I haven't met two small business owners in a meeting where one doesn't ask how to get his or her site to the top of the Google search results list. There are transparent reasons for wanting to be first: you get more clicks, your business seems important, clicks convert into business, and your Internet traffic can skyrocket. What's the magic formula for getting to the top?
There is no magic formula Disappointing as it is, there is no single solution to move your site's rank to #1 in Google. Now that you're over that impractical wish, let's find out how you can increase your page rank and stay away from what will get your Web site tossed from consideration.
Optimize your Web site Sometimes called SEO, Search Engine Optimization (or SEM, Search Engine Marketing are related but not the same), is a marketing tool more than it is a technology process (so put it in your advertising budget). People type queries (search terms) into search engines and Google delivers results. If your site is optimized for your key product or service, then why isn't it at the top of the results? Common problem: your site hasn't been optimized and search engines cannot find it. You want examples?
Google has quietly announced some new features for Analytics, its web tracking tool. They seem small, but these additional tracking features will provide much greater insight into what is going on your website since you can't always peer over visitors' shoulders to watch.
The updates include:
Site Search Tracking - Users will now be able to tell exactly what keywords visitors searched for on your site, and where these searches end up.
Event Tracking - Currently in a limited beta test, these website reports will show how users interact with various multimedia aspects on your site, including flash and Ajax without messing with pageview metrics.
Outbound link Tracking - Also in a limited beta test rolling out in the next few weeks, reports will show what links website visitors click on that direct them to an outside site.
If you have a website, and don't already have the free Google Analytics code installed, you are missing out on understanding how your visitors move around, how they interact with your content and how they got there in the first place. Google Analytics not only provides insight on how people navigate, but it also aids in targeting site content towards what people enjoy. It's easy to set up, free and Analytics reports are super simple to understand.
Homepage Startup tries to set itself apart from astampedeofweb2.0startpages by focusing on the fact that the majority of web users regularly visit no more than a handful of websites. The concept is pretty straightforward (if not exactly original): set this site as your homepage and when your browser window opens you have instant access to your favorite search engine and a grid of links to your favorite websites. Each link is identified by a screen shot and you can easily rearrange them by dragging and dropping to your hearts content. You can even get this all setup before creating an account.
When put up against the likes of iGoogle and My Yahoo there isn't a lot to do here, but that isn't a bad thing. Often the key to success is doing one thing well and not overpowering your users with unneeded features. Links are what Homepage Startup does well and they deliberately do not burden users with RSS feeds, weather, widgets, news, or anything else that is likely handled better by a dedicated service.
If you are looking for something simple to pop up when you click your browser's Home button then Homepage Startup is well worth checking out.
Every day we link to dozens, if not hundreds of blogs, software companies, news articles, and other web sites here at Download Squad. And most of those sites post links to other web pages.
Walk2Web is a tool that can help you finds new web sites by following the outbound links from a single page. For example, if you type in "www.downloadsquad.com," a few dots will pop up on the screen representing pages we've linked to. Since this blog is part of a network, some of the first links will be to our sister sites, like Engadget, Blogging Stocks, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
But if you click the "more" button a few times, you start to see some of the thousands of web sites we've linked to over the years. Click on each of those sites to see pages they've linked to, and so on. It's a great way of finding reliable sources of news, information and tips.
Walk2Web makes it easy to remember some of the sites you find by adding social bookmarking buttons to the interface. You can submit pages to StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, or Digg. Or you can just save your favorites at Walk2Web.
We know, it's the middle of the summer, but it's never too early to start looking at what you might need for the upcoming semester. And if you are looking for another way to get, and stay organized while off at school, Notely might be your lecture note savior.
This online tool allows users to organize data from meetings, appointments, class notes, lectures, accessing it anywhere. There are a number of free features that the Notely application supplies, including:
Calendar
To-Do
Homework Organizer
Course Manager
Notes
Link, Contact and File Organizer
Notebook/Lab book
Notely is a pretty powerful online application that can aid in keeping all class information together, in an easily managed interface. One main thing we wish it had, search. It would be nice to search for a phrase or keyword and have all related notes, calendar items, and course information show up. All of the content that users store in Notely can be exported as PDF, DOC, TXT, Excel and synced with iCal.
Each little white dot represents a blog. The bigger white dots represent blogs with more incoming and outgoing links, while the smaller dots are blogs with fewer links.
The green lines represent one-way links from one blog to another, and the blue lines show reciprocal links, or blogs that link back and forth to one another regularly.
So what do we see in this big messy blob?
The biggest white dots are popular blogs like Boing Boing and the Daily KOZ.
