The Google Toolbar is full of great features including an easy access Search feature, easy Bookmarking, Page Rank information (Google uses a scale of 1-10 to determine a website’s relevancy and importance) and more. Recently, they’ve added a new Share feature which allows you to share a web page with your friends on the most popular Social Media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Myspace, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Blogger and more…

Share any web page with your friends right from the Toolbar
• Click the Share button on any page and select a service.
• Add an optional personal note and send to your friends.
• You can modify which favorites pop up by going to Share > Settings.

Click Here to Learn More

A few Google Toolbar features:

• Share any web page with your friends right from the Toolbar.
• Contribute and read helpful information on any web page with Google Sidewiki.
• Translate web pages instantly with automatic language detection.

Download the Google Toolbar

We are huge fans of Google! Not only do they provide the best in search results, but they offer a variety of free services that make our lives easier. Honestly, if you haven’t looked into all the products that Google has to offer, you really should. Each working day, every staff member at Skybox Creative has at least one Google app open in their web browser.

From the awesome Google Calendar that lets you share your schedule or embed on your website to Google Wave for collaborative projects, Google Feedburner to update followers of new blog posts right to their inbox, to Google Docs for file sharing and form tracking…Google has what you need to make your business run more smoothly!

This post is specifically about Google Docs and the ability to create surveys, or any other type of form for that matter, and track the results in a spreadsheet. You even have the option to “Show Summary of Responses” where the data is compiled into bar graphs and pie charts – so easy a child could understand. There are a variety of templates to choose from (although we hope they add more template design options or at least the ability to customize colors sooner than later, nonetheless, they get the job done). You can create a form with ease, specifying whether you want a checklist, multiple choice question, paragraph answer, etc. Once you have completed the form, you have the option to email it or embed it on a web page (see below).

The results are tracked anonymously in a spreadsheet. You also have the option to share the ‘Results’ spreadsheet through Google Docs sharing options (now available for individual docs and entire folders). We have embedded our Client Satisfaction Survey below so you can see what it looks like. We had to force the width and height of the iframe in order for it to fit in our blog – not perfect, but again, gets the job done. If you embed the form on your blog, make sure to click on the HTML tab first, then paste the code. You can easily adjust the dimensions, just make sure to calculate the proportions to make sure it displays optimally. It’s also good to know that (for whatever reason), if you tab back to Visual, it might erase the iframe code – for this reason, we recommend copy/pasting the code in a text editing application so you can grab it again if needed!

Clients ONLY: Feel free to fill out the form with your feedback! All others, if you are interested in speaking to us about the services we offer, please email us at info@skyboxcreative.com

Great Web Design is just the beginning! Being found on the search engines, particularly the leader, Google, is critical to growing and sustaining your business – that’s why SEO and social media are such prevalent topics these days. Understanding SEO can be complicated, but luckily there are tools that make it easier!

One such tool is SEO Doctor for Firefox. This tool will help you understand and diagnose SEO problems on your site as well as understand factors of success on competitor websites.

At glance

SEO Doctor is made with both beginners and experienced SEOs in mind and it’s scoring system and recommendations are based on official SEO documents, namely Google Webmaster guidelines, Google Image guidelines and Google SEO starter guide as well as my own experience from years in the profession.

Main features are:

• Points out to potential problems and assigns a score for your pages based on common SEO methodology
• Shows link structure and helps track page rank flow for your pages
• Detects and warns you about pages not indexable by search engines using comprehensive methods
• Quick one-click access to most popular SEO tools allows you to additionally inspect a site
• Fully customizable

Features

By default SEO Doctor will place itself in the browser status bar, immediately providing you with the following information (see image).

SEO Score represents the result of on-site optimization analysis of the currently viewed page. Maximum score is 100 and the green flag will indicate everything is OK. Yellow flag indicates warnings and red flag suggests that concrete SEO elements can be improved. In a special case when the current page is not indexable at all by search engines, the icon will show a special ‘no-trespassing’ icon.

Flow shows how much of the Page Rank has been preserved on the site. 100% means that you preserve 100% of all the Page Rank on your site, while 0% would mean that all outgoing links are to other sites.

Links shows number of external links/total links on the page.

Visits show estimated number of daily visitors for the site (data is retrieved from Compete.com and is available to you if you register for a free API key).

Clicking the nofollow icon allows you to instantly highlight all nofollow links on the page on and off.

Click here to read more and DOWNLOAD.

Source: www.prelovac.com

SEO is a term that is tossed around on a daily basis yet there are many people who still do not understand what it is. Firstly, there are 2 components to SEO and generating traffic online: Organic SEO and PPC. The term ‘Organic Search Engine Optimization’ refers to ranking well on Search Engines for specific keywords without paying on a per-click basis. Then there is PPC, which stands for, you guessed it Pay-Per-Click! There are a slew of local and national organizations offering SEO, but it is important to do your homework before hiring any of these companies. There are some basics that everyone should understand, so we are going to educate you here on just a few of the main points.

Defining your keywords and keyword combinations is a vital first step in the process. For instance, Web Design San Diego is a different keyword combination than San Diego Web Design, so selecting the appropriate keyword combinations is tricky. Getting thousands of ‘hits’ is not nearly as important as attracting relevant traffic. A great way to start your research is to sign up with a Google ‘Ad Words’ Account. You do not have pay anything to start the set up, but once your account is activated, you will have access to a tool called: Search-based Keyword Tool and the Keyword Tool. It is good to understand which keywords generate the most traffic, but also to make sure the ones you choose will help drive sales. For instance, a term such as ‘Brand’ will generate over 1,000,000 searches on Google monthly, but the term is too generic to sell ‘Branding’ or a specific brand for that matter, besides, you will be drown out by the 617,000,000 results, try getting to page 1-3, it will take A LOT of work!!

If you have a product or service that people will search for locally vs nationally, you are in luck! Whenever you add a city name to a search it narrows down the results tremendously. Take the Web Design example, a search for ‘Web Design’ generates 375,000,000 results, where as a search for ‘Web Design San Diego’ generates 11,600,000 results, you just eliminated 363,400,000 competitors from the running…not a bad place to start! If you have local seekers, you also have the benefit of Map listings which show up above the organic listings when a city name is added to a search. Google offers a free map listing, you can even add coupons and many other business details through their Local Business Center. Yahoo has a similar product as well, I would recommend setting up a listing with both Search Engines. A couple of factors will help you get to the top of that list, number one is location, but you can also submit your listing to specific categories + sub-categories and fill in keywords that way. It also helps to have customers go on and rate your business, if they like you! When visitors find a business with multiple testimonials and a five star rating up front, they will automatically feel a stronger sense of trust vs. your traditional Organic Search Results.

Ok, now to the on-site details.

Now that you understand the importance of keywords, you should know that your top (2-5) keywords should be all over your website. Developing a site entirely in Flash is fine if you don’t care about search engines, but if you want your site to be found, you should limit flash to a certain location on the page, keeping the navigation, title tags and body text in HTML/CSS. There is also a rule to be aware of called: Keyword Stuffing. If Google catches you trying to ‘trick’ the system, they can potentially blacklist your domain, which is definitely no good! Ok, so how do you repeat keywords without keyword stuffing, let me count the ways: title tags, url strings, meta keywords + description, h1 tags (proper definition of header text), body text and links (internal, inbound and outbound). If you have more questions about how these elements can be implemented on your site, please email us info@skyboxcreative.com I have attached a graphic below visually illustrating the elements I have mentioned above. The live site used as a reference model can be seen here: www.drgram.com

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