This is just a little demonstration of embedding Google maps into a website or blog. I just created a website for an upcoming event and wanted to give visitors directions from a local hotel to the event. To make it easier for everyone, I just embedded a Google map with directions on the “Directions” page.
Google Chrome is by far my favorite browser of the moment. I lost interest in Firefox as it became slower and slower with each update (it takes nearly 10 seconds to load from when I click the icon to launch it!). Additionally, Firefox had tons of memory leaks, and leaving the browser up all night would have my computer at a crawl by the morning.
Chrome loads immediately and my favorite feature is the one-box-for-everything (URL and search in one box).
I recommend you try Google Chrome out if you are looking for an alternate browser.
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According to research by Hitwise, as of December 2008, the top four search engines are (in order) Google (72.07%), Yahoo (17.79%), MSN (4.10%) and then Ask (3.15%). Each of these search engines provides a method for you to track how your site is doing in their results.
The first step is to make sure you have a robots.txt file and that it allows search engines to index your site.
The next step is to setup a sitemap, based on the sitemap protocol. This gives the major search engines a list of what pages you would like indexed and how you would like them to be indexed.
With those two steps complete the major search engines will be able to better find and index your content. To track how your site’s indexing is going for each engine, the steps are pretty much the same. Create a login, verify you own the site through either creating a file on your site or updating a meta tag, submitting a sitemap, and then tracking results:
Google: Google.com by far the most popular search engine, provides Google Webmaster Tools. I like Google’s tools the best, as it not only provides statistics, but lets you view how individual pages, if there are any indexing errors, and allows you to diagnose your site. I think it provides the most information and I use it in combination with Google Analytics to track my traffic results.
Yahoo: Yahoo.com provides Yahoo Site Explorer for its users to track their sites indexing. This tool provides a method to submit a sitemap and see your site indexing statistics but not much else. I still have an account registered to track how I am doing statistically.
MSN: MSN.com provides Webmaster Tools to access indexing information. They provide a cross between Google and Yahoo tools as far as depth of information goes. While they have more information than just the statistics offered by Yahoo, it is not to par with Google’s offering.
Ask: Ask.com does not provide a webmaster login but states that simply creating the appropriate robots.txt and sitemap files are all you need to do to help your listings. More information about Ask.com sitemap submission here.
Using these tools, why it will not increase your search ranking, will help you see how you are doing and diagnose areas of improvement. They are great tools to see how different SEO techniques are improving how your site is indexed.
What is your websites Google Page Rank? A sites page rank shows how important Google says it is for search results. The higher the page rank, the higher and more likely the page will display in a search. Additionally, every page has its own individual page rank. With a good internal site linking structure when one page obtains a higher page rank it will pass it on to all other pages in your site. You should check your home page as well as many different pages throughout your site to see what your overall page ranking is.
At this moment in life I am using Google Chrome as my browser of choice.
It is fast, efficient, and has some interesting features and functionality that makes it easy for me to use (I am a big fan of the startup page, as well as how it organizes bookmarks, etc). However, I just noticed that it does seem to use my hosts file. For those of you who don’t know, a hosts file is a file that allows you to configure certain websites to redirect to certain other sites. For a home user, a big use is to block certain websites from displaying or accessing your computer…. Such as Google Analytics.
Let’s say I wanted to keep google analytics from tracking when I go to my own website. This is a very useful feature when you do not want the pages you view on your own site to show up on your google analytics page. This skews the ratings, generally towards direct referral traffic.
The way it works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc is… in Windows XP simply open: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
In notepad and add:
# [Google Inc]
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
to the file.
Is this a feature intentionally left out of Google Chrome to prevent users from blocking Google advertising like Google Adwords, etc? You can do it like this:
I just updated my web site pages with the new Google Analytics tracking code snippet. It fixes a rare javascript pop-up error message by using a try-catch snippet. If you are familiar with object oriented programming languages, try-catch statements are nothing new. If you aren’t familiar… well the Google article gives you everything you need to know.
The “#t=31m08s” takes you to 31 minutes and 8 seconds in a video. I just found out that you can also start embedded videos at a certain timestamp.
To do it on an embedded [...]
Calling for link spam reports Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us [...]
Leaving the iPhone I’m three weeks into a new 30 day challenge: no iPhone. When I got a Nexus One in December, I spent a few weeks carrying both phones around in the pockets of my jeans. It took a little while to adapt to Android, but I’m very happy with my Nexus One and I don’t plan [...]
My speaking plans for 2010 Last year I tried to limit my travel but still ended up making about ten (!) trips in 2009. This year I’ve resolved to travel less for work. Right now, here’s my current speaking/travel plans for 2010:
March 2-4, 2010: SMX West, Santa Clara, CA. I’m doing a “Ask the Search Engines” panel.
May 19-20, 2010: Google [...]
Finding the best cell phone carrier Okay, someone tell me if this device exists (or build it!). I want a device where I can pay $10-15 to get a gadget in the mail. The gadget would sit in my pocket for a week wherever I go. The device would record cell phone signal strength for each of the four major U.S. [...]
Blog to Book? I recently went looking for some software to make a blog into a book. Here’s what I found:
- Lulu will take PDF files for a book. Blogbooker.com will try to create a PDF from a blog. Unfortunately, my blog made BlogBooker choke (I have 991 posts from my blog) — even when I excluded comments.
- [...]
Chrome support for Greasemonkey Back in December, I happened to click on a Greasemonkey script in Chrome and was shocked that it just worked. At the time, I wrote a note within Google that said
Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, [...]
Our algorithm employs rules of Arabic spelling and grammar along with signals from historical search data to decide when to leave out spaces between words or when to remove unnecessarily repeated letters. Now, [...]
Installing Android development environment on Ubuntu 9.04 I wanted to play with writing Android apps on my home Linux computer, which is currently running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). These are mostly notes for myself, so don’t feel guilty if you skip this post.
- Make sure your system is up-to-date:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
- Install Java
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
- [...]
Keep an eye on changing pages Google just launched a nice feature on Google Reader: the ability to keep an eye on pages for changes. This works even if the page doesn’t have its own RSS feed. This sort of thing is very handy. You could use it to spot new things on a privacy policy page or watch for changes [...]
