The first is that keyword phrases do matter and will always matter, to an extent. Search engines will always need the ability to extract relevant and important information from the web. The text of your site makes up the content that must get judged, one way or the other. The last two truths are just as important. The first is that social networking also drives relevance. If you aren’t taking advantage of that, then you’re letting your site stagnate. The second is that links still matter as well.

Evaluating Your True SEO Ranking

With those three truths in mind, I’m going to help you judge your own site’s accurate SEO ranking. I did not call it “PR” ranking, or pagerank, because that is truly an artifact of the past. There is a new sort of “ranking” that you should use based on all factors that search engines take into account. In this article, I’m going to help you determine the true SEO value of your site.

Make Sure You List Highly For Important Keywords

You should already have a list of about 5 to 10 critical keywords that you want to perform well for in Google. They should be focused on the content of your site.

Take those keyword phrases and search the Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines for them. File through the listings and determine what position you land in. But beware of false rankings when you are logged in, such as shown here.

When I’m logged into Google, I rank #2 for the search term “secret societies”. That’s a false positive. If I log out, I find that I actually list somewhere around #10 for that term. However, when logged out of Google, conducting a search for “top secret cults” shows that I really do list second, so that’s an accurate result for that term.

Go through each of your keywords and then give it a score based on the following formula that I developed. (x is placement position)

(100/x) * .60 = Google score
(100/x) * .20 = Bing Score
(100/x) * .20 = Yahoo score

If you rank 10th in Google, 5th in Yahoo and 4th in Bing, then your “keyword” score is  6 + 4 + 5 = 15

Anything above 10 is good, 30 is very good, 50 is excellent and above 70 is top-tier.

Determining Your Incoming Links

There are countless tools that help you determine your number of backlinks. I’ve covered Traffic Travis previously, and a while back Linda covered a number of sites that will show you your incoming link count. A couple of my favorites are Domain-Pop, as shown here -

- or Backlink Watch, as shown below. This is one of my favorites for a quick overview of my most recent stats for incoming links.

By far, my favorite tool – because you can get the most accurate picture of incoming links to your site – is definitely Google Webmaster Tools.

Take a look at the “Total Links” and also pay attention to “How your data is linked“. Those links can show you what people value about your site and feel compelled to link to.

Judge Your Influence On Social Networks

Today, more than ever, social networks are playing a giant part in how search engines judge you. Only a year or so ago, only Twitter and Facebook were key. More recently, Google Plus is critical. So, to determine your value to search engines, you need to evaluate your site’s value on the social networks. Mahendra wrote a great article listing some great tools for this. My favorite is Klout.

I love Kout because it incorporates everything – Twitter, Facebook, Google + and more – add whatever networks you want to use, or leave any of them out.

You can use your Klout score as a baseline to work on improving your overall social networking score. The higher you can move this score, the higher you will rank in the search engines, guaranteed.

Of course, if you really love Facebook, you need to have a Facebook Page for your site, and so you should be using Facebook Insights.

It’s the best way to see what impact different posts have on how many people link or share your articles – so use it, study it, and learn from it.

Check The Number Of Broken Links

Once again, the single best tool to analyze your site links is Google Webmaster Tools. Just click on “Diagnostics” and “Crawl errors” to see a report of Google crawler errors. Most of these will be broken links – 404 not found errors. You should work hard to get this list to zero.

The number of broken links listed here is another factor for your overall “SEO Ranking”. For every broken link, you are hurting your search engine value significantly. A part of any good SEO regimen is going back constantly and removing or fixing broken links. Do this, and you’ll see your search engine placements skyrocket.

There are many issues that determine your value and relevance to search engines – far too many to list in this one article. However, the four factors that I’ve listed here are the four issues that will have the greatest affect on your SEO quality over any other factor out there. Just improve any one of these factors, and you’ll almost immediately notice results (or at least the next time your site gets crawled).

So give it a try and let us know if you were able to improve your standings in the search engines. Do you have any other tips for readers in addition to these? Share your own thoughts and insights in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

As Yaara recently described in a news update, Google has released a new and improved Google Analytics platform with a whole slew of brand new features. In this article, I’m going to dive more deeply into some of those new features.

