Have you tried these Free Google Tools?

Everyone knows just how powerful a search engine Google is. You can find pretty much anything you’re looking for these days. Whether you’re curious about who your favourite singer or actor is currently dating (or breaking up with), you want to know why you have some ailment or other, or you’re desperately looking for a local business to fix your plumbing, heating or air conditioning in a hurry, 99 times out of 100, Google will find tons of websites with answers to your problems. Which one you visit will depend on a variety of things… attention grabbing heading, interesting description, and of course relevancy.

How does it find these websites?

In brief, Google “spiders” crawl the internet looking for key phrases on web pages, starting with the homepage, and depending on the relevance of those key phrases, as well as a number of other factors, it will rank your website accordingly. How often Google’s spiders crawl through your website depends on several criteria, not least how well your site has been “search engine optimized”.

If your site has good internal SEO, that is fantastic. But did you know there are a number of Free Google Tools that will not only let Google know you exist, but may also improve search engine optimization and visitor conversions?

Here are five free Google tools that you can use on your own website:

1. Submit your content to Google
2. Map your business with Google Maps
3. Analyze your website traffic with Google Analytics
4. Create better conversions with Website Optimizer
5. Add events to Google Calendar

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Rediscovering StumbleUpon and some free marketing guides

Sometime last year I became a “StumbleUpon” user and for awhile I used it regularly each day, particularly enjoying the fantastic photography I would stumble upon. But I realized today I had not stumbled upon anything in a long time. Why? Because I generally use Firefox for my browsing and I have StumbleUpon set up with Internet Explorer.

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Whether it is business cards, brochures, newspaper ad or website you need to have a clear direction. A creative marketing piece means nothing if it does not convey the right message, targets the right audience or uses the correct medium. Before you start you need to ask some questions:

• What do you want to achieve through your advertising?
• Who are you targeting?
• What message do you want to convey?
• How will you reach your audience?

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After two weeks of intermittent down time of my website and having to manually fix the problem, to the chagrin of one or two clients who couldn’t gain access when they needed to, I decided to switch my hosting over to GoDaddy.ca (really it’s an American company, and I swore I would stay with Canadian, but enough is enough already).

Apologies to anyone who couldn’t get to my blog on Kaz Design Works or the business directory on www.powerfulwomen.ca I’m a great web designer, but can’t always find my way around the control panels of web hosts to find the relevant bits of information I need to get things like databases up and running.

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Wow, it’s been awhile since I wrote an article. But today I must.

In March, Kaz Design Works is publishing a new pocket-book sized magazine that will be distributed throughout Waterloo Region, Wellington County and surrounding areas, as well as available to read online, 24/7 365 days a year, as a flip book and hi-res PDF.

The magazine’s main goal is to support local business women, female entrepreneurs and women moving into a new career.

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If you’re a regular tweeter you’ll know that there’s more to tweeting than meets the eye. Since Twitter’s inception thousands of twools have been created. (No, that’s not a typo… I just made that word up… or rather I started off with Twitools, but thought maybe twools sounded better.)

According to Jason Hiner of Tech Republic, this has been made possible due to Twitter’s simplicity and the ability for open API (application programming interface) development, which has allowed developers to experiment with tools and utilities to improve Twitter’s functionality.

Since not all twools are useful, Jason created a top 10 list of useful tools for business users. Up till now I only used one twool, but that’s probably more to do with a lack of time rather than a lack of need. Nevertheless, I thought I’d share his list with you, and even went as far as checking some of them out.

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Or, in other words, get more bang for your buck

I had a meeting a few days ago with a potential new client who needed to plan her marketing material budget for her first year in business. After a long discussion, I went back to the office and drew up a budget for her, but decided it wasn’t just a matter of providing a quote. Knowing how new businesses struggle in the first year, coupled with today’s economy, I wanted to give suggestions on how she could get more bang for her buck.

Now, I am not a marketing guru; my expertise is more in layout and design. However, I hope the knowledge and experience I’ve gained during my many years involved in the newspaper and advertising industries, together with what I’ve learned since deciding to go into business two years ago, have enabled me to give her some food for thought.

Here are the suggestions I made, edited, re-written and additional information added for a wider audience. They mostly relate to saving money on print material. (This is a long read… you might want to sit down with a cup of coffee first!) Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a number of comments in response to my postings. Unfortunately, most of them have been caught by Akismet and thrown in my spam box.

Akismet is a great plugin and I recommend it to all WordPress bloggers if you want to avoid spam appearing on your blog.

However, I apologize to anyone who has posted a genuine comment and is wondering where it is. I do not receive notifications for any comments caught by Akismet.

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Now you’re probably thinking that’s a strange topic to include on a mainly graphic and website design-related blog, but there’s a good reason.

My partner and I, Joseph, are on a mission. On Saturday, he decided to participate in ALL four of next year’s Ride to Conquer Cancer events in Canada, and I will be joining him for two of them (I’m not the athlete he is!). As well as Ontario, he will now be riding in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec, while I will be riding in Quebec as well as Ontario. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s been a trending topic on Twitter for the past couple of days. Well, not those exact words, but something similar so I read the article they were all talking about: IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On

It’s the message web designers and developers, including myself, want clients to send their visitors! And I can understand their frustration.

Why?

Well, because, like most most web designers and developers, I often spend hours after I’ve completed a design, that looks perfectly fine on all the most popular browsers (Firefox, IE7 & 8, Chrome, Opera and Safari), altering the code so that pages render correctly on my old laptop which I’ve deliberately left installed with IE6 (small screen with outdated browser software). Read the rest of this entry »