter if you rank #1 if no one searches for what you are ranking for – even if its on Google and Yahoo where you rank so well.
Software like WebCEO and Wordtracker (and others) can help you figure out what get’s searched for the most and has the least competition> That being said you may already have an idea of who your competition already and you can check the search engines yourself to more information.
WHERE TO PLACE KEYWORDS FOR GOOD SEO
Now everyone knows the only place you need to worry about keywords is in your keywords META tag, right? Wrong. As a matter-of-fact, though the keywords META tag isn’t completely dead its not as important as it used to be. Places to work your TOP keywords into include your HTML title tag, META description tag, your page headers (h1, h2, etc…), your content, your ALT tags, TITLE tags, domain name, folder name, and page names, not necessarily in order from most to least important. If you run a blog you also have categories and tags to consider.
Remember when you are placing keywords, that they need to be easily read by people as well as search engines. A web page with a h1 header like “Windshield Replacement, Auto Repair, Brake Repair” is probably going to be more confusing than a h1 header of “Auto Repair” with a h2 “Windshield Replacement” and another h2 header using “Brake Repair”.
Google Gets Twitter-gestions
Oct 27th
If you have suggestions about Gmail in Mobile Safari Google Mobile invites you to, among other feedback channels, to tweet using #gmailmobile and they’ll take a look at your “Twitter-gestions” (Twitter Suggestions). Google is leveraging Twitter as a channel for suggestions & feedback for Gmail Mobile, I’m sure that’s no surprise to some.
If you use Gmail in your mobile browser a lot, you may have noticed that we recently tried several different variations of these buttons. We‘ve iterated on the design and made improvements based on your feedback. If you have more suggestions, please post them in our forum, or if you use Twitter, mention #gmailmobile and we’ll take a look. If you’re a developer and are interested in learning about the Javascript and HTML techniques we used to do this, we’ll post an article to code.google.com/mobile in the coming weeks.
On your iPhone Gmail in your mobile browser you will see 2 changes Google has made, snappier scrolling and fixed toolbars that stay on the screen during scrolling instead of floating/moving. The Google Mobile post also notes … “You can see these improvements by visiting gmail.com from the browser of iPhone and iPod touch devices running iOS4 (English-only for now).”
Windows Software: Defrag
Oct 26th
I used to think that the Windows Defrag program was all that I needed. Then I started reading about defragging programs (freeware, shareware and paid) and talking to people in the know. There are a couple of good ones I use that do a better job than Windows Defrag, and tonight I’m writing about two of my favorite Windows Utilities, MyDefrag and Defraggler.
UPDATE: The recommendations for MyFrag and CCleaner came from a good friend who is an IT Pro who performs PC maintenance and repair. Since the recommendation for CCleaner is not a direct recommendation for Defraggler, I read Gizmo’s “Best Free Disk De0Fragmenter” page.
Defraggler, which I would have never used without a recommendation because of its name, is written by Piriform, the same people that write CCleaner, another essential Windows Utility. Defraggler can be downloaded from the Piriform Defraggler download page and you will also find more info about the program using the links on the right hand site of the site.
Another great, free Windows defrag program is MyDefrag. Their website is so generic-looking, that again, without a recommendation I would have never used this product. Visit the MyDefrag site and download the latest version, and you can also read about the product. Its got a very interesting screensaver option that can run when your screensaver starts… but read up on it before using it.
SEO: Tweeting about 15 Sites for Learning and Mastering
Oct 26th
A tweet I twote earlier…
A great link sent to me by a great friend… 15 Sites for Learning and Mastering SEO http://bit.ly/7W92Q8
Good SEO thanks to WordPress and blind luck
Now, this post to add more meat to that post. I love SEO and don’t normally have the time to read about it much. When I do its a quick look at an SEOMoz article or maybe something from Matt Cutts’ blog or some other relatively short snippett of information to add to or fine-tune my SEO skills. I’m no great SEO Expert, but I do get into the Search Engines, and its an important part of building a website. A website that is not AT A MINIMUM Search Engine friendly is a useless use of money.
I’ve been trying to learn good, solid SEO for about the past 8 years. Often its in response to a question a client asks or to a challenge issued by someone that asserts something I don’t agree with.
