I have read several articles about how Alexa ranking was useless, but never took it to heart.  While I don’t hold Alexa in the same high esteem as I did when I first started, I still believe Alexa ranking provides great information about the type of traffic you have.

Above are the graphs for Alexa and my Google Analytics traffic for the last 30 days. The first thing you’ll notice with Alexa is I have major spikes about once a week.  You’ll also notice the huge spike on Oct 31 (who would have thought Halloween would have been my highest traffic day to date).

Strangely, Alexa doesn’t really reflect the huge traffic spike. In fact, on days where I had less than 1/6th of the traffic, I had nearly the same Alexa rank.

Alexa Gives Quality Information About The Type Of Traffic On A Site

Clearly Alexa isn’t a perfectly reliable source for traffic volume ranking.  It does, however, give you an idea of the type of traffic you are getting. Alexa tracks a few things Analytics doesn’t specifically track.

Analytics will give you the referring site, but it doesn’t tell you what other sites visitors have visited either just before or just after visiting yours.  It isn’t the same as referring site or outbound links (although they will probably have some correlation).  This is helpful if you have a lot of direct traffic, but what to know what other sites your visitors read.

Demographics are another thing Alexa tracks that Analytics doesn’t.  Since not all visitors have Alexa, these demographics might not be totally accurate, but they are better than nothing.  Knowing your audience is critical for success.

Finally, Alexa gives related links (if your site gets enough traffic for Alexa to recognize trends).  This is helpful for finding other sites in your niche or other sites similar to ones you like to read.

Alexa definitely is not a reliable source for directly comparing traffic, but it does give you some decent point of comparison, and it tells you things about your visitors other tracking methods like Analytics and WP Stats might not include.  That alone makes Alexa worth keeping an eye on.

Related posts:

1. How the Alexa Toolbar can enhance your internet broswing
2. How Website Grader Can Take Your SEO To The Next Level
3. One Simple Way to Protect and Build Your Brand Name Online

Tweeter has been the center of a ton of attention the last year.  It’s explosive growth and strength as a real time organic search engine, instant breaking news resource, and marketing tool provide people using it an amazing advantage over those who don’t.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about 5 Twitter Newbie Mistakes To Avoid which was a great hit and some basic information about Twitter Lists.  The success of those articles has made me do a lot of thinking about how to get the most out of Twitter.

Five Reasons To Use Twitter

If you’re like me, you use Twitter for 5 reasons: To find useful information, to share useful information, to market my product, to build a brand image of value, and to build relationships.

While it is possible to do all of these things without following a ton of people or having a ton of followers using searches and hashtags, following the right people and having the right followers make the process much easier.

Step 1. Follow And Be Followed

One of the easiest and most popular ways to build a following is to follow someone and hope they follow back.  It’s not always easy to know who to follow and who not to follow.  Randomly following people will end up getting you a bunch of followers who you don’t care about and don’t care about you.

Step 2. Follow People With The Same Interest

The next natural step is to follow people who follow people you are interested in.  In other words, if you follow Shoemoney, you might follow other people who follow Shoemoney or people Shoemoney follows.

You can do this manually, but there are a lot of third party programs that automate this process.

Step 3. Follow Active Tweeps

A lot of Twitter accounts go inactive and there is no point in following them (even if they follow you back via automation).  People who only tweet once a week aren’t going to offer you anything special.  Many third party follow programs  just follow everyone without rhyme or reason.

That’s why I use Tweepi.  Tweepi is a free website lets you sort the “prospect follows” by almost every imaginable category including number of recent tweets, number of RTs, times RTed, and % of tweets with links.

After sorting the prospect, you can selectively pick which ones to follow.  Because I’m most interested in sharing information, I follow users who tend to RT and be RTed the most.

People with bigger followings are not always better. At first I thought it was great to be followed by people with thousands of followers.  After all, if they retweet my article, I’ll get tons of traffic, right?

Wrong!  The majority of those people just joined the random follow back frenzy, and their followers are not targeted and probably don’t care.  In fact, I’ve come to prefer people who are following less than 500 people (which usually means less than 1000 people are following them).  They tend to be more interactive and are far more likely to see my tweet, read my article (or other articles I recommend), and actually care.