New Features Of Google Analytics

At first, you’ll notice only very minor differences with the layout of the left navigation menu. For the most part, the overall traffic numbers and display looks the same as usual. To discover the differences, you need to start exploring the left menu by expanding each of the items. What you’ll notice is that not only are the choices simpler and more straightforward, there are also more choices available.

By expanding the Visitors area, you’ll notice a few interesting choices like demographics, behavior, and technology. I really like the behavior area, where you can get a closer look at visitor behaviors like new vs. returning visitors, how often visitors return and how much visitors engage with the site.

Clicking on “Frequency & Recency“, you’ll see a graphical layout of how many times your visitors have visited your page and how frequently.

Under “Engagement“, you can see another graphical layout of pageviews versus visit duration. This can show you some interesting things about how your visitors behave. For example, it might show that while a large majority of your visitors come to the site for a short visit, your return visitors (higher pageviews) actually come back and hang out quite a bit longer.

Under Visitor Technology, you can get a very detailed graphical breakdown of all of the browsers or networks that your visitors are using to visit your website. This lets you optimize your site for the best display in the browser family that the majority of your visitors use.

Click on Social Action under your Visitors section, and you’ll get a breakdown of how many people have been taking advantage of social network interactions on your website through services like Google +. As you can see, I’ve only just added Google + functionality to my own website, so activity has just started. If you’ve been using Google + on your site for a while, you’ll have a lot more information in your Google Analytics account for Social activity.

Under Visitors, there’s also a Mobile Devices area where you can see a breakdown of what mobile devices your visitors use to visit your site, and what percentage of your visitors come from mobile devices. Obviously, if you have a very big number here, you’re going to want to make sure that your site  is well optimized for mobile browsers, or that you offer a mobile-optimized version of your site.

One of the coolest new features can be found under Visitors, when you click on “Visitors Flow“. This display shows you an impressive graphical view of the traffic flow through your site. You can select starting traffic points from what geographic region visitors are from, the source of traffic, the browser visitors use and much more.

What’s amazing about this feature is that you can see how different types of people navigate through your site – you can see what topics and what pages matter more to people from different countries, people that come from Google search vs. Facebook, or people that are running Chrome vs. Firefox. You can pick up some fascinating patterns about your readership from this flowchart.

You can check out how well your search engine optimization is working by clicking on Traffic Sources, Search Engine Optimization, and then “Queries“.

Here, you can see exactly what search terms are drawing in the most traffic to your site. If you’ve done your SEO optimizing well, then you should see those targeted search terms showing up here. You’ll see how many impressions your site is getting from the search engine listings, which can be pretty impressive (pun intended) in many cases.

Other really cool areas of Analytics includes “Site Speed” under Content, where you can see the page load time for the bulk of your visitors.

You want to see most of your load falling under 0 to 6 seconds. If you’re seeing higher percentages with longer page loads, consider upgrading your web hosting.

The absolute coolest area of Analytics, in my opinion, is “In-Page Analytics” under “Content“. This will show you a display of your webpage with click-through rates placed on top of your webpage.

If you change the display to color-coded bubbles, you can see where the highest click-through rates are by looking for the red percentages. This can really help you see what types of content your visitors are most interested in, and what areas of your page do the best job getting your visitors to click and explore the site further.

The new Google Analytics does an excellent job giving you much more information about the behavior and the characteristics of your readership. This can serve to help you lay out your site and produce content that is more valuable and interesting for your visitors.

If you’re an existing Analytics user, check out the new features that are available in the new version. If you haven’t ever used Analytics, now may be an excellent time to try it out. Give it a roll and let us know what you think about the new improvements in the comments section below.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Every month more people start using the Internet on their phone. This means an ever-increasing amount of web traffic is through mobile browsers.

If you’re a web developer, or responsible for a website, this is something you need to know. The iPhone and Android browsers display websites differently than their desktop equivalents. For one thing, they are by nature smaller. For another, they don’t support the same technology. If your site relies heavily on Flash, for example, it is broken on the iPhone. If your site features very small text, it’s probably a pain to read on a phone.

It’s for this reason that Google wants web developers and website owners to start “Going Mo.” Their initiative for doing so, can visit here, includes a lot of great resources for the job.

Lots of information

Get to this site and the first thing you’ll see is information, arranged in a brilliant interactive design similar to Google’s 20 things I learned about browsers and the web. Explore this site and you’ll be convinced: mobile sites are an essential part of every website’s future.

