Posts Tagged ‘application’

More Google API Applications

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Staggernation.com offers three tools based on the Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists the Web hosts of the results for a given query (www.staggernation.com/gawsh/). When you click on the triangle next to each host, you get a list of results for that host. The Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO) is a little more complicated: You enter a URL and choose whether you want pages that related to the URL or linked to the URL (www.staggernation.com/garbo/). Click on the triangle next to an URL to get a list of pages linked or related to that particular URL. CapeMail is an e-mail search application that allows you to send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com with the text of your query in the subject line and get the first ten results for that query back. Maybe it’s not something you’d do every day, but if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn’t do Web browsing, this is a very handy address to know.

Seo:Web Site Traffic

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Web site traffic is the number one imperative of 99-percent of the marketers on the Internet. How does one go about gaining more web site traffic? That is putting the cart before the horse. The first thing a person needs to do is measure current web site traffic before embarking on gaining more traffic. The second step is to use some or all of the methods listed below to gain more web site traffic and the third step is to measure current hits once again in order to calculate the success of the traffic-building campaign.

Measuring Web Site Traffic

You may know where you want to go, but how do you get there if you don’t know where you’re starting from? By measuring current web site traffic, you’ll establish a baseline of how many hits you’re currently receiving and where they’re coming from.

If someone else is hosting your site, most likely they’ll have a traffic analysis package that you can access through the control panel. Packages such as Webalizer or AW Stats are common. Even if one of these web site traffic analysis applications is not offered by your host, most likely you’ll still have access to the log files and can download these to a PC and use an application such as Funny Web Analyzer to give out the necessary stats.

If these web site traffic analysis packages are not available or understandable, you may wish to turn to an outside vendor who will give you a little Java code to put on the pages in order to give the necessary stats. Vendors like web-stats.com or freestats.com are a couple of places to start.

Once you have an idea of how many visitors per day you’re receiving and where they’re coming from it is time to start using some methods to gain web site traffic.

Gaining Web Site Traffic

The best method with the highest return on investment of gaining web site traffic is to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on a web site. Traffic from the natural search engines such as Google is free and for some online businesses, this accounts for 80-percent of their sales. Spending a couple of thousand dollars on search engine optimization may seem like a lot of money. But if your site has, say, 10 pages in the top rankings of the search engines (SE’s), do you think the resulting traffic will make this money back? If the answer is no, then you may not wish to do SEO. But if the answer is yes, which is most often the case, then you’ll not only recoup the investment but most likely gain thousands of dollars more in sales on your site. Isn’t this what you’re going for in the first place?

Since SEO is a slow, long-term plan for gaining web site traffic, typically taking months for the rankings to kick in, many web site owners choose to use a pay-per-click campaign to gain traffic in the short term. Pay-per-click programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo / Overture Site Match are a way to see immediate results by placing a web site in the Sponsored Listings section of the SE’s search results page. Traffic from these campaigns can also help you judge the viability of the keywords you’ve chosen for the SEO campaign. When doing pay-per-click (PPC) you basically bid on a keyword or key-phrase. The more you pay, the higher you appear in the Sponsored Listings and the more traffic the web site will receive. The downside of pay-per-click, though is that you keep paying and paying and paying for the traffic. Soon you’ill spend way more on PPC than on the optimization services.

Press releases (PR’s) are another great way to generate web site traffic. In the recent Search Engine Strategies seminars it was pointed out that the major search engine news feeds actually scan online press releases to see what they are about and rank them accordingly. So, just when you thought you could get away with writing standard press releases, now you would do well to write optimized press releases. The major SE’s scan these press releases like they do an html page, looking for keywords in order to categorize and rank the release. If you have a timely story or happening about your site, write and submit an optimized press release on a place such as PRWeb.com and see your traffic grow. Or if you don’t wish to do your own, there is a new business called SEO-PR who will do this for you.

There are many other methods in gaining web site traffic - too many to fully cover here. But to name a few, it is worth check out: article writing, opt-in email advertising, newsletter advertising (your own and others), give-aways, contests and promotions and banner advertisement.

A good idea once you gain traffic is to employ a website monitoring service such as that from Webmetrics to monitor your site for downtime. Too much downtime may mean the robots are unable to spider your site and will adversely affect your rankings.

Search engine optimization is not an end all and be all for everyone when it comes to generating more web site traffic. Many different and varied online marketing practices should be employed. When employing these other practices, though, don’t neglect SEO because you can be sure your competition isn’t neglecting it.

Office 2007 Users

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

Users who have Office 2007 on their computers can save each file in the earlier version. For example, when saving a document in Word:

1. Click on the Office button
2. Choose the Save As - Word 97-2003 Document

This will save the file in the recognized format for older versions (.doc).

A second option is to have Office 2007 users change the default setting for their files in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. to automatically save in a lower version. This is better than having to try and remember each time you save a file to change the file type. To change the default setting:

1. Open an Office application, for example Word
2. Click on the Office button
3. Click on the Word Options button at the bottom of the window
4. Click on Save to display the options
5. Click the down arrow next to the field for Save files in this format and choose  Word 97-2003 (*.doc)
6. Click OK to save the default

Pros / Cons on Google’s Desktop Search Engine

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

It’s been a month or so since Google’s Desktop Search Application was released. My initial reaction when the software was launched was nervousness. We live in a time of daily security breaches and while I trust Google for the most part I am reluctant to install software that indexes too much as far as I’m concerned. Google’s application indexes data files, including word processing files, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail messages, cached Web pages and chat sessions. What if it searches your cache and finds bank summaries or personal messages? What if it’s a shared machine and it accidentally shows you someone else’s personal information? I understand that Google found a capability that was missing in Microsoft’s OS and decided to fix it, and for that I applaud their efforts. Unfortunately at this time I’m not willing to take the security risks of installing their application.

If Google can work on this application and fix some of the security breaches I would be happy to install this application. Does it really need to index a computers cache, I personally don’t think so. I think this feature should be removed, and the same holds true for searching other machine user accounts.

If anyone has any additional information please let us in on it!

Google Reader Desktop: ReadAir Google Reader Client

Friday, June 20th, 2008

ReadAir is a desktop application which let Google Reader users read their feed on desktop. It is built with Adobe AIR, which means it is compatible with Windows, Linux, or Mac machine.
Google Reader is one of the best feed reader our there, but one thing is that you can’t bring it to your desktop. Thanks

Increase your RAM and so system speed

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

1). Start any application, say Word. Open some large documents.

2). Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open Windows Task Manager and click Processes tab and sort the list in descending order on Mem Usage. You will notice that WINWORD.EXE will be somewhere at the top, using multiple MBs of memory.

3). Now switch to Word and simply minimize it. (Don’t use the Minimize All Windows option of the task bar).

4). Now go back to the Windows Task Manager and see where WINWORD.EXE is listed. Most probably you will not find it at the top. You will typically have to scroll to the bottom of the list to find Word. Now check out the amount of RAM it is using. Surprised? The memory utilization has reduced by a huge amount.

5). Minimize each application that you are currently not working on by clicking on the Minimize button & you can increase the amount of available RAM by a substantial margin. Depending upon the number and type of applications you use together, the difference can be as much as 50 percent of extra RAM.

In any multitasking system, minimizing an application means that it won’t be utilized by the user right now. Therefore, the OS automatically makes the application use virtual memory & keeps bare minimum amounts of the code in physical RAM.