At any rate, the point is that this link is a good place to start (or continue) for anyone wanting to learn to master (or continue learning to master) SEO… 15 Sites for Learning and Mastering SEO. Check out some of these sites, and sign up for a newsletter or two.
The sitepoint website also has some great SEO articles and resources: http://search.sitepoint.com/?q=seo&submit=Search
Kill a Gmail and Advance to the Next Square
Oct 26th
Now you have an option in Gmail Labs to advance automatically to the next email conversation when you archive, delete, mute a conversation (etc…). To get started with this new feature follow these steps stoeln directly from the Gmail blog:
To get started with “Auto-advance” go to the Labs tab in Settings, enable it, and click the “Save changes” button. By default, “Auto-advance” will advance to the previous (older) conversation in your inbox — perfect for people who read their newest mail first. If you usually read your oldest email first and would rather advance to the next (newer) conversation, you can change the direction from the General Settings tab.
The old way when you deleted are archived you are taken back to the Inbox and instead now you can be taken to the next conversation (email).
Gmail Tasks Wants You!
Oct 26th
Google is asking for help improving Tasks and I’ve got a couple of ideas that I think would be pretty useful. Very similar to what Armo said (http://goo.gl/mod/7XCq) about flexibility between Tasks and Email and links to the original entry.
At the risk of some repetition of Armo’s post I’d love to see Tasks, Gmail, Google Docs and Calendar integrated to the point that any of one could be turned into any of the other with links back to whatever is needed.
Was that nebulous enough? Here’s an example… let’s say I have an appointment I’ve entered into my 
GCalendar for a doctor’s appointment six months from now. I setup the appointment with an email reminder (as I usually do) to remind me before the appointment so I can let my boss know – all of this is normal so far. Additionally, I need to bring my medication list to the appointment and I found a website with some great info I want to talk to my doctor about when I have the appointment also. It would be great if I could open a Google Doc an type in my medication list and associate that with the GCalendar event/reminder, and have a Task pop up the day before in whatever Task list is currently active during the time the event reminder is fire off reminding me, and possibly linking to the website with that great info I want to discuss with my doc, along with another link to my Google Doc (meds list).
At the risk of being redundant while trying to explain in one situation how this could all fit together, the email reminder would arrive with the website link to that great info, have my Google doc attached, and a handy link to Google Maps based on the info I entered into the calendar event.
Now I’m covered… on that day six months in the future if I am in GCalendar, or in Gmail using Tasks, or reading email I cannot miss my appointment – even if I ignore the emails. Of course, emails and Google docs could have links to GCalendar Events, etc… etc… so that they all interact with, link to and manage information between and with one another.
DO MORE
Gmail Task Poll – let your voice and ideas be heard, and let the Gmail Tasks team know what you want.
Quick Boost for Windows Vista – Disable Transparency
Oct 19th
Microsoft Windows Vista is still around (I’m using a Vista laptop tonight) and so looking around for ways to speed my system - disable Vista transparency. I’ve added RAM to computers before, but this tip is free, and doesn’t have any negative effecton the Operating System (in my opinion). I found this little gem on TechRepublic.com originally posted back in 2008, but its still as useful as ever.
For instructions and screenshots click the link above, or do this:
Right-click an empty spot on the desktop > click Personalize > click Window Color and Appearance. When the Window Color and Appearance window opens uncheck the Enable transparency checkbox, then click OK.
You’ll notice you can’t see through as when transparency was on, but the window edge background now gives the appearance of transparency since the “background pattern” doesn’t move when the window does.
HP Computers Compaq p6230y Uninstalling HP Software
Oct 15th
I’ve got an HP Compaq p6230y I’ve had for a while now and talking to an IT buddy of mine decided it would be a good idea to remove 
the HP software. I was reminded that I’d done this before (for different reasons, or one program at a time) when I got to HP Games and I had to go through put a check mark next to each and every WildTangent game that I wanted to uninstall. A well-written uninstall program would have an option for “Remove All Games” that would do that for me.
Now I’ve got all of this other HP software to go through, and because some is a waste of space, and others might be useful (like HP Mediasmart sounds like it might be worth keeping) I need to really consider what I’m uninstalling, and make sure I’m not getting rid of software that I really want.
