Optimize Your Web

Wanting to send a text message while sitting at your phone?  Google makes this easy by allow SMS messages from GMail.  If you are logged into Google, simply click here and you can see which of the awesome Google lab projects you want to try.

I suggest you try the SMS messaging, the custom colors for labels (especially if you’re a label-holic such as myself), pictures in chat, and Google Calendar.  There are plenty more that may be useful, but those seem to be really handy for myself.

Share with us if you have any good ones to add, or just want to post your opinion about it.

Ever wondered what the purpose of User Agent settings were for?  Well it has changed over the years, and was used to determine what type of browser or service was accessing your website.  Mainly it is used by people to determine what browser their main subscription base is using in order to tailor their website to that viewing.  One thing that I have seen is that some people use a spoofed user agent setting are trying to see things that they only want a website crawler such as Google’s GoogleBot to view.  This may be taking advantage of if they are showing the crawler special files that they may try to SEO optimize in order to get better ranking.

If you are looking to see whether or not the GoogleBot that has visited your site is legit, visit this list to check and see.  Also, if you are looking to tweak your user agent settings (that I mentioned in my “Top Firefox Pluggins (Addons)”) through your Mozilla Firefox, download it here.

Make sure that you use the correctly formatted user agent information, which you can get a huge list here.  For more information, please feel free to contact me with questions or tips.

For those that are constantly reviewing site visitors with Google Analytics (or any web site analyzer), there are a few things you should realize about their measurements.

Avg. Time on Site.
-This is calculated when they first request a page, and then when they request another.  This is not a true indication of the time.  Say if a person wants to read one of your posts (say a really lengthy and informative post, and it fulfills their needs) it doesn’t say actually how long they sat there and read it.  So it counts it as 0 time on your site if they do not click something else on your site.

Bounce Rate:
Many people don’t go to a website to find specific information and while they’re using that information for their intended purpose, do they continue to search your site unless either A) they’re returning to find out what else you wrote or B) complete finished whatever task they needed to accomplish at your site, and was curious about more.

So in conclusion, these are not great indicators of how your site helps people unless you have 20 articles written about similar subjects.  Because there is not a way for them to see (unless the person clicks something after reading the article, which many don’t).  If anyone has a good alternative or way to determine these and other measurements better, please feel free to share with all of us.

When Gmail was first announced, the amount of space that they offered was unheard of. Hotmail, which was one of the most popular free email sites at the time, offered space in terms of MB instead of GB. As more and more people migrated from using hotmail, among other free email providers, to Gmail, the only thing that these other companies/sites could do was to give in and try and match Google’s free services.

As more and more companies, such as AT&T – Uverse and Verizon – Fios, try and compete against home internet connections from cable companies, will we soon see someone break into the market in the next few years and offer bandwidth at a good price with great speed? There is also the upcoming purchase of the wireless airwaves in which one startup hopes to offer it for free! I am hoping so, but with the new release from CNet about Comcast capping their bandwidth, I am unsure if it will happen.  Is there any possible breakthrough for ISPs as there was with email services when Gmail came about?

Here is a table that I found recently about Google’s Page Ranking based on incoming links. I am not sure how accurate it is since Google keeps changing their algorithm, but it is a very interesting thing to note about how many links should be incoming in order to get a certain page rank. This doesn’t seem to factor in content or other things that are (or should be) heavily weighed in Google’s algorithm, but again it’s just very interesting.

Needing to get your website indexed? Well below is a list of the top search engines and their corresponding urls to get your site submitted. While all of these allow you to manually ask to be indexed, the exact time of your index is not certain and it is also not certain whether manually adding your website will have it crawled faster. But it cannot hurt right? (continue reading…)

Call it a trick, call it a hint or whatever, but what you are about to see is just plain cool.  Say you signup for gmail and have the username google.  Well you can receive email that comes to the names: go.ogle@gmail.com, goo.g.le@gmail.com and any combination of periods. That may not be exciting as this next little setting. (continue reading…)