Step 4. Provide Valuable Tweets

There is a reason Guy Kawasaki has so many followers.  He tweets useful information.  Don’t over promote your own product, don’t tweet affiliate links, and don’t spam, and you’ll be way ahead of the crowd.

The more you interact and more value you provide when you tweet, the less likely people are to unfollow you (even if you don’t follow them back), the more you will be retweeted, and the faster your following will grow.

Step 5.  Make Functional Twitter Lists

Even if you’re very selective about who you follow, there will be a point where you just have too many people to keep track of all at once.  Making the most of your Twitter Lists is one of the best ways to make following thousands of people more manageable.

Group people who tweet about similar subjects together.  Also group people who tweet with about the same frequency together.  If you have a list that is getting over 100 tweets an hour, you probably have too many people (or people who are too active) in the list to follow them closely.  You don’t want people who only tweet 20-30 times a week to get drowned in the noise of people tweeting 20-30 times an hour.

Lists for grouping people like classmates, coworkers, family, or other general categories can be bigger, but it will prevent you from following as closely.

Step 6. Unfollow The Spammers And People Who Don’t Follow You

Seth over at Blogussion wrote an awesome article about how to use ReFollow to clean up the people you are following.  I unfollow people who constantly tweet affiliate links.  I also unfollow almost everyone who doesn’t follow me back.

There are a few people who tweet about useful things that I always re-follow after

Step 7. Stay Active And Don’t Rush

There is no point in following people and building a following unless you are going to be active.  Interact with the people who you follow.  Get to know them, befriend them.

There is no point in rushing to get tons of followers if the ones you have now don’t care.  If you selectively follow people and slowly build your following, you’re Twitter experience will be far more powerful and useful than those who grow fast and never interact.

These 7 easy steps will put you well on your way to harnessing the power of Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Sponsored Twitter to make Money on Twitter
2. 5 Twitter Newbie Mistakes To Avoid
3. Props to Twitter – How Twitter has become the face of social networking marketing

A lot has been going on this week here in Props Blog land.  Today is my first anniversary with my beautiful wife Leah!  We also signed disclosure papers on a house and expect to finish closing by the end of the month.  Last but not least, we’re expecting in June!  (Talk about being busy)

You’ll also notice a lot has changed here at Props blog in the last month.  I’ve been completely changing up the theme to make it more attractive and easier to navigate (hopefully it has helped).

I have noticed a steady increase in both traffic and RSS subscribers.  I finally manned up and signed up for Awebber as well.  At this point, I don’t have an ebook to bribe people with, only good content and the promise of a lot more to come.

As you’ve probably noticed, I do one or two site reviews/plugs a week.  My gift to anyone who signs up for my newsletter is a free site review.  After you’ve signed up, just send me an e-mail with the site you want reviewed.  I’ll let you know when I’m going to post the review after that.

You can sign up for the newsletter at the top right of my page (the red box, can’t miss it unless you are color blind).

Finally, I’ve been having a hard time deciding how often I want my newsletter to update readers with my recent posts.  I think it is useful to be able to keep subscribers informed of recent posts they might have missed over the last week or two.

I’m conducting a poll about how frequently I should send out post updates.  Please vote what you think is best (even if you haven’t subscribed).

Back to our normally scheduled content tomorrow.

p.s. The Arbitrage Webinar was informative, but pretty weak regarding “secrets” of the trade.  I can tell the guy knows what he’s talking about, but I just have to see more before I can justify $2000.

Related posts:

1. How To Get The Most Traffic From Every Article You Write
2. Leave Those Spammy Ads Behind And Join In The Blogussion
3. Let Click Booth Make You An Affiliate Rockstar

Webpage design is critical to effectively capturing your reader’s attention and keeping them on your page.  If a reader arrive and nothing catches their eye, they are likely to bounce right away.  When there is too much going on, a reader might not know where to start, get frustrated, and leave too.  Finally, if the reader’s attention is drawn to unimportant parts of your page, they won’t end up reading the information you think is important.