That isolated streak of green in the upper right hand (by the number three) shows LiveJournal blogs. LiveJournal users tend to link heavily to other LiveJournal blogs, but don't communicate as frequently with the outside world.
The blue spots show bloggers who frequently link back and forth, possibly writing responses on their own blogs to items they've read on other sites and vice versa.
Number 5 shows the fringe community of bloggers who share pornographic images and write about adult industry news and gossip.
Number 6 sports enthusiasts who are a bit more linked into the rest of the mainstream blogosphere than the pornography enthusiasts or LiveJournal bloggers. But it's still a distinct community with users communicating primarily amongst themselves.
dnScoop is an online tool that bunches many popular domain lookup tools into one.
It's a location where users can check out the traffic of a particular domain, see the domains history, popularity, PageRank, count inbound links, and perhaps the coolest feature, get a site's dollar value report.
Start off by entering your chosen URL, and then choose a category from the 10 supplied. dnScoop will spit out the results pretty quickly after running through a number of checks and balances.
For instance, in a search on downloadsquad.com, we see that the domain has a Google PR value of 6 with 1,390,153 inbound links. Alexa traffic ranks are provided, as well as the number of indexed pages downloadsquad.com has in major search engines. Last but not least, the most interesting feature, the value report. dnScoop takes all of the above results and calculates them with a special formula to give them a dollar amount. In this case, downloadsquad.com is valued at $5,654,000. And of course you can show this amount off with your very own valuation button to add to your website.
It's a neat figure to show off to your friends, but I wouldn't base any real life transactions on dnScoop data.
Linkification converts text URLS written on a page into clickable links. But there is much much more packed into this tiny Firefox add-on. This is a great add-on and to help reduce your frustration on forums and comment threads alike. Thanks goes to DLS reader kobewan, who pointed this out to us a while back.
With Linkification, you get a new icon on your lower Firefox status bar (a circle with a fancy "L" in the center), this is a quick on/off button. As you surf the net it will change colors, from gray to green or yellow.
If gray, there were no links converted on your current page.
If green/yellow, there were text url's that were converted into valid clickable links.
When you hover over the status icon a small tool tip pop-up will show you exactly how many links have been converted on your current page. It's an end to the routine of "Highlight, copy, CTRL-T, paste, Enter".
We all want to know how our websites are doing in this crazy World Wide Web of ours. Google just made this process a little bit easier with a great update to their Webmaster Tools.
With the additions of the "Links" tab to the tool set, finding out who is linking to your site could never be easier. With just a quick verification of your site's ownership you can quickly and easily find all internal links, link-backs that are within your domain, and external links to any page of your website or blog. So now, instead of using Google's Link operator, you can use this new feature. You are also able to download the entire table of links to your computer for quicker and easier navigation of the entire list.
In the process of typing this article, the list processing was a bit slow and the "Links" tab just disappeared. So it still has a few kinks to work out, but it should be completely live within a day or so. This would be a great tool for any webmaster and is completely free for use on any site you have.
NSFW (Not Safe For Work), a universal sign that something is objectionable or inappropriate or offensive online, is now going to become a part of many web developer's standard coding techniques. The idea is to put the rel="nsfw" attribute in link (a href) tags, much like the currently widely used rel="nofollow" attribute. This NSFW attribute will denote objectionable content that might get you in trouble with your big-brother-IT department. There is even a greasemonkey script for Firefox to block links that have the NSFW specification in the page's code. It is a smart idea, and may help computer users everywhere avoid NSFW content a bit more easily. However, I wonder if we still click on NSFW links, knowing that the link is not acceptable because of our insatiable curiosity, but I will leave that up to the statistician, Gallup pollers, and techie-shrinks for now.
When favicons first started to become popular, I have to admit that I didn't really "get" them. I couldn't see what the value was to having a dinky little icon in the address bar. Maybe I'm slow, but it also took me awhile to figure out that my browser could remember the favicon for my bookmarks or favorites that I'd visited, making it easier to pick them out from a long listing of links.
Of course, now that I'm used to them, I feel like I can't live without them. In fact, any listing of links that doesn't use favicons frustrates me, particularly if I use it a lot. One tool that I use a lot that unfortunately does not support favicons is del.icio.us. Of course, what do you do if there's something on the web that you wish was different? Well, if you're a programmer you just hack yourself together a greasemonkey script. And if you're like me, you just cross your fingers and hope that some kindly developer has hacked together a script to do what you were wishing you could do.
In my case, I'm happy to report that someone has in fact written a greasemonkey script to add favicons to del.icio.us. Creatively called fav.icio.us2, it does what it says it will do, and that's good enough for me.
