From Google’s official announcement:

“Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”

This is the perfect opportunity to buff up on your meta title and description knowledge.

Jiffy Pop please contact me for further sponsorship ideas.

Page Title

The page title should include descriptive, relevant keywords as well as a branding title. The rule of thumb is to keep your most important keywords closer to the beginning of the page title. Your branding message can come at the beginning or end of the title. Although your keywords may rank better if your branding comes at the end of the title, but its not going to be a huge factor. You can try both ways and see which works better for you (ranking, presentation, readability) and choose from there. Keep your title to the point and keyword relevant to the page content.

Meta Descriptions

When you write your meta descriptions you want to keep three things in mind. First make sure that you are including relevant keywords. Second trim the fat. You have a small amount of space to use, so use it wisely. Remove excess words. Third write for your audience. Make your writing attractive and descriptive while providing the relevant information that answers “I will see ______ when I click this link.” Following these guidelines and mixing in a bit of common sense will help you make the most of this space.

Don’t run out of room!

You may have seen results that have been truncated with a ‘…’ Please not the max character length for both the title and description and try to work within this range.

Max Title Length = 63 characters
Max Meta Description Length = 156 characters

It is commonplace for misplaced emphasis to be put on the meta keywords. There was a general knowledge in the SEO community that meta keywords were of little to no help to a page’s ranking.  Last week Google made it official stating that meta keywords do not help increase the ranking of a page for a particular keyword.

From Google’s official announcement:

“Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”

While meta keywords may be a thing of the past this is the perfect opportunity to buff up on your meta title and description knowledge which I have outlined in the following post: Meta Title & Description Guidelines

Normally I want to jump over the counter and scream at the Best Buy employee who asks if I would like to buy the overpriced protection plan for the new memory card I just bought. Apple is different and their protection plan is one to seriously consider.If you are buying a new Apple product (which can be overpriced, but have you seen the refurbished section?) their plan is like buying a 3 year promise that it will always be in tip top shape.

I have  various iPods over the years, and most have had problems that required them to be sent back (wear and tear ya know… plus they have a slinky like attraction to stairs). I purchased the AppleCare plan for my iPod Touch when I bought it over a year ago and have replaced it twice. Each time the process was painless, I called Apple and talked to a CS representative (that speaks English thank god!) who gets your information and starts a ticket. Apple overnighst a box, you put your broken product in the box and send it back with prepaid overnight postage. They fix it, and overnight it back. Its a quick process, and by far some of the best support I have seen. Given I have only used this for my iPod, I can’t guarantee that this same process applies to all their items.

If your in the market for a new Apple product, buy a plan with it. You can see information on the plans here.

If you own an Apple device and have not checked out the new Facebook 3.0 app, I suggest you stop what your doing and do so now. Facebook has created a full featured, lightweight solution that iPod/iPhone users will love.

The app borrows the menu function that you are firmiliar with on the home screen of your iPhone. You may reorder your items as well as add more from your favorite pages and friends. From this main menu you have access to all the usual features you expect from Facebook.

You can ‘like’ and comment on wall posts. Videos currently display in the wall but spits out this error when you try to play them: “Sorry, Facebook Video is not yet compatible with iPhones and iPod Touches, but we’re working on it.” Expect video compatibility (uploading as well as viewing?) in a future update. Kudos to Facebook for creating another product that people want just like they did with Facebook Lite.

What do you think about the new app, and what would you like to see in future updates?

Wordpress features a pretty cool built in gallery feature that is easy  to use and even easier to enable. This feature automatically lays out a batch of images in a post, giving you control over their order, size, grid width and how the full size image is viewed.

I stumbled upon this feature while posting a batch of images on my subdomain. You can see an example post that uses the gallery feature here. To enable the gallery feature built into wordpress 2.5 and greater, simply include the  tag in your post.

This shortcode will place a gallery item in your wordpress post. You can either upload images into it, or use images you’ve already uploaded to fill your new gallery. Organizing the images is as simple as dragging and dropping them, or manually numbering them from 1 on.

At the bottom of your list of images is a breif options menu. From here you can edit the way your gallery looks and functions. Selecting an attachment page will point the user to a blog page with your single image featured as opposed to a direct link to the image. The rest of the  options are fairly straightforward and allow you to get your gallery displaying as you wish.

Details from the Wordpress codex canbe found here.

So right off the top it sounds like a made for TV ad right? This one is different.

FreeConfrenceCall.com offers a variety of services for needs of groups large and small. I have only used their confrence call service, but all I can say that it is awesome! You walk through a painless sign up and voila! Thats it, you’ve got a conference line to use at your next meeting. I’m simply excited about this service and had to write about it so it can come in handy to someone else!

Use Free Confrence Call.com’s service? Tell me what you think! Don’t use their service? Give it a try and I hope its as handy for you as it is me.