Google Plus

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*your message*

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-your message-

Know any more? Feel free to share them in the comments!

I am sure more formatting or navigation tips will be picked up with time.  Overall, I think Google Plus has great potential and I can not wait to see what they do with the platform next.

So, what is so special about this new social network?  The possibilities are endless.

Google is already the defacto place to turn for millions of people on the web.  People will sign up for Google+ simply because Google says to do so.  The invite only scheme that they have been pulling thus far is very similar to how they treated Gmail a few years back too.  Make something rare to have and you will have even more people fighting to be a part of it.

The part of Google+ I am looking forward to the most is the integration with Google’s other services.  From search, to documents and even video – sharing content with a specific group of people has never been easier.  Google+ does a great job at giving you ways to organize your friends into groups (oh sorry, I mean "circles"), so that you can send one message to Group A and another message to Group B.  Group A can not see what Group B saw, and vice versa.

It might be too early to say Google+ is better than Facebook. Hopefully Google+ will gain enough momentum to give Facebook a run for its money.  Competition is good in any business, and Facebook has been standing alone in the social networking field for way too long.

The first thing you will want to do is head over to their Google +1 create a button page.  From there, you first select the size of the button you wish to use:

• Small (15px)
• Medium (20px)
• Standard (24px)
• Tall (60px)

Once that is done, you can click on the link that reads, "Advanced options" to tweak a few more things, such as if you want to include the count, parse, JS callback function and the URL to +1.  The final step is to copy and paste the code they provide to you and place it into your own website.

Google has been grasping at straws for a while to find a way for people to share content, in the same way that Facebook does it.  You have to believe they would love to have that data in their own hands, and this is one way they hope to make that happen. 

The WordPress dashboard is a pretty useless tool if you ask me. I have found some great plugins for WordPress though that add a lot of functionality to it, to make the dashboard useful again.  Check out these five great plugins for WordPress and then try to tell me your WordPress dashboard is not better for having added them into the mix.

WP Hide Dashboard

Hide the Dashboard menu, Tools menu, Personal Options section and Help link on the Profile page from your blog subscribers when they are logged in.

Dashboard Links

Provides a dashboard widget for showing links from a certain link category on the dashboard.

Dashboard Post-it

Adds a simple ‘Post-it’ widget to the Dashboard that allows you to leave yourself or other authors a note.

Google AdSense Dashboard

Google AdSense Dashboard displays your earnings on your WordPress dashboard for a quick heads-up on your earnings for the day.

Google Analytics Dashboard

This plugin will give you access to your Google Analytics data directly inside your WordPress blog.

Know of any other great WordPress plugins that add a little more functionality to the WordPress default screen?  Let me know your favorites in the comments!

Check your website’s social ranking status with Siteholic.  This neat tool will give you a lot of details concerning your domain’s age, Google PageRank and other search engine and social network ranking statistics you need to keep track of.  The best thing about it is, it keeps all these details, all in one location, on one very simple page.

Now, I love to keep tabs on all the statistics of my websites – this way I know what I might need to improve, where I am doing good, and site building techniques I might not have thought about before.  Some of the details Siteholic provides to you about any domain include:

• Domain’s Age
• Google Backlinks
• Google Indexed Pages
• Bing Indexed Pages
• Site Value
• Digg Links
• Google Bot Last Visit
• and much more!

Here are a few more details about the tool from the developer:

Having a website with good content does not get you results. The next step is getting your website indexed in various major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. If your website is not listed and indexed in these search engines, people would never come to know about the existence of your site. Also it is important to know about the social bookmarking and how people are sharing your site.

Get a holistic view of your website ranking and social media presence.  Go check out siteholic.com!

Google Buzz, thus far, has been another example of them not exactly having Midas’s golden touch when it comes to new ideas (the other modern one being Google Wave). However, to make sure you have your bases covered – it might not be a bad idea to start syndicating your content through this wacky service to make sure those who want to follow you using Google Buzz can.

Have I gone too far forward? First let me touch base on what Google Buzz actually is.  Google Buzz is Google’s way for you to share updates, photos, videos and more.  Think of it as their version of Twitter, with a little more functionality – and built right into your Gmail account.

Is Google Buzz Worth the Trouble?

To get started with it – you simply visit the Google Buzz website, and click the, “Try Google Buzz in Gmail” button. That should bring up the new Google Buzz feature in your Gmail sidebar menu. I simply have it setup to syndicate whatever it can find from my Twitter account, by “connecting” it to Twitter.  You can also post to it directly, or link other websites or services to it.

The idea is cool, it is just not really reinventing the wheel so much that everybody wants to use it.  There is one redeeming fact about Google Buzz thus far though.  Once setup – it will bring a little more usefulness to your Google Profile.

What About the Google Buzz Sharing Widget?

Oh yes, nearly forgot about this one.  Google Buzz also brings us all one more button to use on our websites so that Google Buzz users can share your content with others on their own Google Buzz accounts.  You can find out how to set up these buttons from Google’s website.

