Posts tagged google
How can I get quick Flight Status while i’m mobile?
Jul 2nd
So this nifty obscure use of Google really helps us out on the go. We fire up our mobile browser (whose home page is Google) and type in our Airline and flight number like so:
And Google does the hard work and gives you what you need to see! This will work from any Internet terminal and not just your mobile. For more obscure uses of Google like currency and metrics conversion check out this LifeHacker post. Do you have any other Google tricks or hacks? Put us on! Let us know in the comments!
Can Google News Help My Site?
Mar 13th
Hey everyone! Scott here from AndroidGuys, doing a little guest blogging today for AskTheAdmin. Thanks to Karl and the other guys for allowing me the opportunity to reach out and talk with his audience.
A common concern with bloggers is where they show up on a Google search and there’s a good reason for this; If you don’t show up on pages 1 or 2, then you run the risk of not getting the exposure you want. Well there’s another option out there for traffic potential that might be available to you and it’s offered by Google as well. If the subject of this article wasn’t a dead giveaway, it’s called Google News.
Take a minute to have a look… I’ll wait for ya.
Pretty sweet huh? It has become my preferred place to search for news and late-breaking announcements. What they do is combine news from thousands of sources and give you a one-stop-shop to find what you’re looking for. Why bother going to CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC when you can see what each of them are saying at once?
One of the best features about Google News is that you can subscribe to news feeds. Let’s say you want to be alerted anytime a news article goes up on “Roger Clemens”. Right now, if you did a news search for him, there are articles listed by
That’s right, depending on what your blog/site is about, you stand a decent chance of getting it listed under Google News. At AndroidGuys, we write about Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and all the other cell phone stuff in between. To compile our articles, we used Google News to gather sources of information and we subscribed to keywords that were relevant to our site. After a few weeks, we realized that we were consistently seeing the same sites showing up, including tech blogs. After reading a few of them we realized that our opinion pieces were just as well written as some of these “news sources” so we naturally started wondering how we could get our articles in there too. It didn’t take a lot of work as Google makes it very easy to submit your site as a source.
The Benefits
Getting your site listed on Google News brings you and your site a few advantages. Here are three big ones.
- Traffic – Number one on everybody’s list. You gain yet another place to show off your name and writing skills.
- Credibility – Having your name show up next to PC World, ZDNet, and InformationWeek gives off the impression that you know what you’re talking about.
- Delivery – Ok, so maybe you don’t have a ton of subscribers to your site. That’s okay because someone might be subscribed to Google News under the term “Barry Bonds Steroids”. Your opinion piece on whether or not he should go into the Hall of Fame might show up in someone’s inbox next to a Sports Illustrated article. Your content is pushed out to people through RSS. In fact, depending on the focus of your site, people can be inadvertently subscribed to your site. The right mix of keywords could have your message delivered to thousands of people at one time.
Sign Up
It’s simple to submit your content for consideration. Just head to the bottom of Google News where it says “Help for Publishers” and check out the topic that might be best suited for your needs. If all you want to do is recommend your site for inclusion, then just click here. It’s pretty easy from there! Google will take a look at your site and find out whether or not it might a good fit to have you in there. An actual person will get back to you if they have questions so don’t worry about trying to win over a computer’s heart.
From the day I asked to be considered, it was less than 10 days before our site received traffic from Google News. A large chunk of our referrals come from here and we get the sense that it is much “better” traffic as it is from people looking for news and not just whatever shows up under searches. Every so often, we’ll get a visitor searching the news for a term that we never even realized we wrote about. This traffic was all free too, courtesy of Google.
What are you waiting for? Submit your site for consideration! If your writing is good and your site is appealing, then you’ll be getting subscribers, referrals, and return visits like never before.
If you’re interested in Google Android and/or cell phone news, please head over to AndroidGuys or subscribe to our feed! Thanks again to AskTheAdmin for letting me drop by today.
Adobe Air steals the show on my desktop – Analytics Users Rejoice!
Mar 1st
Commodore 64 here to report on the next big splash on the scene. First some history.