Those Facebook social bookmarking features we told you about the other day? Well, the wait wasn't long and it seems that they're available to everybody now, even little ol' me. Facebook, of course, isn't calling it social bookmarking, they're calling it "Sharing." There's now a "My Shares" link in the left-hand sidebar, and there's little "Share" buttons all over the site--next to photos, people's profiles, and items other people have shared. When you share an item you can choose to put it on your profile or share it with specific people, or both.
When you share something with another Facebook user, it shows up in their right sidebar, not in their News Feed, which will be a relief to those who were afraid of overzealous linkers (or those with dreams of "free" iPods) spamming things up. Like events, you can enter someone's e-mail address if they don't have a Facebook account, but they have to register for an account before they can see what you've shared. There is, naturally, a bookmarklet that you can use to share links from across the web, as well as MP3s and videos from YouTube and Google Video.
Overall, I think Facebook's new Sharing features are well-implemented and well-thought out. They don't get in the way, it's easy to control who you share with and easier still to manage items. I really wish MP3s had an embedded player like videos do, but you can't win 'em all. Look after the jump for a bunch of screenshots of it in action.
TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick is reporting that Facebook is dipping its toes into del.icio.us territory with a new social bookmarking feature. Given the recent controversies over the News Feed feature and Facebook's opening for all users, the company is currently only letting Stanford and Berkeley users in on a private beta. The new sharing feature lets Facebook users bookmark both outside sites as well as Facebook pictures, notes, and profiles, and users can choose to share a bookmark publicly on their profile (in which event it will may appear on their friends' News Feed) or privately with the friends they choose. The bookmarking can be done by entering a URL into a form, clicking on a browser bookmarklet, or clicking on a "Share" button next to an item on Facebook. Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has more images of the feature in action, which show a YouTube video being bookmarked. It looks like Facebook is smart enough to recognize that it's a video and put a thumbnail image in feeds as well as a full embedded player in your profile. Smith says it recognizes MP3s, too, and does the same.
I think this is a very cool feature, but though I don't think it will cause a stir like the News Feed did initially, I have a feeling that Facebook will be hearing its share of complaints. In the end, though, if they make great features that users ultimately find useful, even if the mere thought of change scares them at first, everybody wins.
You know how you sometimes end up with many undead links in your del.icio.us after while, and it frustrates the heck out of you? Well Mac users now have a solution to the problem. dead.licious is a downloadable app for Macs (using OS X 10.4 and up) that will verify your links in del.icio.us and give you the option of removing the dead ones. The program is odd in that it is not an online app, nor a cross-platform app either, but is generating some buzz on Digg. It will run on both PPC and Intel powered Macs, and the developer's comments on Digg and MacUpdate.com state that this is merely a test to see how interested users are in the idea before he puts in more features (and work) into the app. I would love to see a Windows and Linux version of this, or hear about others you've used for this purpose, that are perhaps cross-platform. Anyone who is interested can let the developer know what you think of dead.licious at his website.
Here's a cool development I wasn't aware of until just now: Metalinks. Metalinks makes complex download pages obsolete by replacing long lists of download mirrors and BitTorrent trackers with a single .metalink file. As you might have already guessed, a .metalink file is a file that tells a download manager all the different ways it can download a file. The file itself takes the form of an open XML standard that can list an unlimited number of HTTP and FTP sources as well as BitTorrent trackers and ed2k and magnet links. Currently Metalink is supported by four download managers: GetRight 6 for Windows, Speed Download (beta) for Mac OS X, aria2 for *nix, and the cross-platform wxDownload Fast. OpenOffice.org recently began offering Metalinks for downloading the open source office suite. In addition to simplifying the download process, another advantage of this sort of distribution is that a smart download manager could download from several sources simultaneously, making for stable downloads even if one or more mirrors go down. I'm really hoping Metalinks catch on and we see them supported by many more download managers, P2P programs, and web browsers. If you want to start using Metalinks to distribute your own software, media, or whatever, the Metalink web site has a handy Metalink Creator that will build a .metalink file for you without you having to learn any of that pesky XML.
I haven't met two small business owners in a meeting where one doesn't ask how to get his or her site to the top of the Google search results list. There are transparent reasons for wanting to be first: you get more clicks, your business seems important, clicks convert into business, and your Internet traffic can skyrocket. What's the magic formula for getting to the top?
When you share something with another Facebook user, it shows up in their right sidebar, not in their News Feed, which will be a relief to those who were afraid of overzealous linkers (or those with dreams of "free" iPods) spamming things up. Like events, you can enter someone's e-mail address if they don't have a Facebook account, but they have to register for an account before they can see what you've shared. There is, naturally, a bookmarklet that you can use to share links from across the web, as well as MP3s and videos from YouTube and Google Video.