There’s more than that here, though. You will find a case study, wherein Google invested to get businesses in Mobile, Alabama set up with mobile websites. You’ll find a list of best practices for setting up a mobile site. You’ll find case studies for complex implementations of mobile websites. I could go on, but you really should explore this resource to see what it offers.

This is only a test

Another feature: you can see how your website looks on a mobile browser, even if you don’t own a mobile yourself. The preview is limited, in that you can’t explore you mobile site in your browser, but it’s still a great way to see what your mobile viewers’ first impression is.

Once you see your preview you’ll have the opportunity to fill in a survey. These questions give you a chance to think about the quality of mobile experience you’re offering, and give you feedback regarding the types of changes you should consider making to your site.

Useful for designers

So who is this useful for? Anyone who owns a website. The mobile web isn’t going away anytime soon, so you might as well get your website up and running with it.

If you’re a web designer this is also a useful tool for you, particularly if you want to get into the business of mobilizing existing websites. Send potential clients this link and they will learn all about the reasons going mobile is a good idea, making it more likely they’ll hire you for the job.

Oh, and if you get a job from that, and the site happens to be WordPress based, I highly recommend you check out wp-touch, a tool for making WordPress sites compatible with mobile browsers. It’s easy to use; I set it up on JustinPot.com and think it works quite well.

Conclusion

Google’s “How To Go Mo” site is a wealth of information, and the testing feature is a nice addition. I hope it’s useful for you, but let me know if it’s not. I’ll be hanging out in the comments below.

These days, there are countless websites that will let you create a webpage in mere minutes, without any knowledge of HTML whatsoever. We’d covered all sorts of websites and tools that you can use for this, like the four web design tools I wrote about, or other tools like OnePager or Zooloo. One of the fastest and quickest tools that I previously covered was Google Sites.

Fabricating Your Own Useful Dashboard

After using Google Sites for a while, I discovered some additional cool ways that it is integrated with other Google tools. That integration makes it a very powerful and easy way to put together your own personal information dashboard in no time.

To build your own person data/information dashboard, start by going to Google Sites and creating a site of your own. Give it a unique name, but at the bottom of the page, make sure to check off “Only people I specify” to make the site a private one.

This is important, because some of the information that you’re going to bring into the page may include personal details or statistics that are only for your information. This might include information you don’t want the public to see, like the Analytics data from your website, or the RSS streams you’re following to come up with new ideas to write about.

On the main page of your new Google site, click the “Edit” button at the top of the window.

This puts the page in edit mode. What many people may not realize is that there are a bunch of premade gadgets and widgets that can help you make a very dynamic website with very little effort. You can see those by clicking on the “Insert” menu item.

Then, click on “More gadgets…” to view the Google Gadgets database.

There are tons of really useful, high-quality gadgets listed in here. But, don’t get me wrong, there’s also a lot of junk.  Try to stick to the “Featured” category for the highest quality gadgets.

Embed RSS Streams To Your Page

One of the ones that I find to be the most useful is the “Google RSS” feed gadget. Choose that gadget, and then you’ll get to the Properties page.

This is where you can integrate an RSS stream widget onto the site that is tailor-made to provide you with a collection of information tailored specifically to what you want to see. How do you do this when there’s only one RSS feed URL field?

Easy, check out RSSMix, and use it to combine as many different RSS streams from around the net as you like into one core stream that you can embed on your own personal information page. Depending on the type of dashboard information page you’re trying to build, this stream can be a collection of whatever specific information that applies to the purpose of the dashboard. Is it your own finance dashboard? Collect relevant RSS streams from around the web and display that on this page.

Display Spreadsheet Data In Graph Form

The other really cool Gadget that you’ll see in the Insert menu is if you click on “Chart” rather than “More Gadgets“. The Chart gadget is integrated right into Google Docs. You can import any spreadsheet of data in your Google Docs account to create graphs of that data right on your new dashboard.

All I did to create this particular chart is export my Google Analytics website data to a CSV file (you can do this from inside Analytics), and then stored that CSV file in my Google Docs account. This allows Google Sites to see that data and import it into graph format.

Once you’re done laying out the data in the way that you want it to display in the graph, just click okay and now the graph is updated on your page. Pretty cool huh?

