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Category: google

Email: Are you a filer or a labeler?


Tuesday October 28, 2008

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To file or to label? That is the question.

I enjoy reading productivity and organization books and blogs. This does not mean I always take the advice, but I do have a curiosity about how other people get things done. We all experience different demands, there is no single solution for any of us. Productivity gurus and email management specialist recommend using labels and not a file based system. Files are cumbersome and often take more energy and effort to maintain, while labeling is efficient and does not impede work flow.

What I want to share with you is the change I have made within my gmail account. I was terribly resistant to this change because as my post title confesses … I am a chronic filer. Filing is what I know. Even though I had gmail, a web-based solution, I was still using Outlook to sort and file email.

Trusting my email to a label based system using gmail’s search function seemed scary but I am finding it to be far superior. I have shed my Outlook program and am working only within the gmail interface.

What I am finding is that the opportunity to file an email in two different categories is a great asset. How often have you wanted an email in more than one place as a reference or a reminder? Labels give me an opportunity to “file” in multiple reference positions. “To Dos” and “Projects” categories can collect reference emails and be available with a click of the label, using the underscore and other unique characters in your labels enables you to separate these items from other labels and keep them promenent in your label list.

I will be using the search function in my gmail, labels will replace folders and my inbox will be my sorting area. Here is a video which gave me the inspiration for my current system and I must share that I am really pleased with the change and only wish I had done it sooner.

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Google released its Google Earth browser for the iPhone and its FREE!!!

What is Google Earth? And if you are an iPhone Geocacher why do you want this is Free App? Watch the above video from Google to find out, In short, Google Earth for the iPhone is Google Maps in 3D, and with just a flip of a switch in the apps settings you can turn on the Latitude and Longitude of your location, very important information for us iPhone Geocaching folks!

With a quick trip to Geocaching.com to find the latitude and longitude of the caches you will be hunting for, make note of that info for later reference. Match up your location, with the location on your note and then start the drunken bee dance in search of your prize!

Google Earth for the iPhone provides most of the functionality of the full program but formatted to fit your iPhone. Pressing the “My Location” button in the lower left of the iPhone display and your perspective changes from one of viewing planet earth right down to seeing what car was parked in your driveway at the time the satellite photo was taken. Impressive, detailed sat shots and you have the option of viewing these as maps or the live terrain or a hybrid of both.

Search functions for Google Earth are also included. Search for addresses, specific businesses, landmarks in relation to where you are on earth. Those of you familiar with Google Earth will also love the addition of the Wikipedia and Panoramio layers.

Google Earth for iPhone, Yet another cool tool in the iPhone Geocachers Tool kit.

Click here to open iTunes and download the Free Google Earth iPhone Geocaching App.

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Google AdWords has in a beta test a bidding tool called Smart Positioning. The function of this tool aims to place your ad in the most cost-effective position each time it’s displayed. Here are Google’s words in how it works.

How Smart Positioning works.

Here’s an overview of what happens when your campaign is opted in to Smart Positioning:
1. Smart Positioning calculates incremental CPC’s to evaluate the effects on cost and click through rate that would be associated with a higher position for your ad.
2. Once our system determines the incremental CPC for putting your ad in a higher position, it compares the incremental CPC to your maximum CPC bid.
3. Your ad is placed in the highest position possible, as long as both the actual CPC for that position and the incremental CPC are less than your maximum CPC bid.

So essentially, this Google AdWords tool attempts to give its advertisers the best position given recent click data and the bid landscape. It then actually changes the max CPC in the account to reflect the bid it deems most ‘efficient’.

I hate to always be the cynic, but with my history in working with one of the major search engines, I know that ‘helpful’ tools may or may not be as helpful as they are described, but they always work in the favor of the search engine.

Here are some things that make me question the tool and therefore whether I will use it or not in the long run.
1. Since my bids can be changed without my specific knowledge, I am dissuaded.
2. Because Google is providing this ‘help’ to multiple advertisers in competition with each other on the same keyword, I can see a problem developing; either the tool won’t be very effective or certain advertisers will be favored and/or others hurt.
3. Google only provides help in ways that increase revenue as I stated earlier, so I cannot see this costing me less, but quite the opposite.

In conclusion of this early evaluation of a new bidding tool, albeit before it is in wide use, I prefer a bid to position model where I am paying the least possible for a particular position and I have real expectations on my cost and display position. When things can be open ended, Google can take advantage of the account without having to defend their actions. I know what their defense would be when you finally reach a customer service rep- ‘in the terms and conditions it clearly states we can raise your bids’.

I am out.