Use Feng Shui for Graphic User Interface Eye Tracking

One of the best ways to increase the impact your site has on a new visitor is to optimize the design of your site so their eyes are attracted to the important things.  You might remember one of the 10 Guidelines to Making Your Site User Friendly was to pay attention to where faces in pictures point.  That is a perfect example of how heatmapping can improve your design and user experience.

One amazing (free) tool I’ve found for heatmapping is Feng-GUI.  Feng-GUI allows you to upload a jpg or png of your site (or anything else for that matter), and it will return a computer simulated prediction of where the human eye will travel during the first 5 seconds of viewing.

The programmers have gone to great lengths to take into consideration 9 important factors which attract attention (Basically: color, weight, size, and shape).  You can see examples of how each plays a role in capturing you’re eyes attention on their FAQ page.

You can only use Feng-GUI for free once every 5 hours, so make sure make the most of your time.

Use Eye Tracking Heatmaps to Attract Your Readers’ Attention to Key Elements on Your Page

Now that you have a way to track your readers’ eyes, and you know the 9 things that attract attention, you can use those things to optimize what people look at.

The first step in optimizing is deciding what you want your readers to do while they are on your site.  Some things your might want your readers to do include:

• * Read one article
• * Read a targeted articles
• * Read as many articles as possible
• * Subscribe to your RSS and/or Newsletter
• * Follow your Twitter
• * Click on Ads
• * Buy affiliate products
• * Bookmark your page
• * Share your page using social media (Digg, Stumble, etc…)
• * Daniel Scocco’s eBook Make Money Blogging goes over more things you might want your reader to do.

If you try to get your reader to do all of these things, they will feel overwhelmed and leave.  Instead, pick out the top 3 or 4 things you want your visitors to do.

Once you’ve picked what you want your reader to do, just use a couple of the 9 attention attracting methods to draw their eyes where you want them.

It sounds easy, but  there is a lot of work involve.  For some well established sites, tweaking a few colors and shapes might be quick and simple while others might find it easier to start from scratch.  Either way, the changes will be worth it.

Remember, you only have one chance to make a first impression.  Use eye tracking heatmaps to make the most of your first impression.

P.S.  My page is currently very poorly optimized right now.  Now that I have a heatmapping tool, you’ll notice some subtle (and no so subtle) changes.

Related posts:

1. SEO and Design Tips You Never Knew About
2. Two Quick Visual Branding Tools You Should Already Be Using
3. Props to WordPress

While the writing style of an author or the quality of a product are huge aspects in branding, there is nothing more important to branding than the name.

When you hear John Chow, you think of Make Money Online (or evil blogger depending on how long you’ve known him).  When you hear Nike you think sports apparel.  When you hear Twitter you think of spam… errr.. I mean social media.

The point is, without a strong brand name, your product will be hard to recognize.  Having a consistent brand name across all online media networks is important for building your brand.

How annoying would it be if you wanted to register a Twitter account or a Facebook vanity name only to find out someone already took it?  When I started Props Blog, I was lucky the name wasn’t taken anywhere.

Use NameChk to Help Protect and Build Your Brand

NameChk is an awesome utility that lets you check the availiblity of a username on well over 100 different social media, file sharing, and bookmarking sites.

Simply, type the name you want to check for, hit “Chk,” and  NameChk will quickly list which sites the name is taken on and which sites it is still available.

It is important to make sure that you have your brand name locked up for several reasons.  Having a consistent name across all networks and sites will make it easy for users to find you, identify you, and most importantly, remember you.

Also, the last thing you want is to work hard building your brand only to find out someone is tearing your brand down by impersonating you on another site.  The easier way to prevent that from happening is stop it before it starts.

Don’t get stuck having to use off names like Problogger007 or JohnChowBrownCow, and use NameChk to lock up your brand name today.  A little time could go a long way.

Related posts:

1. Two Quick Visual Branding Tools You Should Already Be Using
2. Invade Blog Archives To Build Your Knowledge In A Flash
3. Sampling Mojitos Can Teach You About Marketing Online

About a two weeks ago, I was reading ShoutMeLoud.com and came across an article about the Beta for Twitter Lists.  I wondered how exactly Twitter decided who to invite and hoped to be included.