Display Dynamic Calendars On Your Dashboard

Another useful gadget in the “Insert” menu is the Calendar tool. This lets you insert any of your personal Google Calendars into your Google Site page. If you think about it, having a calendar embedded on a web page often takes a bit of work, because you need to use embed code to pull data from some calendar stored on another site, or a calendar app installed on your own server, in order to have a dynamic calendar.

But with Google Sites, it’s completely seamless.

Choose your calendar, click “Select” and you’re done. If you choose a two column layout for your page, you can easily lay out these gadgets side by side on the page.

Once you’re done integrating your Google services and embedding various gadgets onto your Google Sites page, save it and then check out how cool your new, dynamic webpage looks.

This is a lot like other dashboard pages like Netvibes, but it is more tightly integrated with your Google services. I’ve noticed that the gadgets here seem to work better and update faster than when you try to embed your Google information into a page like Netvibes. It’s also nice to quickly import docs, spreadsheets and charts right from Google Docs with just the click of a button.

If you’ve put off trying Google Sites, I highly recommend revisiting it, and trying out all of the cool integration tools that you’ll find in the “Insert” menu. You may be surprised just how dynamic and useful a dashboard page you can create for yourself.

Thankfully, there’s a fantastic, free plugin for WordPress that handles the difficult bits, and I was able to get the show on the road within an hour of buying a domain.

What Is A Podcast, Technically Speaking?

A podcast is a special extended form of RSS, or really simple syndication. Regular RSS just provides HTML content, as well as some additional meta-data such as preview image, a title, a date etc. A podcast feed on the other hand also includes links to the audio/video files in a way that special podcast clients – such as iTunes – can understand.

When a podcast feed is updated, the client will prompt you or automatically download the associated media. iTunes also specifies some additional meta-data fields such as description, which it uses to populate the information in the iTunes podcast directory.

Hosting

First off, you need to think separately about the hosting of the actual podcast media files – typically anywhere from 5MB (10 minutes of audio) to 500MB (video) – to the hosting of the podcast feed.

Today I’ll only be discussing self-hosting both the files themselves and the website used to make the podcast feed, but if you have a particular bandwidth-limited webhost then you may need to consider placing your files on a low-cost host such as Amazon s3. Either will function the same, but you will need to consider this beforehand. While the bandwidth required to access the feed will be no more than a regular blog, the bandwidth needed for 1,000 people downloading your 100MB podcast every week can rapidly escalate.

An alternative solution is to use a low-cost feed/file host combination, such as libsyn. The problem with using a hosted service is the same as using a hosted blogging service – if you become popular and need to migrate to your own domain, things can become difficult and you may end up losing listeners in the process.

On the other hand, many all-in-one hosted solutions offer access to their automated advertising insertion systems. I can’t testify as to the profitability of these, but I assume it’s much the same rules as Adsense – the more downloads you get, the more money you can make. In my opinion, monetization should never be your primary goal on any web project – start off making great content, and only consider monetization once you’ve gained traction.

To clarify a common misconception – the iTunes store will not host your podcast for you, nor will they set up any of the necessary meta-data needed in your feed. This is entirely your responsibility to set up. For podcasts, the iTunes store functions in a similar fashion to a link directory. With the feed correctly set up, you submit the address, and wait for approval. That’s it. You need to provide the file hosting, and the podcast feed hosting.

Using WordPress & Podpress

So assuming you’re going to host your own files on either your own web server or Amazon s3, the next step is to set up a website or front-end to manage the podcast feed, again on your own server, for which we’ll be using the world’s best CMS – WordPress. I strongly suggest you get your own specific domain for the podcast too – we got ours for $6 with a coupon at GoDaddy – and that’ll save a world of hassle later on.

A standard WordPress installation won’t do podcasting out of the box, and for this we’ll install a plugin called podPress - search for it from the Add Plugin menu option within WordPress.

Basic iTunes meta-data is automatically added to your site feed now. Go to the podPress->Feed/iTunes Settings to customise this with your own:

• summary
• preview image (this is what people will see in the store)
• owner
• subtitle
• keywords
• explicit tag

You’re also able to set up additional feeds, but I won’t go into detail with them here as the setup is significantly more complicated. These can be used if you plan on releasing different formats – for example, keeping the main feed as a plain MP3, or also providing a video feed.