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If you have ever found yourself under the influence of your choice poison, which led your writing and sending a poorly thought out email, consider the new email tool Gmail Goggles. This email setting in Gmail makes you answer 4 math questions before you are able to send any email, between the hours you set for self restriction. The ultimate hope being you can’t do math intoxicated and therefore are unable to compose any email until the following day when cooler heads prevail.
So how do you enable Google Goggles? When logged into your Gmail account, access the “labs” option in the Settings page. Once you have enabled the goggles feature, you can then access the parameters of the tool in the ‘general settings’ page within that same Settings tab.
The parameters available to this tool are comical- you have a 1 to 5 meter you set for yourself on how difficult the math is for the questions that need be answered correctly before any mail can be sent. Additionally, there is a basic scheduling feature that allows you to set when the goggles apply to your email, and furthermore when you feel you may be inebriated enough to need 3rd party intervention.
But of course, if you can still do middle school to early high-school math when intoxicated, this won’t do much for you in being an obstacle.
We here at Webconsuls have been using a tool we think is better than Gmail Goggles– we call it self control; like Gmail Goggles, it’s free of charge. But I still like this tool because math is fun.
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In the Google way, they announce this product with a comic book, but this is not about your kids going to Webkinz this is about how the internet has itself turned into the application, and Google gets it. Gmail, Calendar, Documents, Photo, RSS, and Vids should not be sitting on a computer in your office that, will break, may become infected with a virus, and finally will become obsolete in 18 months.

Click here to download Google chrome

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Google AdWords does provide a way internally to get suggestions for keywords in your marketplace, its called the Keyword Tool. This tool is found when drilling into the account at the ‘keyword’ level. This means you have clicked past both the Campaign and Ad Group levels to display your keywords and ads.

This tool is free to AdWords users, so great right. Well in the past not as much because depending on what you gave the tool as a starting term for more suggestions, the tool spit out those suggestions from most general (least useful) to specific. Furthermore, the only information associated with these suggestions was 2 simple horizontal bar graphs detailing, ‘advertiser competition’ and ‘search volume’. So hopefully your are following me in that no numeric data was given whatsoever.

Now Google has expanded the tool to return suggestions with ‘approximate search volume’ for the last month and ‘approximate average search volume’ with an actual value. Practically speaking, your campaign has only to spend a predetermined amount any way, so its not as if one regularly finds him or herself adding up search volumes, but it is nice to quantify what Google used to shove into a half inch blue bar.

When it comes down to it, we need to have all the necessary keywords in the PPC account regardless of search volume because we need to target what it is we have deemed necessary in achieving our projected goals. That is, we do the best we can with what we can in the given market with a given budget for a certain business model. But I can say it is significant that Google’s Keyword tool is a bit more useful, and frankly it is nice to see Google sharing any real data with us at all. I’m sure tired of getting email replies that might as well have been some fraction of a bar graph. But Google must be listening to the people to some extent in changes as little as this one.

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I turn polar bears white
and I will make you cry.
I make guys have to pee
and girls comb their hair.
I make celebrities look stupid
and normal people look like celebrities.
I turn pancakes brown
and make your champagne bubble.
If you squeeze me, I’ll pop.
If you look at me, you’ll pop.
Can you guess the riddle?

97% of Harvard graduates could not figure the riddle out, but 84% of kindergarten students could. And they did it in 6 minutes or less!

Are you as smart as a Kindergartener? (no fair using Google!)

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New From Google, Google Health,

This service will let you store and manage all of your health information in one central place at Google. And it’s completely free. All you need to get started is a Google username and password.

Google believes that you own your medical records and you should have easy access to them. The way they see it, it’s your information; why shouldn’t you control it?

* Keep your doctors up-to-date
* Stop filling out the same paperwork every time you see a new doctor
* Avoid getting the same lab tests done over and over again because your doctor cannot get copies of your latest results
* Don’t lose your medical records because of a move, change in jobs or health insurance

Using Google Health, you manage your health information – not your health insurance plan or your employer. You can access your information anywhere, at any time.

Click Here for the Google Health Tour,

So would you put all of your medical info in Google’s hands?

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A quick and easy tutorial on how to make a form that you can add to your webpage that will easily grab the info you need from your visitors, add the s to http and even go secure!

Need to get info from the visitors to your site?

We can help.

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The Google Earth Plug-in and its JavaScript API new from Google will let you embed Google Earth into your web pages. Using this API you can draw markers and lines, drape images over the terrain, add 3D models, or load KML files, allowing you to build sophisticated 3D map applications. If you have an existing Maps API site, you can 3D-enable your page with as little as one line of code.

Got Google Earth embedded in your site yet?

