Webmaster Tools from Google is your link to the Google index. Today I logged in and noticed that they updated their look. The new look is optional for now, but for starters it seems faster. The new webmaster dashboard has these new features (compliments of BrowserMedia);

• The previous style dashboard has been transformed into a ‘one-stop’ dashboard, that now collates all the most important data, such as links to your site, top search engines, sitemaps and crawl errors.
• The number of search queries that are available to track has been increased to 100 and improvements have been made to the quality of this data.
• The option to track sitemaps that have been submitted by other users has also been added. This was not possible with the previous interface, as users were unable to oversee sitemaps that were submitted by other users or via robots.txt or other such mechanisms.
• The new design also allows users to set up email alerts, which means that they can be notified of any important occurrences without having to log in to their webmaster account.
• The availability of help has also been increased as there are now links to relevant help articles on each page, this means that if a user needs help with a particular aspect of the system then it is simply one click away.
• The navigation and menus have also been changed and Google has reorganised it’s features into more logical and plausible groupings, making some of the features easier to find.
• Due to the improvements in the data that is now provided in Webmaster Tools, Google will now insist that sites are verified in order to access any of the features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt. Sitemaps can continue to be submitted for unverified sites but this has to been done so using sitemap pings or by including the sitemap location in the robots.txt file.
• Finally, in order to improve the design of the tool Google has also decided to take out some features that were not working well, as well as implementing new ones and one that they have decided to remove is the enhanced image search option. The Google image labeler will continue to function the same as before, however, and will continue to select images from sites without the enhanced image search being available.

For those of you who do not know what Google Webmaster Tools is, check out this video from none other than, Matt Cutts;

Google Webmaster Tools Video

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

Google Webmaster Tools Updated

The Beginning

You first decide to want to blog. You’re not sure why, but it seems like fun. Then you start thinking everyone will find you and it will be great. But you can’t get enough people to subscribe to your feed. And to comment on your posts. I mean that’s what it is all about, some feedback.

The Answer

Remarkablogger. He has come up with an idea that I think will work. Just put your blog address in the comment section of this blog and a desciption (please be detailed) of your blog. Then promise to visit all of the sites that are left in the comments, and if you like them subscribe to them. You will need to subscribe to the comments feed so that you can stay updated with newcomers.

Please join my list below by adding a comment, and on the original post here

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

Blog Traffic Jumpstart 2

It Hurts!

Shouting on Digg.Com

Here is the problem. You start using Digg and you like it. You can generate some traffic to your site and that is always good. But, you have to give a little to get a little. That means that we have to Digg for our “friends” so that they will Digg for us. If there are 100 Digg’s in 24 hours you can get on the front page.

Now, I don’t mind Digging for people, and commenting if I like the article. But I cannot stand when I get three or four emails asking me to Digg the same article. I Digg all requests from my friends and this takes up a good portion of my time.

Since I am the type of person who likes to help people, I am going to give you some advice on how to not piss people off on Digg and get them to keep you as their friend.

FireFox

First, and foremost you need FireFox. If you do not already have FireFox, please stop reading this blog. Internet Explorer just does not compare to this browser. It will only take you 1 day to get use to it. Just leave IE, please…Download FireFox here….

For those who already have FireFox, then go to this page and follow the instructions…

Finally

Once you have completed the instructions, the next time you shout on Digg.Com you will see the option to Friends not Dugg

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

Digg Users: PLEASE!!! Stop Re-Shouting Me

I Love You

I was reading Link Juice And Other Stuff by JustinLL and was reminded that I need to show my love with a DOFOLLOW. I had downloaded the Lucia’s Link Love Wordpress plugin weeks ago but have been in the US ( I hate leaving Costa Rica) and haven’t had the time.

Finally I have a day off!

And with my free time I have taken the 3 minutes it actually takes to download, upload, enable and configure this plugin. I am pretty much taking the same configuration as Justin on this one, a very small about of comments are needed to get your “dofollow” backlinks. Since I only have 6 subscribers now there isn’t much for me to moderate, but I will have to make sure to remove any off-topic comments.

Moving Forward

I have only had my blog for a few months and it has been mostly in testing. I feel now that it is forming it’s own personality and will start to receive more subscribers. I also do not blog enough (I still work too much) to keep people interested.