Adding Your First Podcast

Releasing a new episode is basically as simple as creating a new post and associating the relevant media file. You can’t actually upload the podcast on most hosts, due to the upload file size limit which is usually about 2MB. You’ll need to open an FTP connection, create a folder for your podcasts, and enter the URL manually on the post screen in the new podPress section.

Anything else you write in the post content area will become the “show notes” and description for iTunes.

Submitting To The iTunes Store

Before you submit, make sure you’ve changed all the defaults from the podPress settings screen, and be sure to have a feed image set, as well as accurately marking if the feed is explicit or not.

You’ll need an iTunes account to submit the podcast. Just navigate to the iTunes Store -> Podcasts section from iTunes, and click Submit a Podcast in the top right. Paste in the feed address of your blog, and step through the wizard. There’s a 2-3 day wait time to be approved, and after that the feed will update daily (so you may not see your new episode immediately in the iTunes directory).

I understand Dave is in the process of writing a full guide on the topic of podcasting, so if you’re unsure of the process or you don’t to host it yourself, wait for that in a few months. Comments welcome, or questions if you’re having problems as I’ll try to help as best as I can. If you need more help on blogging in general with WordPress, may I suggest my own fantastic free guide.

Growing a blog takes years, and a whole lot of pain and struggle – I’m sure Aibek would testify to that. Then there are the major transitions, when you realize that you have to make some major changes, and it’s going to take a whole lot of work.

There are a number of major changes I’ve had to make on my own blog, but one of the most difficult was due to the fact that I had used a certain manual method to insert Google adverts into my blog articles.

Changing Posts With A Single SQL Command

The problem is that after several years of running the blog, I had nearly 1,000 posts with that Google advert manually inserted. If I ever wanted to make a change, that’s a thousand posts I’d have to edit.

I wanted to use that cool in-post template add-on that I wrote about in 2010.  This would automate the insertion of adverts moving forward, but if I used it without removing all of those existing adverts, I’d end up with two ads in the old articles.

To remove the old advert , I had to perform a little bit of SQL magic, and I’m going to share that with you today. The action takes place in phpMyAdmin, and you’ll need to select the database of your blog from the left menu.

The code that you’re going to use to strip sections of your content will be in the SQL tag. What I mean by that is the code I’m going to show you, you’ll be able to use to remove any content that exists on multiple blog posts, from 2 to 200 – or more. The only requirement is that what you want to remove has to have a common start text and an end text – like a Google advert has a common start tag and an end tag.

This is what my newer blog entries look like, with the ad manually inserted right after the “more” tag on every page, aligned on the right.

The way this code is laid out on the page looks like this:

As you can see, I have a “script type” start tag that I can use at the start of every advert, and a “script src” tag I can use at the end.

So here’s how it works. You need to tell the SQL “update” command that you want to completely wipe out that block of your page. You’ll need to understand three basic MySQL functions – replace, substr and locate.

First, use LOCATE to tell the command the locations of the start and end points. In my case, I use the strings at the start and end of the section I want to remove. The start location on the page of the beginning is:

LOCATE ('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content)

The end location is trickier. Locate gives you the start of the string, so you have to add the number of characters to the very end of the string to get the ending location.

LOCATE('<script src='http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript">', post_content) + 93

Next, you’re going to need to tell the “REPLACE” function exactly what text you want to replace. You do this by extracting the actual string out of the post content, using the SUBSTR function. You have to pass it the starting location (which you now have) and the length. The length you need to calculate by subtracting the starting position from the last position (which you also have).

Here is what that looks like, with the code above inserted into the SUBSTR function:

substr(post_content, locate('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content), ((locate('<script src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript">', post_content) + 93) - (locate('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content))))

Looks crazy right? But if you look carefully, you’ll see there’s the three sections embedded – post content, start location, and length.

Now that you have the exact text that you want to remove from your posts, all you have to do is tell the REPLACE function to replace it with a space. Just copy the code above into the following command:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, string_to_replace, replacement_string);

Like this:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, substr(post_content, locate('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content), ((locate('<script src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript">', post_content) + 93) - (locate('<script type="text/javascript">', post_content)))), ' ');

Running the script above, if all of the syntax is properly aligned, you should see the following successful results in phpAdmin.

Now, when I reload the posts in my web browser – voila! The ad has magically been stripped away.

Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t work on all ads, because I had some older ones that had slightly different formatting on the start and end. Like this page.