Then about 30 minutes ago, I was looking at my secondary Twitter profile which I recently started (more of a mix of personal and blog instead of just blog) and saw that I was on 1 list.

I thought to myself “hmm, how am I on a list with my BlakeWaddill account, but not my Propsblog account.”  The hamster started running…  then the light came on.

My Initial Impressions of Twitter Lists (BETA)

It turns out my primary Twitter account was selected to participate in the beta testing.  The first thing I noticed was the extra “stat” next to followers that keeps track of lists.

When you click on the list stat, it takes you to a list (shocker) of the different lists you are on.   There is also a counter for how many people are on the list (following) and how many people are following the list (followers).

It turns out Greatest Review was selected for the beta as well, and he added me to his blogger list!

Naturally, the next thing I did was start a list.  From your Twitter homepage just below saved searches is the tab for Lists.  Just click on New list to get started.

You are then prompted to create a list name and decide if you want it to be public or private.  I created a list called Whale Bloggers which included the normal cast of big name bloggers.

To add people to the list you can use their search function which sucks, or you can just add people to your list the same way you add a friend from their homepage.

You can select multiple lists or you can create a new list on the spot.  Can you guess which famous blogger this is?

Twitter List Counts That Caught My Attention

By now, you’ve probably already heard about all the nonsense I mentioned above.  If you haven’t, you now know what you have to look forward to. ;-)

As I was going through different bloggers to add to my Whale Bloggers list, I saw a couple of interesting things.  Problogger, Chris Brogan, and Guy Kawasaki  were on 250, 410, and 570 lists respectively while John Chow, Daniel Scocco, and Shoemoney were hardly on 50 lists each.  Not shockingly, Mashable was on 1,250+ lists!

After I started checking my list, I noticed Chris Brogan, Problogger, and Guy were by far the most active Tweeters, follow back to some extent, and they were on far more lists.

Think Twice About Who You Put On Your List

The problem I see with adding people like Chris Brogan to your lists (he’s on my list, won’t come off, don’t get me wrong) is that he has a tendency to fill your entire feed when he is online.

When you start making lists, will you split super active twitters into a separate group for people who rarely tweet so you can hear more of what the quiet people have to say, or will you let them be drowned out?

I’ll be playing with lists over the next couple of days I’m sure.  Expect a list for people who actively visit and comment here on Props Blog.  I have to give my readers some luv.

Anyone else participating in the Beta?

Related posts:

1. 5 Twitter Newbie Mistakes To Avoid
2. Sponsored Twitter to make Money on Twitter
3. Props to Twitter – How Twitter has become the face of social networking marketing

Ever since I started using computers, I’ve always been interested in ASCII art.  I remember how cool I thought I was as a 10 year old making faces like };^> (the devil).  When I found the internet the level of ASCII art stepped it up a few notches.  Being able to draw crazy pictures in IRC using macros once again made me feel cool.

I’m more grown up now.  I only laugh half the time when people burp or say the word “penis” (haha!).  ASCII art no longer strikes me with awe as much as it once did, but there are still actually a couple of fun uses for it.

Three Fun Uses for ASCII Art

First, If you use any instant messaging client like AIM or Skype, dropping a ASCII picture on an inspecting friend can always get a great laugh.  It’s almost as fun as rickrolling someone.

Some sites do not allow image links in their comment sections, so the second unusual use for ASCII art is to use them in comments.  You have to hope that the site will actually format the post with the right number of characters per line, but if it does, it can really pay off.  Depending on the crowd, other people will be very impressed by your crazy ASCII Art.  (Without knowing the audience and author of the blog, this might not be appropriate according to blog comment etiquette; sometimes it is fun to break the rules… I would lol if someone did this on my blog)

The third and more practical use is branding your theme, code, and/or plugin.  You see, most code writers just have a little byline that no one ever notices or sees when they are skimming over the code.  Most people don’t even think twice about the person who wrote the free theme they are using and there is nothing to catch their attention.

This is where ASCII art comes in.  If you add in a comment at the top of each piece code that you write with an ASCII art picture of yourself or your webpage logo, people are far more likely to notice.  Once you have their attention, you can ask them to visit your webpage, follow you on twitter, or signup for your mailing list.

