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.

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.

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.

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?

How many links you need from pages with PR ==>

1

3

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.

Google has the majority of the search market, so it should be number one on your list.  Click the follow link to submit your site to Google. http://www.google.com/addurl/

Next on the list of popular search engines is Yahoo!  They hold about 20% of the market compared to Google’s 65ish%.  But any avenue to get to your blog is a plus!  If you would like to get your website added to Yahoo! to get crawled by their robots, please visit the link http://submit.search.yahoo.com/

Another good site would be the Open Directory Project, also known as the dmoz!  For this one, you must navigate to the correct category that you would like your website added and then click “Suggest URL” at the top.  Click here to read about adding your site to the dmoz. http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

We can’t forget about the Giant software company now can we?  MSN has loyal followers and also has those that use hotmail for their personal email.  So make sure to also add your site to their submission form so it can be indexed also.  Use the link http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

Alexa is a very good Web Information website that has a good way of analyzing websites similar to that of Google’s page ranking.  To get your site added to them, visit the following link: http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters.

Lastly, we need to have a sitemap already created.  We can do this with our blog by using the Google Sitemap plugin (which is one of the vital plugins we will see soon in the “Top WordPress Plugins” article).  It asks you to add it in what might be a confusing way, but I’ve provided an example.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your
sitemap here.xml

Example:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.optimizeyourweb.net/sitemap.xml

After adding your site to each one of these, you should feel confident that they will soon be indexed by each and everyone one of the previous sites soon!  Once indexed, the only thing you should work on is relevant content!

Want to make a filter for your gmail? Want to make it so you know exactly where you signed up from that you’re getting this email? Well try this: If you again had the username google, you could add a plus sign (+) to the end and add whatever you want!

• Example: google+playboy.com@gmail.com.

This will remind you when you get spam that you did sign up to playboy or whatever site using that email address. Very helpful way to search for emails if you are looking for a specific one, or set of emails, just use this trick!