Tweaking your Blog for Holiday Sales
Recent polls show that online shopping will soar this year with 80% of internet users buying gifts online ($33 billion in the fourth quarter of 2006). Traffic in some niches run 10x in December as compared to September. Is your blog ready? If you are an advertiser, publisher, or both (like me), you need to [...]
Google Sitemap Protocol now the de facto Standard
If you are not already using Arne Brachhold’s Sitemap Plugin for WordPress, you had better get it installed as soon as possible. Google announced this week that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining them in officially supporting the Sitemap 0.84 XML protocol.
Sitemaps help improve website visibility in search results by insuring that indexing bots don’t [...]
Transferring large files over the internet - what are the options?
Transferring large files over the internet can be tricky. PowerPoint presentations with a lot of graphics can be from 5-100mb in size. Print-ready images files in TIFF format can often be as large as 75mb. Groups of JPEGs or GIFs (even zipped) can easily exceed the file size limit of mail servers. CD-ROMs or DVDs [...]
Google Alerts for Blogs - It works!
News about Google Alerts has been splashed around the net for the last week or so. If you subscribe to a Google News alert for your company or topic of interest, you can now receive the same style alerts for content in the Google Blog Search index. Registered users can setup an advanced search, or [...]
Google Launches New Mobile Application for Gmail
Google just announced the availability of a new mobile Gmail client. The free downloadable Java application delivers Gmail through a fast, feature-rich interface that is optimized for handheld devices.
This news is a welcome development as the existing web-based application is very plain and not at all user-friendly. I was never able to find the [...]
Auto-pinging Google from WordPress
Surely you heard about Google’s new Blog Ping Service (see my previous post). Yes, Google made it very clear how to do a manual ping. The auto-pinging instructions, however, make confusing reading. If you are a WordPress user it’s a snap! Just add this URL to your WordPress Update Services (Options -> Writing):
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
Does it work? [...]
Google Cuddles Up to Bloggers
Blogging is moving more and more mainstream nicely pushed along by Google (GOOG: 490.50 -1.57%). Three recent moves by Google demonstrate their interest in this medium.
First is the addition of Blog Search to the Google News page. This change was first noticed by Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion. Since then, Google has gone one step [...]
