HitChrome

Website design and keyword choice can often get overlooked when talking about SEO. Everyone wants to build their links, build their content, drive traffic and make sales. So do we, but without a well thought out gameplan, your success is going to be held back. A great blueprint will allow you to construct your campaign properly. Even if you already have a site built, revisiting some of these basic principals will allow you to go back and fine tune things to work with a higher success ratio.

The first thing you need to do is brainstorm. Type in a notepad doc a list of keywords and keyword phrases. Go ahead and create as large of a list as you can, but for this particular demo, I am going to use a brief list for one of my sites that deals with creating a blog.

Now we will use a fantastic tool to look at how to choose good keywords. This is a free tool that is great and part of Google Adwords. It is the keyword tool, if you have not used it, you should go check it out now. Search for “Google keyword tool” if you have not signed up for Adwords. If you do use Adwords, you can click on “tools” under campaign management, then choose “keyword tool”. It is an excellent tool, and it is free.

Take your list of keywords and paste it in the box marked “get keyword ideas”. For this example, I used free internet marketing. It may not be directly related, but it will be a good example to look at for what we are looking at. The tool will take a couple seconds while it is thinking, then spit out a list for you, potentially large. This list may look something like this (but much larger depending on how many keywords you use):

• internet marketing company
• internet marketing product
• strategic internet marketing
• internet marketing online
• internet marketing products

The great thing about this tool is that it allows you to see the frequency a term is searched for on Google. Also, it shows you by a bar graph, how much competition there is for that individual term. In this manner, you can get a good estimate of your search volume and how hard it should be to rank high for your chosen term. If you would like more info, please feel free to download our free seo ebook. This seo guide will walk you through the entire optimization process one step at a time. Not only that, it is completely free!

Mozilla’s Firefox browser has also surpassed 20 percent market share for the first time.

And Google certainly isn’t reluctant to kick Microsoft while it’s down, as it now automatically recommends that Gmail users running IE6 switch to Firefox or Google’s own Chrome browser (apparently Google is hoping that those users don’t realize that IE7 exists or that IE8 is on the way).

I’m sure the Microsoft dudes are starting to get a bit frantic about the slippage in IE’s market share, and I fully expect IE8 to get nearly as glamorous a launch as Windows 7 in order to try to win back some of those Firefox and Chrome converts.

For those of you included in that group of disenchanted IE users, what would it take to bring you back? Adblock Plus for IE? Or would that just be polishing a turd?

A representative from Sohu.com (SOHU) has confirmed that the Chinese Internet company plans to launch its own Internet browser product, but the detailed schedule for making it available to users has not been released.

According to news posted on Sina.com that quoted the unnamed representative from Sohu.com, Wang Xiaochuan, senior vice president of Sohu.com, revealed during his recent lecture in Tsinghua University that Sohu.com plans to launch a browser software to compete with Opera, Google’s Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Maxthon. The most distinctive feature of this browser is that users on education networks will be able to visit international networks directly via this browser, which means the browser will have an embedded proxy function.

At present, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominates the browser market with other browser products, including Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome, dividing the minor part of the market. Having launched many software products like Sogou’s Pinyin input method, Web applications and desktop applications, Sohu.com’s browser product is expected to further integrate its product line.

Earlier in 2008, Mozilla announced plans to cooperate with Sohu.com to launch a new Olympics-related special version of the Firefox browser. This was the second time for Firefox to launch a customized product in China. Its first special version was NKU Firefox 1.0, which was developed by the Firefox user group at Nankai University.

Google and Yahoo look all set to drop their proposed ad alliance and this could happen as early as next week as early as next week because of antitrust objections by the Justice Department, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Google is considering pulling out of the deal because it doesn’t want to accept the conditions the government might require to avoid harm to competition, the sources said.

The officials from the two companies met with regulators and appeared to be unwilling to make the compromises needed to satisfy Justice Department concerns that their combined power would overwhelm the online advertising market.

The deal was announced in June and proposed that Google start selling its search ads throughout Yahoo’s US properties.

Needless to say that the demise of the plan would represent another tough blow for Yahoo, which had hoped that the tie-up with Google would help it boost revenues after it rejected a 47.5-billion-dollar takeover bid from Microsoft. This upcoming collapse of the planned venture between the two biggest online advertising companies would deprive Yahoo of as much as 450 million dollars in operating cash flow over a year, according to estimates. What’s Yahoo upto next?

Some time back, Google executive Marissa Mayer had made an impassioned - not to mention lengthy and kind of complicated argument over on Google’s blog about how much effort the company has to put in to keeping its home page clean. We were told it’s space is sacred: you can’t add new stuff to it, because it makes the homepage all cluttered and messy. That’s not Googley.

The real idea was to explain that the company had decided to add a link to its privacy policies on the homepage - with the underlying implication being that privacy was so important it deserved space on that hallowed virtual wall.