Use ACSII-O-Matic For Your ASCII Art Needs

You can spend hours trying to figure out how to make cool ASCII pictures, or you can just use the ASCII-O-Matic tool from typorgansm.com.  Typorganism has some really cool tools, but the coolest is the ASCII Art tool.  Just resize your image to 60×50 (weird dimensions, I know) and upload it to their site.

You can have your image rendered using either letters or squares, and they can be in color or in black and white.  As you can see by the two images above, the square makes a slightly more distinct and clear picture.  You really have to use color to get the most of the letter setting.

Just click the Generate HTML button, and you’ve got yourself some wicked ASCII art to surprise your friends with or put in your theme.

I look forward to seeing what nonsense comments I get over the next couple of months because of this.

Related posts:

1. How Upgrade Master Dot Com saved my life and why I will never buy Dell again

Pay Per Click Ads Are Frustrating

Pay Per Click ads are somewhat frustrating by nature.  You spend hours optimizing your site to have just the right number of ads in the right places,  so you don’t look like a tool just trying to make money (even if that is what you are).

Each morning you check your Adsense.  So far today, you might have 2 clicks each worth $1.50 each.  Not a bad average depending on your keywords (I have heard $5+ in some niches… crazy).

Around noon you check again.  This time you have 10 more clicks… for $0.02 cents each. WTF?!?

You have just been the victim of a MFA (that doesn’t mean Mother F—ing A–hole) site.  While there are some sites that simply just don’t want to shell out the big bucks for ads called LCPC (low cost per click) sites, there are others that are Made For Ads.

Made For Ads Sites Are Stealing Your Money

These Made For Ads sites pay very low prices for your ad space, then have nothing but ads on their sites which pay out higher.  Basically, they pay $0.02 for your reader, then send them off to another site at a much higher payout; the site they should have gone to from your site in the first place!

Beat MFA and LCPC Sites

Google shows the highest cost ads first on every page.  That means the ads at the top of the page will pay out better.  Legitimate advertisers know that most sites use text ad block sizes that include 4 links, so they pay a premium price for those spots.  After that, the price frequently goes down very quickly.  There are three ways to limit the amount of MFA sites you run face.

First, you can limit the number of ads your site displays.  If you check your Adsense stats and see that your ads at the bottom of your page are paying out a lot less per click, you might consider removing those ad blocks.  You can replace those ads with ads from another network.  If the ads at the top of your page aren’t getting many clicks, you can also remove those which will bump the higher paying ads down on your page.

Second,you can switch you image only ads for some or all of your ads.  This is the method I am using currently, although I’m not sure the CTR is always as good.  Another thing that you have to consider using this method is the selection of ads available.  Certain ad size blocks are more popular, so there might be better image ads for different sizes.

Finally, you can make use of the competitive ad filter in your AdSense setup.  If you know which sites have bad PPC rates, you can filter up to 200 of them (maybe more now).

The problem is there are so many, it would take a long time to manually figure out which ads to block and which ones were good.

Use Ads Black List To Help Filter MFA and LCPC Sites

Ads Black List is a site dedicated to helping you filter out as many of these profit stealing thieves as possible.  When you arrive to the site, you’ll have to register to get to the good stuff.  A basic membership is free, and there are premium options as well.

After you log in go to “My Account” and click “Add New Domain.”  Enter you URL and then click Auto Populate.  If your site title and meta keywords are good, you won’t have to do anything.  If they aren’t good, you’ll want to fill in a few more keywords to help the filter then hit submit.

Now go to “Generate Filter List.” Drag you website URL from the left box to the right box and check both MFA and LCPC boxes.  Unfortunately, you have to use Internet Explorer to drag your domain over.  Hopefully my wasted 15 min trying to figure this out saves you that time.  Click submit and voila! You have 200 sites you can cntl+a, cntrl+c, and cntl+v into your AdSense Competitive Filter.

Focus Your Ads On Your Content

Occasionally, you might talk about something off topic, and it will cause unfocused ads on your site.  I get ads for boat props because the title of my blog.  Obviously, boat props have almost nothing to do with my blog, so those ads are useless.  There are two way to limit how much this happens.