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

How to say I Love You over the Internet…

Did you Stumble here?

If so, please don’t leave!

I have a love / hate relationship with StumbleUpon.com. I love them because they drive traffic to my site, and by far the most traffic. I hate them because they almost never stay on my site. They almost never comment on my site, and they NEVER click on my advertisements. I really don’t care about the advertisements, but it would be nice…

Let’s start a New Trend

I need all visitor’s to help me in a personal study of my statistics. Using Wordpress and Google I can see how many users come to this post and where they come from. I want to get Stumblers to stop clicking that Stumble! button so fast and try to read content. I believe that it is more fun to involve yourself in the conversations rather than just absorbing knowledge and leaving…

My Stats

Add Your Comment

In order for me to test my theory I need everyone who comes to this post to just add a comment at the bottom telling me how you ended up on the post.

• Did you Stumble here?
• Did you find me on a Google search?
• Are you a subscriber?
• How about Mixx.com

Trust Me

Going to Digg.com and checking the most popular stories and aimlessly digging thousands os stories is boring. You are not experiencing the Internet to its potential. What I noticed is that once you find some decent blogs and subscribe to them, you will have a a better experience. Check out these blogs that frequent my blog;

• Matthew Dryden
• Writer Dad
• Sidecar Sally

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

Which Social Media Site brought you here?

My evening starts out like any other evening. All of my clients offices are closed and the chance of a serious problem outside of a natural disaster are very slim. I now have time to clean out my inbox and check my RSS feeds.

I have a wide variety of blog sources, all of which relate to my categories here that I write about (if you can call it writing). I write, and read about Costa Rica (and why I moved here), sports, some of my own personal experiences, Tech Support (various help articles) and of course Breathe Google (my soon to be great SEO info section), which I will talk about now.

It’s raining today in Costa Rica so I am just relaxing and perusing my tech feeds. I probably found this post from Eric Lander over at Sphinn ( is that ‘ph’ pronounced as an ‘f’ ? ), but if I am being honest I can’t remember exactly where I came across his very well written post “Protect Digg, StumbleUpon & Propeller from uSocial.net’s Spammers“.

A little about Eric Lander

When you first go to his blog, if you have not been there before, you will see this at the top of the article;

I did what you will do, continue to read and see what Eric has to say. Well, I can just about guarantee (unless you are an employee over at uSocial.net) that you will want to visit his non-verbose about page and definitely subscribe to his RSS feed. From his contact page you can also follow him on Twitter. After you read this post and check out some of his archives, you will be a loyal subscriber as I now am.

Now let’s get to the point, what the hell is uSocial.net?

Get Votes, Get Traffic, Get Paid!

This is the actual Trademark slogan for uSocial.net. They will officially launch on December 1st of this year and do yourself a favor and stay away. Eric’s post is very detailed and informative so I will not reiterate it here, please read it..

are ruining the social media for the people who enjoy the “social” aspect. For me, I enjoy knowing my friends over at Mixx.com are sending me an article that I want to read and discuss. I want to interact with my network on a particular article/subject and have that subject easily found. I do not want to sift through a bunch of articles that have no meaning to me, or anyone for that matter.

If you ask me, Digg is losing some ground at the moment to Mixx because the system has been tainted for a while now. Give them credit, they are trying to take care of the problem, albeit in a manner I don’t agree with.

What do you think about uSocial.net?

I have not put any links to their site on purpose, if you want to see their site type it in your browser.

Please help to Protect Social Communities

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

What is uSocial.net? Spammers?

First of all let’s get started with the real question

What the hell is StumbleUpon?

This will be brief, a summary only. There are many uses for StumbleUpon and many people use it for social networking. I don’t use it for that reason, I prefer to use Twitter for that. The biggest reason I have an account is the Blog Traffic.

There are few things you need to know about how to use StumbleUpon properly for blog traffic. One very nice feature is if your domain name has never been submitted before you will get a huge jump in blog traffic on the first submit. After that, you need many people to Thumb Up or Thumb Down you post.

StumbleUpon Karma

Like any other social network platform, the more you use the site the more your stumbles are worth. The idea is that you should not be just submitting your site and hoping for blog traffic. You will be rewarded with traffic the more you use the system. I have seen when I stumble for an hour I start to get traffic to the posts that have been submitted in the past. Conversely, when I do not use the site I do not receive any traffic.

