Quick Checks For Google Web Page Speed Tests

You probably heard the recent “announcement” by Google, right? In 2010, the web page speed (page load time) may be included as a factor to rankings and therefore, visibility.

Are you ready to make changes to your corporate web-pages? It may be a smart thing to do, but as with anything in SEO – all factors as a total matters. If you have poor user experience, or low traffic, you might start with that instead.

Here are some resources to help you:

http://www.webpagetest.org/

http://code.google.com/speed/

http://code.google.com/speed/articles/

Google Explains Adwords In 9 Minutes

Great for people who don’t understand – which are many!

Google Moderator launches

Google made some updates to their services.

Google just released a free service called Google Moderator. This is a port to Google App Engine of an existing tool, internally it was called Dory (after the fish who asked questions all the time in Finding Nemo).

What does Google Moderator do? When you have company-wide meetings, it lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered.

The interface looks like this:

It’s good for prioritizing which questions are most important.

There are many tools to use, and Yahoo for example has their excellent Yahoo User Interface Library, Yahoo Pipes, or YSlow. Its just nice when companies release code or tools that benefit lots of people on the web.

Google Moderator is a free service, so give it a try sometime.

Rumor: Google is Set to Acquire a Company Named Valve

Citing “well placed sources”, The Inquirer reported that Google is set to acquire gaming company Valve any time now. If you’re like who haven’t heard about Valve before, the company is responsible for a content distribution platform called Steam. Words on the streets say that Steam is Google’s major interest for acquiring Valve.

Industry watchers are speculating on the reason behind Google’s decision to buy Valve (if indeed, the well placed sources leaked info is correct) Some are even thinking that Google maybe entering the video market, but no words have came out yet from the Google camp. (more…)

Link Building Etiquette : The Value of the Connection

Yesterday I was reviewing the statistics behind one of our link building campaigns which consists of contacting sites & publishers for links in their resource pages, articles or linking areas and the approval to denial ratio based upon responses from those publishers. Surprisingly, almost as many publishers responded with a no or sorry message as responded with a positive message.

Now, it may be easy to just forget those publishers who responded to say no, and concentrate on obtaining the links on the sites which responded with a yes, but each of these email responses is not just a no, in fact, its just the beginning. These emails are warm and trusted connections with these publishers because even though they may have said no, we cannot include the link or sorry, we cannot link to you because we’re linking to your competitor, there are still ways to bring value from these connections which will help with your website marketing. (more…)

Twitter Ranking #1 for SMXEast

I was wondering why I was getting so many followers to my Twitter account today

Thanks Twitter!

Yahoo Preps Up a “More Open” Homepage

Yahoo will soon be rolling out a new homepage design and will begin testing it today with selected “testers” from UK, US, France and India. The new homepage would also come with new features that is aimed at establishing the Yahoo portal as a “friendly and more open” user start page.

Specifically, the new homepage:

will help you get more out of the Internet, make more of your precious time, and make sense of all the things going on in your world. After lots of ongoing research (i.e., focus groups, usability experiments, etc.), today we’ve begun testing an all-new, more streamlined Yahoo.com that will bring the things that matter most to you –- no matter where they “live” on the Web

(more…)

FireFox Extensions to Learn Domain IP Address

First of all, I do not mean you should use all these extensions, of course. This will slow down your FireFox immensely. Choose the one you like most and stick to it.

1. Flagfox – displays the country flag (based on an IP address) in the status bar for you to see the domain server location. Additional information (IP address and country) is displayed when you hover over the flag. The extension menu also provides quick access to more detailed Whois data.

(more…)

Yahoo-Rhapsody Team Up Brings Music to Search

Yahoo has teamed up with Rhapsody to enable users to listen to the full copies of songs right on the Yahoo! Search results page. This is in addition to the other Rhapsody collaboration which provides music artist shortcut on the page. Whereas before, Yahoo search users can only find quick details about artists, this time whenever a user search for an artists or a particular song, a Rhapsody music player will pop out of the screen to enable them to listen to the full version of the songs. (more…)

Oops! Google Did It Again, Gets Big Chunk of Search Market Share for August

As expected, the latest data from comScore shows that Google once again got the biggest chunk of the search market share for August and even managed to register a 1.1% increase from last month’s 61.9% to 63%. And we don’t have to guess who suffered from Google’s gain, Yahoo with a .9% decrease from last month’s 20.5% to 19.6% and Microsoft with .6% decrease from 8.9% to this month’s 8.3%.

Both Ask Network and AOL got a slight increase with .3% (4.5%-4.8%) and .1% (4.2%-4.3%)  respectively . (more…)