Use the HTML tag <!–google_ad_section_start-> at the start of the content that you want Google to use for keywords.  For me that might be words like blog ideas, blogging, blog reviews, or whatever.  Then add <-google_ad_section_end-> after the related content.

The second way works exactly the opposite.  If you open the tag with <!- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ->, Google will ignore everything in between your tags.  This actually works better for really off topic posts like my post on high fashion.

Make The Most From Your Ads

These tips might not help you get more clicks, but they will help you get the most per click possible.  Many of these ideas came from John Chow’s eBook and Problogger’s Adsense Tips.  Do you use any of these methods to make more money blogging?

Related posts:

1. Optimize Anchored Keyword Links To Improve your SEO
2. Props to eHow – How to do just about everything
3. Let Click Booth Make You An Affiliate Rockstar

There are countless theories behind what helps your SERP rank. In my opinion, anything that changes the way you write isn’t worth trying because if you aren’t putting your readers first, there is no point in blogging.

So how can you optimize your SEO if you don’t change the way you write?

Website Grader by HubSpot

When I first saw a Website Grader badge, I assumed it was silly ranking that had little to no relevance to the site like an Alexa badge.  The truth is, it really didn’t provide any benefit to the site, but it was a great link to follow.

When you get to the site there are options to enter your webpage, competing pages, and your e-mail.  I didn’t enter my e-mail, but I did compare my site to a few top blogs just for fun.

The results were far more useful than I expected.  Website Grader gives you a free break down of each part of your webpage that search engines look  and gives you tips on what you can improve.  While there were 5 major categories Website Grader analyzes, there were two section that I found very helpful:

On Page SEO

1. Metadata – Your Page Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords
   Apparently my page title was too long, so it gave me a warning notice that I could improve my SEO by shortening my page title.
2. Heading Summary – It checks all the pages  for header tags h1, h2, h3, etc…
   I recently was reading an article by Chris Pearson about how search engines use headings to read your page and how to improve your heading use.  Tomorrow, I’ll go into more depth about this.
3. Image Summary – A summary of all the images on your page and their tags
   Apparently, by removing the 16×16 gravatars that I include on my top commentators, I could make my webpage load faster.  I’m not sure that I agree with this, but it is something to take note of.  It also noted images that didn’t have alt tags.  Those tags effect the images rank in image search engines, so this was very helpful.
4. Page Analysis – This just checks the other pages on your site like contact, about, etc..
   Nothing really insightful here for me.
5. Readability Level – tells the level of education you need to read the site.
   Apparently someone in secondary school/high school can read my webpage.  Maybe I should start writing more articles about chemistry?

Off Page SEO

1. Domain Info – Just general info about your domain.  For some reason this site things I don’t have paid hosting, and that I’m using Blogspot… I’ll never be 100% apparently.
2. Google Page Rank – If you don’t know what Google Page Rank is you better ask someone! jk
   I’d like to be around PR 3 sometime around Christmas.  Is that too much to ask from Google for Christmas?
3. Google Indexed Pages – How many pages on your site Google has indexed.  I think my site isn’t old enough to rank other than “n/a.”
4. Last Google Crawl Date – I guess this is why I don’t have any indexed pages.
5. Traffic Rank – Your traffic rank is based off Alexa’s traffic rank for you.  Mine is top 0.725% at the moment.  In 3 months that will be better!
6. Inbound Links – How many inbound links you have.  I don’t know what system they are using to measure the number of inbound links, but 4,842 isn’t terrible for under 3 months.
7. DMOZ directory – They spelled it wrong.  I’m going to e-mail them about that.  I am not listed in DMOZ, but if it will help my SEO, I’ll register tonight.
8. Yahoo! Directory – Again, I should register.
9. ZoomInfo – Not sure

There are actually several other sections regarding social bookmarking and feeds, but I don’t think they give me anything new to consider.

What To Look For To Improve Your SEO

The On Site SEO section really struck me as the most helpful.  Labeling your images with meta/alt tags is very useful for your rank on Image Search engines which can drive more traffic to your site than you might think.