Why do I Stumble

I have a system for my “connected friends” and for those blogs that deserve to be stumbled. If you are a friend of mine then every post you write I will make sure to stumble this site and add to Delicious, Friendfeed and others. I have done this so many times thatI have noticed a problem that I want to share.

Part of my system is to read the blog and comment. We all know how important it is to comment and build relationships. After I comment I then do the “norm”; stumble, digg, etc..

How to Not Screw Up

So let’s get down to the problem. Almost everyone is using WordPress for their blogging platform. And in the default setting when you comment on a post you are moved to a new page, away from the original post.

Before

http://www.thejimgaudet.com/blog/POST-TITLE

After

http://www.thejimgaudet.com/blog/POST-TITLE/comment-page or #comment

Why is this a problem?

What you want is your main page sent to StumbleUpon and not your comment page. This would be two separate links in StumbleUpon and your Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down will not count for the same post even though they are. If this happens you will not get as much traffic as you expect or deserve.

Does anyone know of any other issues with StumbleUpon? Do you even use it to help other bloggers, or just yourself?

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

How To Use Stumble a Post Correctly

Zoho.com

If there is one thing I hate it is logging into a ton of instant messengers and having them take up resources on my system. Not to mention, if I am using a computer at an Internet cafe then I don’t have my favorites, or my calendar. There are many sites that handle some of these services, but now I think I have found the one I am going to keep.

What is Cloud Computing?

From Wiki;

Cloud computing is Internet (”cloud”) based development and use of computer technology (”computing”). It is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.

For example; if you are at an Internet Cafe and they do not have MSN Messenger installed, then you need to get the software, or go to a web service. Well, with Zoho.com you can connect to your MSN, Yahoo, Gmail and others at the same time. Where ever you are, when you login to Zoho.com you can be logged into your messengers. And that’s just the beginning…

Zoho Chat

I first learned of Zoho Chat from an article at RWW. I am always looking for a good program to consolidate all my IM programs into one and Zoho Chat is going to be my last stop, I think. I have tried Meebo and RadiusIM. They are OK, but Zoho combines so many more applications and features that it was easy to want to move over. I just have to learn to start using the applications on Zoho instead of my personal computer.

The best feature of Zoho Chat is that you can add a live chat service on your website or blog. If you want to chat with me, just look to the right for this photo you see on the left. Type in a name (try not to be profane :)) and click enter.

Zoho Notebook and Zoho Calendar

Zoho has many free applications and business (paid) applications. The list of free applications is pretty big;

• Zoho Mail: You get a free email account with Zoho
• Zoho Writer: Online Word Processing Application
• Zoho Sheet: Online Spreadsheet Program
• Zoho Show: Online Presentation Tool
• Zoho Docs: Online Documentation Management
• Zoho Notebook: Online Note Taker
• Zoho Wiki: Easy to use, full-featured Wiki
• Zoho Share: Centralized Public Repository
• Zoho Planner: Online Organizer
• Zoho Chart: Make Group Decisions Faster

I need to train myself to use the office applications, but I am very excited to have an online note taking program as well as the calendar. I am always in front of a computer, just not always my own. Having access to my calendar and the ability to jot down quick notes are my favorite features.

Has anyone used Zoho.com before? Any thoughts on Cloud Computing?

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

Zoho - Welcome to Cloud Computing

SEO First

I first thought; I want a website. So I went out to buy jimgaudet.com. When that was not available (damn musician! ) I picked up this domain; thejimgaudet.com. Not bad, I like it and I am on the first page if you search Google for “Jim Gaudet”, so I am satisfied. Anyone looking for me will know I am not a musician.
After designing the website I thought; I should have a blog. So like many people I just added the blog to the end of my domain like this;

thejimgaudet.com/blog

This was fine for a while until I noticed I really didn’t need a website, a blog would do just fine. The blog was taking up enough of my time. So I redirected my main site to my blog and left it at that. I did 301 redirects so I would not have problems with the search engines Google. Then I noticed a problem in Google Webmaster Tools. I couldn’t check some of the stats because it was not the root domain. So now I needed to move my WordPress blog from http://www.thejimgaudet.com/blog to http://www.thejimgaudet.com/

Easy Steps to Move your WordPress Blog

To actually move the blog is easy, the part to worry about is the backlinks you have to your blog. Links from posts submitted to Digg, Reddit, Mixx and other sites. All my links are pointed to /blog and I need to make sure they redirect to the proper post after the move. Here you will see how I will redirected (301) my backlinks to their new locations.