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With Google Sites anyone can create and manage a simple, secure group website. You can create and publish new pages with the click of a button, edit web pages like documents, and move content and pages around as you please. Information is stored securely online, and you decide who can edit or view the site. Google Sites is powerful enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a family website.

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In this short vid from the head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts, provides some great tips on how to optimize the images you include on your website. A how to directly from Google with useful, accurate information on your ALT attributes and how they can make your photos and pictures more accessible.

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Google Doctype, Documenting the Open Web.

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

Google Doctype is 100% open.

* Open source
* Open content
* Open to contributions from anyone

More good stuff from Google.

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Microsoft and Yahoo have yet to work out a deal for Microsoft to takeover Yahoo via a stock bid in the $30 range. We at Webconsuls are not noting this in the slight chance that you hold Yahoo stock or in my case stock options. It is significant to note the impact of re-merger of the 2 giants in the search results category.

That is, Yahoo and MSN used to have a search marketing partnership which ended about 2 years ago. With Google the clear market share majority player, it would be nice to see Yahoo beef up its partners, especially for MSN who since the split from Yahoo has yet to be a formidable opponent.

In a perfect world, Yahoo Sponsored Search would give us the option of eliminating the partner network with the exception of MSN, should a merger ever be completed.

We’ll keep you updated.

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Google’s ever changing algorithm, that mysterious secret combination of characteristics to convince the search engines that your site is in fact the best and most appropriate resource for the inquiry typed into Google’s search.

In previous years search engine optimization experts would anguish over data and statistics trying to discern what keyword density was optimal, dashes or hyphens, strong or bold tags. These were the questions of the day. The algorithm would change as various techniques were exploited.

From the Site:
Why Google's Link Based Search Algorithms are Here to Stay

Let us look at just one small competitive niche for example. Say "Dallas Mortgage" for instance. This industry is fiercely competitive and right now there are several dozen mortgage brokers that are actually in Dallas trying to do a decent job of SEO to be ranked for this one (relatively small) niche. Now add to this the fact that Dallas is a major market and many companies in Houston, Austin, San Antone, etc that can underwrite a loan anywhere in the state are focusing on SEO for this one term as well. Lastly add the literally thousands of affiliate marketers that are working to build leads for companies like LowerMyBills.com, Ditech, etc who are also making mirror sites that optimize for this term and this one very small niche is persued by thousands of people.

To accomplish this goal some of these people are doing pure white hat (and getting owned by the way), some are doing varying levels of Gray to Black hat methods and some (affiliates mostly) are doing pure spam. To get a rank for this term you have to play by the Google rules and you must get links for it. Here is a news flash, no one is likely to give out links for "Dallas Mortgage" in the idealistic "democratic" way that Google suggests we get links. So to rank for this term you either directly create, negotiate, request, buy or beg links from quality sites.

Now to my idealist White Hat SEO brethren the solution is simple, just pull this link component out of the equation and judge sites on their content, what could be wrong with that? To anyone with an ability to think forward even a little bit the problem is like a oncoming train! Just go back to the fact that on site SEO is simple to accomplish, easy to learn and simplistic to teach. It only requires knowing and following standards, some very basic math and some skill with keyword research. So what scream the idealists!

Well what this means is all those thousands of people chasing "Dallas Mortgage" now will each create content with specific key word densities, proper tags, etc. Some will "win" for the moment and the loosers will just copy there techniques and try to do 1% better. Very soon the precise formula is determined and all the sites are using it and in a statistical tie with each other. Now also understand that with the exception of perhaps some of the "made for adSense" sites most of these sites will actually lead the visitor to a source for a Dallas Mortgage, they are not all junk as many would claim. Does this stalemate sound familiar? It should if you have been around a decade or more as it is very much how some of the first engines worked.

So what happened next? We needed a "tie breaker" some way to take two sites that both were quality from a code stand point, both had real sources of "dallas mortgage" information and both had a 2.5% (or whatever was in en vogue at the time) key word density for the term. What, short of a subjective and therefore flawed human review, was left for the search engines to use. Nothing but the infamous link. Why?

Beacause even though you can build your own links, even though you can buy them, even though you can build an entire series of sites just to pass link power around, some number of links will still be 100% beyond the control of the actual site owners. Right now we only have two choices in this. Human review or links as a component and humans can be bribed, wrong, bias, etc. Links at least use math and my friends, "math doesn't lie".

Do I think we have swung to far and links now have to much influence? Yes I do, I think it should be impossible for any page to rank for any term that is clearly not present on it at all. Yet Google "click here" and you find Adobe and if you Googled Miserable Failure in the past you found George Bush and Michale Moore (thanks to bloggers Google Bombing). Eventually Google had to hand job out those results for Bush and Moore because there were so many links nothing else would have made them go away.