So – should you go through the trouble of setting up a Google Buzz account? If you are already using Gmail, you might give it a shot – but for me, the only really good thing about it I have seen is it gives you one more place to get your links out about yourself and add some social fluff to your Google Profile, which I do recommend setting up.

Did you know that in Google Analytics, you can easily make annotations for big events happening to your website?  I am going to share with you the very simple way I made note of all my recent website designs in just a few steps. 

The first thing you will want to do is open up one of your website profiles in Google Analytics.  Next, under the visitor dashboard at the top, hit the tab that has the arrow pointing down on it.

Once you do that, you will see a link that says, "+ Create new annotation".  Click that link to create your new note.

Now, you will want to give the date you want the note to show up on in the first text box.  In the middle text box, leave yourself a note (I just put 2010 Redesign as my note), choose to make the note visible to other who have access to your Google Analytics report for this website or not, and then hit the save button.  Now you will see a little speech bubble come up on the date you added the annotation on.

You can do this as many times as you want.  It is a service put there to really make note of big website changes that you would like to mark in your statistics.  Events this would be perfect for could be:

• A major website redesign
• A change in your website advertisements
• The starting of a new landing page campaign

The possibilities go on and on.  I am just happy that Google provides us with such an open ended toolset to play with and customize to suit our needs.  Also worth making note of is the fact that your annotation will show up on your other traffic charts too, such as pageviews, pages/visits, bounce rate, and more.

Google Analytics offers a lot of good information, but not everybody knows how to read it.  Today, I will show you how to compare your best performing keywords that bring people into your web site and compare it to the average traffic of your website.

To get started, you will want to login to Google Analytics, go to your site’s profile.  Next, on the left side of the screen click on Traffic Sources and then Keywords.  This will take you to the Keyword Overview screen for your domain.

Now, you can see your most popular keywords.  This screen shows all the paid and non-paid keywords people use to find your website. By default, the keywords are sorted by highest to lowest by how many visits they have brought to your website.

Click on the comparison view to see how individual popular keywords compare to the website average.

So if I were to start advertising, I would want to target some of these better keywords for my website, such as “paint.net tutorials” and “wordpress alternatives”.  Even when you take advertising out of the picture, you could also say these would be good areas to focus on when it comes to future articles or tutorials.

Hope that helps you out when using and trying to understand Google Analytics on your own.  By understanding which keywords out perform the site average, you can see where you might need to shift your attention to in future marketing or website development.

Did you know that you can easily use Google Webmaster Tools to fix crawl errors on your web site?  This way, you can make sure more of your links go to where they are suppose to so your visitors are not getting the doomed 404 error as much.  I have been going through my old Web Hosting Show posts for the last few weeks fixing a lot of old errors, so figured I would show you how I got things fixed up.

First, you will want to make sure you have set up a Google Webmaster Tools account for your domain.  It is free and easy to do.  Once you have the basic statistics up and running, check under Crawl errors:

As you see, Google has found 36 pages that are pulling the proverbial 404 on visitors.  Next, I want you to click the “Not found” link so we can find out how to fix the problem at hand.

This next page should show you all your crawl errors.

You get the basic information you need to get the problem fixed.  Google will tell you the page address that should be there, the kind of error it is, where this page is being linked from, and the date the error was detected.

Please Note: These changes you make will not be updated live to the list.  So even if you fix all the errors, and you see them still coming up in Google Webmaster Tools, don’t think you did something wrong.  Just wait for Google to crawl though your pages and the links in question again. Might take anywhere from a week to a month.

Now, if you click on one of the “Linked From” links, you should see the specific pages on the web that are causing the 404.

Here you can see three pages are trying to link to a page that does not exist on my web site anymore (due to me changing from Blogware to WordPress many years ago).  I need to go in and edit these three pages if I can and update or remove the link in question.

I hope that helps serve as an introduction to fixing your crawl errors within Google Webmaster Tools.  This service that Google providers all web site owners is one that is often overlooked, and deserves more credit than it gets out there today at helping you troubleshoot common web site problems.

Looking for a way to download YouTube videos, without cluttering your browser of choice with yet another extension or add-on?  YouTube Downloader is a free program you can download and use to get this simple job done.

All you have to do  is enter the web site address of the video into the program, and hit the, OK button.  The rest of the process is taken care of internally via the program.

This might be one of the best stand alone simple YouTube video downloaders out there on the Web today.

Some of the features included are:

• Download videos from YouTube, Google Video, MySpaceTV and many others
• Allows you to access YouTube videos for which you need to be 18+ years of age
• Provides the ability to cut and select the output quality of converted videos
• Uses the FFmpeg engine to convert the videos
• Plays videos downloaded in Flash
• Extremely easy to use

You also have the choice to download and convert the files to the formats for the iPod, iPhone, PSP, Cell Phone, Windows Media, Xvid, or turn the video file into an MP3.

To download YouTube Downloader, go visit youtubedownloader.altervista.org, and hit the, “download now!” banner there.  You’ll be glad you did.