If you want to learn how to backup your Wordpress blog get it here

1) You should put your site into maintenance mode. If you do not have the plugin go here
2) Now go to Settings - General and change these 2 settings;

• Wordpress Address - This should be your domain name, make sure to remove the /blog
• Blog Address - This should be the same as above
• 
• You will NOT be able to login to your blog until th move is done

3) Now backup/download all your files in the /blog directory
4) Now you have to create the .htaccess file that will work the magic. The .htaccess file will do 2 things;

• Make sure to use www.thejimgaudet.com instead of thejimgaudet.com so Google doesn’t penalize me for duplicate content.

• Permanantly redirect everything sent from the URL past /blog to the root domain with the filename attached thus not throwing a 404 and passing Google Page Rank to the new page.

5) Now upload all these files into the root of your domain. I am sure you have backed up your current site and are ready to take it down!

Conclusion

Once the files are uploaded you will be able to login to your WordPress blog again. Once logged in you should be sure to rebuild your sitemap for Google. There is a plugin for that too.

This was my process and it is working beautifully. If I missed anything plaeas let me know in the comments. Or if you have a better way to do this.

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

SEO First - How To Move your WordPress Blog

SEO Basics

The “SEO Basics” series will be in 3 parts;

1. Keywords
2. Content
3. Back Links

Keywords

Part one of three on the basics of SEO. I truly mean basic and all of this information can be found on the Internet. With some common sense you can optimize your website fairly easily. I put keywords first because to me this is the most important. If you do not know which keyword you are using, your content will not match your keywords.

Research Keywords

Keyword research is the first and most important step in SEO. You must first find your niche market and then check out the competition for keywords or phrases. A new site will find it hard to rank for a competitive keyword so in the beginning it is best to use longtail keywords.

Example: “The Jim Gaudet” instead of “Jim Gaudet”. I could not buy the domain jimgaudet.com so I had to get thejimgaudet.com. Well, I am number 2 for Jim Gaudet and number 1 for The Jim Gaudet.

Keyword Research Tool: Google AdWords Keyword Tool

There are way too many tools to list here so I am only showing one. Why not use Google’s own tool and get the data from their systems? I think this is the best free tool for researching keywords.

Site Structure

Once you have your list of keywords you should rank them. A list of 5 or so is pretty good. Now you design your site structure on your keyword priority. A small list to help you setup SEO for your site structure;

• The main page should be optimized for your top priority keyword
• Each keyword you have should have it’s own page optimized for the keyword
• You should try to name each page with your keyword
• You should link from the main page to the secondary pages with the keywords for the secondary pages in the anchor text

Keyword Placement

From what I can tell, this is the most important part of SEO. Google reads your web pages like a person does. So there are a few important things to note here;

Domain Name: Try to find a domain with your keyword in the domain, and to the far left of the domain name as possible.

Page Title: This is the same as the domain. Tr to get your keyword into the title and to the left. Remember, the page title is like a news heading, if does not bring the reader to your site then you have failed. So do not stuff the title with keywords, make it for humans.

Heading Tags: This is pretty important. Your page should be formatted like a document with heading. H! being the most important and having your keyword wrapped with this will help.

Images: Google does not look at pictures, it only reads the ALT tag withing the image. So be sure that all images have an ALT tag. Do not keyword stuff this either, try to add your keyword but in a sentence explaining the image.

Links: Whenever you link to another page on your site (assuming you want that page to rank for a keyword) you should try and make the Anchor Text have your keyword in it. All links have a title tag that should be used. The title tag will show when a user moves the mouse cursor over the link, this should be something made for a human, but can have your keywords in it.

The bottom line here is that you cannot just slam keywords all over the place, they need to be placed properly and made for HUMANS, not Google.

Extra

If you use WordPress for your blog and want great WordPress SEO check out Michael Maratines WordPress SEO Secrets

I am not an expert by any means, so if anyone wants to throw out some ideas here I would appreciate it…

Post from: Do you Breathe Google?

SEO - Search Engine Optimization