But with a little bit of tweaking, just changing the precise tags for start/finish, I was able to re-run the SQL and wipe those out as well.

This technique will work to remove any content at all that is in your WordPress post content. That’s the beauty of having the posts in a MySQL database, you can simply run SQL commands to manipulate thousands of posts all at once – saving a tremendous amount of manual work. Just make sure to back up your database before you start!

Do you have any other neat uses for this SQL command? Give it a shot on your own WordPress database and see how well it works for you. Share your experiences and feedback in the comments section below.

Image credits: Shutterstock

Here at MUO, we’ve covered a number of useful tools that offer insight into different social networks. Facebook Spectrum was one tool covered in directory – a cool way to see Facebook stats for your Facebook account. Research.ly was another small tool that was covered, which gives you insights into the general Twitter social network.

What I want to focus on today is a tool that is actually offered by Facebook called Facebook Insights. If you’ve established a Facebook brand page, it provides you with very valuable insights into the interests of your readership.

Using Facebook Insights

If you have a Facebook Brand page that you want to analyze, just log into the Facebook account that you use to manage that page. Then head over to the Facebook Insights dashboard and choose the page that you want to analyze.

When you click on the page that you manage, you’ll find yourself on the “Overview” page. This is where you can see the big picture information, how many likes as well as weekly and monthly users that actively visit your Facebook brand page. It also shows you the overall level of interaction on your page.

This information is useful to watch for trends surrounding any major stories you publish or any large advertising or marketing pushes that you’ve done for your site. You can get a really useful long-term trend by changing the time frame from one month to several months.

When it comes to “daily active users“, you really want to see more of those steady plateaus and fewer days with zero or low daily interaction. You can see more details about user interaction just below the trend charts. Here you’ll see interactions broken down daily, as well as any rising or falling trend stats. You can add or remove trend lines by selecting or deselecting the checkbox for that data.

Best of all, you can export all of the data to an external Excel or Comma-Delimited spreadsheet by clicking on the “Export” button next to the date range.

This spreadsheet provides you with the highest level of detail that you could hope to gather from the activity on your Facebook page. You’ll see daily, weekly and monthly active user averages, as well as “Like” averages, page views, daily news feed impressions, comments and more. This daily breakdown can help you identify when averages rose in response to a page post you made, or a link that you published.

Analyzing The Data About Your Fan Base

This is all really useful information to see how well your page is performing overall, but it doesn’t really give you the information that you need to understand your fan base. Luckily, Facebook Insights lets you further focus the data into user-specific information and behavior.

You can get that information by clicking on “Get Details” on top of each chart. This takes you to a new page that shows you all of the very fine details behind the data.  You’ll see unique views vs. post views (how many new users you’re getting), as well as how many people liked or commented on your posts and where those “like” sources came from.

Insights further breaks down your page user base by demographics like age, gender and what country they are from.

Further down, another useful piece of information is where the views are coming from, and your Facebook page top referrers as well. If you have a brand page that’s public, the odds are pretty good you’ll see Google at the top of the referrer list here, under your own website (hopefully you’re referring people to your Facebook page from your own website!)

It just so happens that Facebook is working on revamping the appearance of Facebook Insights, so many of the views above may change slightly – or at least how you access them will be a little different, but all of the data is the same. There are also going to be new features, like this really cool post breakdown that gives you really detailed information about community activity from your wall posts. There even a really cool “Virality?” column that assigns a percentage to the post based on how viral it went on Facebook.

All of this is the sort of detailed information you need to know in order to gear your future articles toward what you know your readers want to see, and what topics have gone viral in the past. Just like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights gives you a bit of a peak behind the curtain to see how people are responding to your wall posts and which posts are attracting the most reader interactivity.

So if you have a brand page on Facebook and having given Facebook Insights a try, open up the hood and look around. You may be surprised what you discover about your fans. Share your experiences and insights with Facebook Insights in the comments section below.

So, when Google Plus came out, I had the same trepidation as always. But as time passed, that has certainly changed.

Integrating Google Plus Into Your Blog

Over the past few days I’ve decided to take a closer look at Google Plus, and discovered that it is quickly becoming far more integrated throughout the Internet than many people probably realize. For that reason – it’s probably high time to assimilate with the Borg. After all, resistance is futile, right?