I would have loved Google to simply have tinkered with things so that a word must be on a page. Sure keep the link portion but if I look for failure on Google I ain't looking for Bush or Moore (regardless of your opinion of either). What this leads us to though is a simple understanding, links are not going to stop pushing rankings for a very long time. Google may move to put more weight back into content, which I would welcome but links will be a driving force for a long time to come. I for one don't think removing them all together would create some sort of democratic internet eutopia, that others seem to believe it would.

What do you think? Is there to much weight on links? Would it be good if Google put more weight on content? Do you like things they way they are now? Or do you think I am wrong and TinPig is right and that Google should just stop using links to rank sites at all, if so how do we then break the 100 "ties" for a first page ranking?

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What is Pay Per Click ‘Quality Score’ and how is it calculated?
Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query, according to Google.

About Quality Score

Quality Score influences your ads’ position on Google. It also partly determines your keywords’ minimum bids. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the better your ad position and the lower your minimum bids.

Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody—advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too—when the ads we display match our users’ needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.
For calculating a keyword’s minimum bid (PPC only, not content network or content targeted ads):

  • The keyword’s historical click-through rate on Google
  • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
  • The quality of your landing page
  • Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
  • Other relevance factors***

Unfortunately, that is all Google will tell us, partly to avoid people gaming the system and partly to be less accountable. The ability to control earnings this way (in my estimation) will keep Google (and Yahoo in their shadow) from ever completely erasing the veil.

All we can do is play by the rules and put ourselves in the best position to pay the least for the desired position. This includes rotating ads, writing the most direct ad, and having the site back both of those points us with our “call to action”, or what we are looking to have the user/searcher do. This must be done clearly, easily and within the top fold of the landing page.

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The following linked article from The Register accuses Google’s AdWords, namely the ‘automatic matching’ feature to be untargeted and an outright waste of funds in most instances.

In short, automatic matching weakens the parameters and rules of defining ‘targeted’ in PPC terms. If I sell Adidas shoes, the articles explains, I don’t want to come up for a search on slippers. That would simply be a waste of money. I would go as far to add that in today’s world of short attention spans, anything not directly or literally an Adidas shoe is not targeted enough- let alone slippers.

Pay per click is too reliant on the ‘conversions to dollars spent’ ratio to allow for any more leniency than exactly what I typed in. Again, attentions spans generally don’t allow for it. Additionally, if the search term in question is on the general side where this rule may not directly apply, then the traffic itself will be of the browsing type not the converting (purchasing, buying, targeted lead) type. So in this case my clients probably aren’t interested in the 1st place.

But that is a whole different argument in itself.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/18/when_google_does_evil/page2.html

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Why should you upload a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, if you site is crawled just fine?

All sites can benefit from submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. You may help them to do a better job of crawling and understanding your site, especially if it has dynamic content or a complicated architecture.

Besides, you will have access to more information about your site, for example the number of pages from your Sitemaps that are indexed by Google, any errors Google found with your Sitemap, as well as warnings about potential problems. Also, you can submit specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content including Video, Mobile, News and Code.
More information about the benefits of submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools can be found here.

How do you detect paid links? If I want to stay on the safe side, should I use the “nofollow” attribute on all links?

GWC blogged about our position on paid links and the use of nofollow a few months ago. You may also find it interesting to read this thread in our Help Group about appropriate uses of the nofollow attribute.

How do I associate my site with a particular country/region using Google Webmaster Tools? Can I do this for a dynamic website?

The instructions in the Help Center explain that you can associate a country or region to an entire domain, individual subdomains or subdirectories. A quick tip: if, for instance, you are targeting the UK market, better ways of structuring your site would be example.co.uk, uk.example.com, or example.com/uk/. Google can geolocate all of those patterns.

If your domain name has no regional significance, such as www.example.com, you can still associate your website with a country or region. To do that you will need to verify the domain, or the subdomains and/or subdirectories one by one in your Webmaster Tools account and then associate each of them with a country/region. However, for the moment Google does not support setting a geographical target for patterns that can’t be verified such as, for example, www.example.com/?region=countrycode.

I have a news site and it is not entirely crawled. Why? Other crawlers had no problem crawling us…

First off, make sure that nothing prevents us from crawling your news site – the architecture of your site or the robots.txt file. Also, we suggest you sign up for Webmaster Tools and submit your content. We specifically have the News Sitemap protocol for sites offering this type of content. If you take advantage of this feature, Google can give you more information on which URLs we had trouble with and why. It really rocks!