Category: News & Trends

Posted on

Add Cool New Widgets You Make to Your Blog

Check out this link to pick up cool new widgets, register your own, create your own customized widgets with news feeds and much more. Just click our blog post title to visit Widgetbox.com.

I think that there are some very cool ones there. Here is one that I am going to try out in a day or so http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/RandomFeed. It’s a random feed slide show widget that allows you to enter your own news feeds and then randomly displays them in a slide show format. Very neat. I don’t have time to try it out today, but I will be adding it to this blog or our Web-World Watch blog this week. I’ll point you there when I do.

Adding cool interactive gadgets to your web pages and blogs can really be fun. With a little research on the Web you can find all kind of very cool things to make your blog more interesting and fun for readers.

I also liked the liquid clock and will try that one out too!

Posted on

Are Your Blog Posts in the Google Supplemental Index?

If you are note sure if your blog posts are in the Google supplemental index, here’s a quick way to check. Go to www.Google.com and enter in site:www.yoursite.com *** –sjpked. Of course replace the your site.com with the correct URL.

One of the big reasons that blog posts routinely go to the supplemental index is that there are simply no links to them raising their page rank. Part of this is due to the way that blogs work with posts going onto a home page and then moving into the archive based on your settings.

One way to help keep your blog out of the supplemental index is to link to specific blog post pages from your website. If you point to a page specific URL for a post, not just the home page of your blog, and start to keep updated links to pertinent information, this may be one way to keep your posts live in the main Google index. Obviously another way is to write great content that others will want to back link on your blog, but if someone links to you and when, you can not control.

You may want to consider doing a special post archive on your website pointing to really hot property blog posts or ones that you particularly want to point out. What I do is to point to specific posts using Feed technology on my own website. I use a tool called FeedrollPro to allow syndication of my content and then I use FeedHoster to easily update my site feed online. This makes it super easy for me to show important headlines on my own personal website as well as to feed what I consider important content to others who are syndicating my content.

Staying out of the Google supplemental index is important so try some of these suggestions to see what may work for you too.

Posted on

Keep An Eye Open On BBB Claim Scams

I just got this in my email and it is enough to shake up any business owner. My email stated that a William Jackson had filed a complaint against me with the Better Business Bureau.

First I have never had a customer by this name and so I figured it was a scam or virus hoax, but the note sure looked legitimate, but I did not open the PDF attachment. I sent the BBB a note for clarification and then did a search on the Web.

This is what I found. First PDFs can now be exploited for virus attacks. Second the BBB has posted a notice that this is a scam and a new way to embed VB Script using their name. The link in our blog post title will take you to the Better Business Bureau site so you can read all about it and make sure that you are not a victim.

For me, I was a bit shaken up. I really pride myself on offering total customer satisfaction and work really hard to assure it, so to think that there was a customer who had a problem I did not know about threw me for a loop. Until I realized I had no customer by this name.

In fact one of the triggers to identify this may be a hoax was the messages headers were masked and the PDF file had a funny name.

Make sure you are not a victim, just delete the message if it comes from the fictitious address operations@bbb.org .

Posted on

Swickis and Buzz Clouds

You’ve seen them, but may not know what they are called. You know the block of content on a site that is just keywords and some words are big and some are small. They are called Buzz Clouds or Swickis. I don’t have one on this blog, but you can visit Web-World Watch and see one on the right side bar near the bottom.

Whatever they are, they are interactive and allow your site visitors to actively participate in adding more keywords, letting you know the keywords they think are important and to search for more information on your site and the web on the keywords included in your buzz cloud.

If you want to start one, and by the way set up is FREE. Just click the post title to go to my favorite Swicki from Eurekster. It is super easy to set up and you can add the HTML that is generated in your blog template or add it to your new Blogger layout if you are using it in the add custom HTML widget.

Swicki even automatically lets you know when you’ve had click activity on your Swicki. I think that you will find what others think is interesting and adding one is just another way to create interactivity and make your site more interesting and of value to readers.