Now, we’ve covered quite a bit of Google Plus here. Mark started us off with an overview, Bakari described how Google Plus is integrated into Blogger, and Matt released the news in July about +1 for websites.

Just like we did with Twitter and Facebook, it’s time to go over the tools that are available to integrate Google Plus with your blog. First, create a new G+ page for your site in your Google Plus account by clicking on “Create a Google+ Page” in the right navigation pane.

Creating a Google+ page for your blog or website is a critical part of establishing it in the social networking sphere of influence.

By the way – make your tagline count. Focus on topics that your blog or website covers so that people will find you. Pick a good, branded photo for your site and you’re good to go. Once your new page is up, just like on Facebook you can share your stories, post comments and anything else that you can do to start a conversation with your readers.

The About page is important. Make sure that the top ribbon has a cool selection of photos that reflect the sort of content people will find at your site. Offer a good, strong, well-written introduction, contact information (this makes you look more professional), and of course the website link.

Now that you’ve linked from a related Google+ page to your website, it’s time to integrate the Google+ tools to link in the other direction.

Adding A Google Plus Badge To Your Blog

The first thing you want to do is create a badge that links from your website or blog directly to your new Google Plus page for the site. You do this from your Google Plus page that you’ve just created. Click on the “Get Started” link in the left navigation pane, scroll down to “Connect Your Website” and click “Get the Badge“.

This is easy enough, thanks to a fast Wizard that Google provides to complete the process. Just complete the URL that links to your new page, and then scroll down to set up what your direct-link “badge” will look like. Right now your choices are fairly limited, but there is a large G+ image that works pretty well for sidebars. In my case I want to put a medium one at the top of the site.

You can have it print the name of your site, or just leave it as a plain button. The next step is just to highlight the “head” code and paste it somewhere inside the <head> tags. In WordPress this will likely be in your header.php file.

Next, paste the href link section inside the body of your page where you want the badge to show up. In my case, I’ve pasted it inside the main template of my site so that it’ll show up above all content on every page, like shown below.

Adding The +1 Button To Your Site

Next up is adding the +1 button to every article page so people can share your posts with the world. Go to the same “Get Started” page in Google Plus as before, and scroll down to the link to add the +1 button to your site.

You’ll see a blue button that says “Go to Google+” and under that a link that reads “Get the Code“. Click on that link.  That takes you to the easy Wizard for configuring your button without any hassle.

Choose the size of the icon and the width of the text/icon snippet that you want, and you’ll see the code in the field at the bottom. Again, just like you did above, place the <script> section of code into your header, and place the “g:plusone” line of code into your page where you want the button to exist.

Now, voila – people can click on the link to +1 your page. If you’re doing this on WordPress, make sure to edit the single.php file, or whatever php page provides content for individual posts – you want your +1 button to apply to individual articles.

So, there you have it. You’ve just bought into the next big thing. You’ve just assimilated into the Borg, and your site traffic is going to reward you for it.

I honestly thought it would be a lot longer before I would let myself say it, but I actually think Google Plus is here to stay. Not only that, but it may very well be the next big thing to actually have a chance to compete with the Facebook monster. We’ll have to wait and see.

Did you find it easy enough to integrate Google Plus into your blog? How do you like the Google Pages for websites? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below.

My operating system of choice for this article will be Fedora Linux, as Linux in general is known for getting servers up and running quickly, and easily. In addition, Fedora is well supported by both a community and a corporation, has great security, and offers graphical configuration tools for multiple servers.

Step One: Installation

New Install of Fedora

If you don’t have Fedora installed on your system yet, you can do so with the DVD because you can also choose to install Apache at the same time. If you take this route, while installing from the DVD you’ll be able to choose which packages you want to install with the “Customize Now” switch. Choose it and then under the Servers tab, you can select “Web Server”. Go ahead with the installation until you can boot into your new system. From there, you can install the graphical configuration tool by choosing the package system-config-httpd from your package manager, or run sudo yum install system-config-http.

Fedora Already Installed

If you already have Fedora installed, you can install both the web server and the graphical configuration tool. You can install the httpd and system-config-httpd packages from the package manager, or run sudo yum install httpd system-config-httpd.