All that means very little in the long run. After all, the company’s supposed 28 word limit doesn’t count promotional text - and we’ve had plenty of that recently. Indeed, just a few weeks after Mayer’s post, we were suddenly treated to a big old link telling us to download Chrome, Google’s new browser. It didn’t last too long, but it was still there.

I noticed today another new addition: a link trying to get users to buy the T-Mobile G1/ You remember, the Google-powered phone.

That link adds nine words - a 33% increase in wordcount. Not very Googley, really, is it?

We’ve all sent emails we regret after stumbling back home late at night in a fog of alcohol-fuelled bravado - a pathetic plea for reconciliation with an old flame, forwarding furry porn to your grandma, or accepting job offers to work at Metro. The sign of an ill-advised night is no longer a traffic cone on your oven the next morning, but something titled ‘IVE WANTD TO SAY THIS FOR A LONG TIEM JEREMY’ lurking guiltily in your Sent Mail folder.

If only there was some kind of drunkenness detector that could stop you from baring your virtual soul to loved ones and authority figures after a night on the funny juice. Well, now there is.

Google have just unveiled a feature for Gmail called Mail Goggles. It allows you to specify times and days when you fear you might be a bit tipsy (say, after 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays) - and if you try to send an email after that, it’ll force you to take a sobriety test.

If you’re not of sufficiently sound mind to complete some basic arithmetic puzzles……then you’re also not in any fit state to be emailing anybody. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Google launched their new browser called Chrome (what a great name). As always Google’s release was surrounded by a lot of buzz and let me tell you now that it was worth it every single bit. Currently the two most popular browsers on the market are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the webmaster friendly Mozilla Firefox.

The expectation of the browser was very high and so it should be as Google are a multi million dollar company, actually the fastest growing company in the world. They have met the expectation and exceeded it by miles. Now we will take a look at the beneficial factors of the new browser.
The new browser is better, faster and stronger than IE - long the bane of Internet users the world over, many of whom have converted to Mozilla’s Firefox.

Here’s why:

* Bye-bye world-ending crashes. Each tab you open in Chrome represents its own computer process. This means that if one tab or window crashes, you won’t be forced to close all of your tabs and windows.
* It’s pretty! Google prides itself on simplicity and usability. While Chrome has both, it’s a soothing shade of blue with minimal buttons to fuss over.
* Less memory bloat. One of the problems with Firefox is that if you’ve been using it for too long, it’ll suck up all of your computer’s memory. Each time Chrome goes to a new page, it throws away the last page’s data, reducing its baggage and freeing up your computer’s memory.
* An address bar with brains. Sure IE will help you fill in a Web address, but it won’t make suggestions based on the most powerful Web search engine and you certainly can’t use it as a Google search box. Chrome does both.
* It’s open source. Don’t know what that means? Don’t worry! The smarty-pants geeks do. They will be able to tweak and improve upon the original design, fine-tuning it into perfection.
* Customized welcome page. Whenever you open a new tab in Chrome, it offers users a thumbnail list of their most visited sites.
Read the rest of this entry »

It may sound preposterous with the benefit of hindsight, but only ten years ago, on September 7, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded their new company, Google. My new blog’s birthdate coincides with that of Google and also the recent launch of Chrome prompted me to make this as my first post on my new blog. Hence the name HitChrome. Here are some amusing facts about Google.

1. Google got its name by accident. The founders misspelled the word “googol,” which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The word was chosen to reflect the company’s goal of organizing the massive amound of information that is available on the Internet.

2. The Google home page is so sparse because the founders did not know HTML and just wanted to create a quick interface.

3. At first, there was not even a “submit” button. Users had to hit the “return” key to generate a Google search.

4. Google’s search technology is called PageRank (tm). It assigns an “importance” value to each page on the Web and gives it a rank. But that is not why the technnology is called PageRank. In fact, it is named after Google co-founder Larry page.

5. Google’s traffic doubled when they introduced their “Did you mean…” feature. This feature was made possible by a much-improved spell checker.

6. Google users apparently never feel “lucky,” since the “I feel lucky” is almost never used. However, in trials it was discovered that users saw it as a comfort button and did not want it removed.

7. Brin and Page would hang out at the Stanford computer science department’s loading docks in hopes of borrowing newly-arrived PCs to use in their network.

8. Google’s first data center was Larry Page’s dorm room.

9. When Page and Brin tried to find buyers to license their search technology, one portal CEO told them “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.”

10. The first major investor Andy Bechtolsheim one of the founders of Sun Microsystems wrote a check for $100,000 after seeing a quick demo. At first, there was no way to deposit the $100,000 check. It was made out to “Google Inc.,” but there was no legal entity with that name. The check sat in Page’s desk drawer for two weeks while he and Brin rushed to set up a corporation and locate other investors.