I also found the heading summary to be extremely useful too.  Search engines use header content to determine the important of the information on your site and places extra weight on those words.  Seeing that my sidebar labels were h2 and my post titles were h3 was kind of bass ackwards.  Just checking the heading labels to appropriately fit the content will greatly help your SEO.

The off page SEO useful for knowing some of the directories to register with.  The information itself is something I have minimal control over other than making sure I am registered.  Also, having a good idea of how many inbound links you have and focusing on increasing that number will help your SERP greatly.

In the end, a lot of your SERP comes from anchored text links from other sites.  Link building is a key part to getting your page ranked, so make sure you write quality content that will get others linking to you.  Also make the most of guest posts to get high quality links from high authority pages.

Discussion

After I post this I’m going to make the corrections to my site to improve my website grade.  How high is your website grade?  Is it higher or lower than you expected?  Were you able to use Website Grader to improve your SEO?

Related posts:

1. Improve Your WordPress Skills With Website-In-A-Weekend
2. 10 Guidelines To Making A User Friendly Website
3. Optimize Anchored Keyword Links To Improve your SEO

Yesterday, I was browsing Lifehacker and came across their First Look at Google Wave where one of the writers lucky enough to get invited to the Wave demonstrated the power of Google Wave with a screan shot fill review.  I promptly proceeded to devour that article followed by watching the 1 hour and 20 min Google Wave developer preview video.

What Is Google Wave

The developers of Google Wave said that e-mail as we know it is an old technology, and they wanted to design something that was like e-mail with updated feature.  If you were to take instant messenger, e-mail, outlook, and a webpage editor and balled them up into one place, you’d almost have Google Wave.

Google Wave Layout

In the First column, you have your standard e-mail navigation with your basic inbox, trash, sent (by me), etc… There is a contact list similar to most instant messenger clients that uses a green ball to mark online contacts.

Next you have your active wave column which is similar to your inbox on outlook with the list of all your active waves.  The unread waves will be bold.  You can also make other folders and view them in this column.  The right column is your reading and composing pane where the big action happens.

Honestly, the layout reminds me of Microsoft Outlook crossed with gmail, and I like it!

Source: http://www.lifehacker.com by Gina Trapani

Google Wave Features

Some specific features that Google Wave includes are:

• Inline replies (similar to threaded replies/comments) that can be hidden via widget
• The ability to embed maps, videos, games, and other gadgets (more on this later)
• Private replies and global replies
• Real time typing  (A lot of people are wowed by this, but ICQ chat had this feature back in 2000)
• Real time spell checking
• Drag and drop folders
• Wave revision playback – the ability to start the wave from the beginning and go through each revision step by step.  This is extremely useful if you join in on a wave late.  You can see who made each edit and even start a new wave from a previous step.
• Wave tagging
• Search operators
• Open source

Google Wave Gadgets and Robots

While the features listed above are all awesome and fun, they don’t truly show off the strength of the Wave. The gadgets and robots are where the real power of Google Wave is going to differentiate from everything else.

Some of the gadgets I’ve seen include: Chess, Risk, Google Map, and a cool “who is coming?” gadget.  Gina from Lifehacker also mentions a conference call gadget called Ribbit that dials out to everyone while keeping each phone number private.

Since Wave is still in development, there aren’t a ton of gadgets, so don’t let the simplicity of this gadgets fool you.  I’m positive many game gadgets will pop up quickly.  Real time typing for Texas Hold’em should be fun!

One of the coolest features is a robot called Bloggy.  By adding this robot to your wave, you can publish the entire wave on your blog.  Other Google Wave users can join the wave from the blog.  The wave and blog will update in real time, so anything you write from the wave client will show up on the blog and vice versa.  As they mentioned in the video, this could make flame wars get heated fast!

Currently, if you don’t have Wave you can’t read these blogs; however, I understand that they will have a read only feature for non-Wave users developed/implemented shortly… How do you think this is going to change blogging?

Summary

The demos of Google Wave that we’ve seen are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this product and the possible features it will have.  The real time editing and playback features will make it easier than ever for multiple users to collaborate on projects.  This will also make social interaction over the net among a group of users easier, faster, and more accurate than ever.  I’m looking forward to getting on Google Wave.  Are you ready for the Wave?

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