Step Two: Configuration

You can now start the graphical configuration tool from System Tools –> HTTP. The first tab you’ll see is the Main tab, where you can configure the server name, administrator email address, and under which addresses the server is available under. I recommend that you add an address right now, and choose “All available addresses” on port 80 for simplicity.

The second tab contains the different virtual hosts, or the number of different websites on the same server, that are configured. The server can differentiate what domain name was entered into the browser and therefore choose the correct virtual host when displaying a page.

There are plenty of different settings that you can choose for each virtual host, including the necessary components as well as hard-to-configure ones such as SSL (HTTPS). For a majority of items, the graphical configuration tool should be able to take care of your needs.

The final tab has everything to do with performance and the amount of connections that are allowed. There are no recommended settings as each server has different capabilities, so if you have a larger website you’ll need to play around with these numbers and see what works (provided that you have enough traffic to test out the settings correctly).

Additional Needed Configuration

Before you can actually access your new web server, you’ll need to open your terminal and then run sudo service httpd start to actually start Apache and sudo chkconfig httpd on to make Apache start at every boot.

Step Three: Testing

Step 3 in our process is simply to test out whether you can access your page or not. On the same machine, open up Firefox and type in localhost or 127.0.0.1 to see if you get this test page (provided that you didn’t change the document root):

If not, you may have done something wrong in your configuration or not started Apache yet.

Conclusion

It’s pretty cool to have Apache up and running on your very system, considering that it’s the same technology being used by most of the websites you visit every single day (including MakeUseOf). If you want other machines to have access, you’ll need to go into Fedora’s firewall configuration utility (installed by default) and make sure that HTTP (Port 80) is open. Also, if you want to run more complicated web frameworks such as forums or WordPress, you’ll have to install MySQL and PHP as well, but I’ll leave that for another article.

How easy do you think this process is? What do you like or not like about Apache? Let us know in the comments!

The Pendule Menu

Pendule’s toolbar button pops out a slick-looking menu, divided into six main areas. First up, the Style Sheets section. The View CSS option may seem redundant – after all, Chrome already lets us view CSS… or does it?

Many websites use compressed CSS, with some compressing it to the point of illegibility. If you’re the only Web developer on your site, you may be able to decide for yourself how much you want to compress the CSS. For me, there is no such luck. One of the websites I work for compresses the CSS using a PHP tool called Minify, so inspecting the CSS with Chrome’s built-in tools shows something like this:

Not exactly the most readable format imaginable. With Pendule, I can easily beautify the CSS on my side. I just click the Pendule button and click View CSS. I then get something like this:

Still not very readable. But click the Beautify CSS button and watch the magic happen:

Now we’re talking! While you can’t change anything in the CSS view, this is a big improvement when it comes to compressed CSS.

Handling Images

Pendule also offers some interesting image-related utilities:

“View images information” takes you to a completely new webpage containing all images from the current page, each with a host of related information:

This is handy because it lets you scroll through all images one by one and audit them individually. For example, some websites serve content from one server and related images from another server (to make things faster). With this view, you can see exactly where each image comes from and easily track down the ones that aren’t served from the right source.

You can also read the Alt text for every image, which can be key for SEO offers. However, if you’re just interested in the Alt text, Pendule lets you easily audit that on-page, using the “Show alt text” option. When enabled, images on your page look like this:

This one happens to be from a lovely post entitled 3 Signs Apple Is Displacing Microsoft To Become The Evil Empire, but the point here is the little “alt=” snippet above the image. It looks like a tooltip, but you don’t have to hover your mouse over it to make it show. With “Show alt text”, you can just scroll through your webpage and see exactly what images have missing or incorrect Alts.

Miscellaneous Utilities

Pendule’s Miscellaneous Utilities menu packs a few interesting goodies. The View JavaScript products a single webpage divided into sections, one section for each script the current page contains. Much like the “View CSS” option we started off with, View JavaScript lets you beautify the code to make it readable. JavaScript is almost always compressed (even more so than CSS), so this is a very handy option if you like reading code to figure out how things work.

The “Display ruler” option dims the page and overlays it with a resizable, draggable frame with a little label that shows its dimensions at any given time. This is very handy for checking to see if elements are correctly aligned, for example.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a Web developer using Chrome, the first thing you should do is get absolutely comfortable with Chrome’s own built-in developer tools. However, once you’ve done that, you will probably be able to find at least one or two tools within Pendule that nicely supplement your workflow.