If any geeks out there remember a time when it was actually a plus for things to run in a browser – along came Macromedia with its FLASHy browser plugin that seemed to work consistently everywhere and broke the boundaries of old-fashioned HTML forever, although still stuck in the 4 walls of a browser.
This was when I was Foxin with the Flash back in ‘99. Admin and I used to sit and try to dream up the next big way to take over the world and Flash was AWESOME, but not everybody knew what a “Browser” was.
To combat this obvious blasphemy, Macromedia added a cute little feature to it’s Flash app which is still one of my favorite old-school, quick and easy, in your face, ad deployment methods – the Flash Player embedded .exe file that ran smoothly and humbly on your desktop with no need for a browser, or fonts, or drivers, or anything really. And your stuff always looked the way you intended it to look. I’m not talking about the Flash plugin – that was, and remains, a pretty reliable medium and is commonplace today in most people’s “Browsers.”
No, I’m talking about that little, self contained .exe file that basically consisted of your Flash creation embedded in an executable wrapper that played consistently; at least among all the different PC’s and versions of Windows on the market. Deployment was the goal of this little self contained nugget of interactive animation, and for the most part, it succeeded.
Now – fast forward to 2008 – in a quick recap – Adobe has acquired Macromedia and all of its Application Library – re-brands all the goodies and resells them, along with a bunch of integration with Adobe’s flagships: Photoshop and Illustrator. All in all a pretty nice package. But through all the hustle and bustle, acquisitions and years of development, the good old Macromedia Flash Player got lost in time.
Today the browser is king of the PC as a deployment medium, which would explain why the self contained .exe Flash Player got lost. In the wilderness of browser wars, plug-ins, add-ins, widgets and the such, emerges a reversion back to the desktop, breaking out of the browser once more, as history kind of repeats itself in a sick, geeky way. This time it breaks out on a caveat.
Take me for example. I work day in and day out, mostly with at least 3 browser instances open and I don’t always want applications that only run in a browser. Especially when that browser does a poor job of memory management and tends to slow to a crawl. One of my favorite applications to have running in a browser tab is Google Analytics. Being a long-time sociology buff and front end web developer, I’m sure many like myself would agree that Google Analytics is a plethora of insight and information. And in the position of a front-end guy, I can actually do something with this info.
Bear with me, here’s where it all ties together.
Adobe has re-released (in my opinion) the self-contained .exe Flash player, but gave it a complete facelift and a few power-ups. This comes in the form of Adobe’s new out-of-browser deployment environment called Adobe Air. And, oh yeah, did I mention it’s FREE, as in F R E E, just the way we like it – read on.
From the Adobe website:
The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.
Now kiddies, if that wasn’t enough, they have a crapload of super-widget like plug-ins to totally deck out your desktop here and here.
Now, the cherry on the cake. While perusing through the catalog of plug-ins I found the sickest, sweetest app for Air.
Anybody out there who uses analytics would agree that it is already one of the most feature-rich FREE applications out there. Now it’s even faster, smoother, and graceful due to the efforts of one very enterprising Adobe (ColdFusion, I believe) developer who calls himself septek.
Septek developed an app for Adobe Air that seamlessly integrates Air with Google Analytics. Words can’t describe how tight this little app is, though here I am trying to. In the end you have a smooth, clean, ultra fast version of analytics that runs right off of your desktop, rather than your browser. Which can free you up to use your browser for other things that don’t have an Air counterpart. Let’s see if the author’s description does this gem any justice:
The Google Analytics Reporting Suite brings Google Analytics to the desktop, with a host of features that help you understand how your website is performing and where you can improve. From tracking your visitors, referrals and campaigns to viewing your AdWords ROI metrics, the Google Analytics Reporting suite is a must-have for every web business.
In my opinion that description only scratches the surface of what Analytics can do in general. But this front-end for Google’s reporting suite really makes the experience that much more pleasing. Here’s an example:
Personally, I’ve been waiting for a slick new front-end for analytics and this little Air app is the answer to my wish. Anybody out there who uses analytics will be pleasantly surprised by the sleek, smoothness of this new UI front end for an application that was already pretty far up on the road to perfect.
Kudos to septek for a sensational app for Adobe Air, and kudos to Adobe for opening up this development environment for everyone.
On a side note, AskTheAdmin has hit an all-time milestone in its growth.
As of now, if you search Google for simply the word “admin” we come up as #4 in the search result. Check it out for yourself if you dont believe me.
You think your big time!?! #4 on any natural Google search is BIG time. Props all around!
Peace
Commodore 64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)
How can i get more traffic to my blog-site? I have tried everything – i think.
Nov 25th
How can i get more traffic to my blog-site? What attracts readers to a blog? Will you look at my site Mr. Admin?
Of course, your first course of action should be to learn about tracking your new website’s traffic via some sort of analytics program. We use Google Analytics and Statcounter; which seems to be one hundred percent free. Next, after you see your traffic and where its coming from and going to you should get some meta tags into the html on your site so people can find you via search engines. This is the same reason you should label your posts.
Next, make sure you have lots of solid, original content up before you start hitting up search engine submission sites. If someones first impression of your site is “sucks”, they will never be back even if you totally revamped it the next day. How would they know?
Now you have a informative or entertaining site you would like to read. Get your RSS feed functioning and download your feed.
Ask your self these questions:
- Is it interesting?
- Do you like it?
- Is it attractive?
- Would you read it on a daily basis?
Make sure you get some images up there. Just text is always boring. And then, young blogger, you can start submitting like crazy to all the free search engine submission sites, rss submission sites and blog submission sites. Just Google it, they are out there! It wont help right away, but in a few weeks hits will start flowing in.
Now you should start spreading the word however you can. Start the hype. Believe the hype.
Join http://www.stumbleupon.com/. Join http://www.digg.com/ and those types of Social link sharing websites. Another word of advice: wait to hit up Stumpleupon until your site is really ready for prime time. You can only introduce a site once, and that is when you get a solid flow of traffic from them. We did it prematurely and wish we could have taken it back.
Now we know you can’t post on the big boy sites that you want to grow up and be just like, but chances are you can comment. Get known.
Speak to the community you want to win over. Show them you have something to offer. Be helpful and witty. Don’t put people down, it wont help you be liked unless you are trying to get down with some sort of underground faction where that’s liked.
Above all else DON’T SPAM! Don’t just blatantly post your URL.
This is important because you don’t want to alienate your public. You can link to posts or have a signature containing a link.
Make sure you have lots of stuff people want to read and come back to read some more.
Vary your topics and get guest bloggers on your site. Have friends that run other sites? Exchange links. Cross post. The more links back and forth the better for the spiders.
Spiders are what the search engines use to absorb your website. They are who you need to appease to get a GREAT ranking. What they do in essence is follow all of your links to other sites and then do the same there. The more references to your site the more time the spider will spend with your site ultimately leading to better rankings. Programs like Internet Business Promoter can help you pin down what you need to do to make the spiders work for you. IBP also grabs the meta tags from your competing sites and emulates spiders which never hurts.
Give your users free tools and resources they can’t readily get elsewhere. Keep updating that content and don’t flood your users with ads. You wont get rich off of ads. And especially if you have no traffic.
Would you want to visit your site if you were not affiliated with it? Would you be hitting up your mobile RSS reader to keep up with your site while your out and about?
Googling your search terms from different IP’s and then choosing your website will slowly bring your ranking up as well. This is not a myth this makes your site seem relevant to the search terms.
Be diligent and don’t give up, because that’s when your results will start to come in. Its like when you stop looking for your lost glasses and find them on your head – well kinda.
I have given up before, on several sites, early on in the decade. And then a few years later, check out some stats to see a hundred thousand hits a quarter. Unreal. Keep your head up and stay at it.
Oh and if you do happen to join StumbleUpon – show some AtA love and give our site a thumbs up! Every little bit helps.
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