Gmail Outages

Gmail is Offline

Google’s Mail, Gmail, is best free service, more reliable than Hotmail or Yahoo. But it can have outages. It was out for a few hours this morning starting at 4:30AM EST, causing some people to call it “Gfail”.

According to the Google blog:

If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.

“Offline Gmail” can help

This should encourage people to either set up a mail client (i.e. Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail), or begin using Offline Gmail though Gmail Labs’ Google Gears. This creates a local copy of all mail all within your browser so that you at least can see your old mail and draft new messages. Because it has your messages locally on your computer, it can make working with email faster too.

Offline Gmail Video from Google:

Google SEO and Other Search Engine Results Performance Suggestions

Poor Search Results

So you’ve made your shiny new website but you’re not getting any visitors. That’s probably because you haven’t worked on your search engine optimization (SEO). The primary way for most sites to get visitors is through coming up in the web search results when people are looking for whatever you offer.  If you don’t come up well in the search results, you won’t get many visitors.

Track Your Visits

The first thing to do is setup tracking systems so you know exactly how many visitors you have so you can tell if you are doing better or worse when you work on your SEO. The best choice for this is to use the free Google Analytics. It involves creating an Analytics account and then placing some simple javascript code on every one of your pages that you want to track. You can then log in on the analytics site to see your visitor information at any time from anywhere.

Google vs The Rest

There are several search engines out there.  The big ones are Google, Yahoo, and Live (Microsoft’s search also used on MSN).  The short and ugly truth is that Google rules search and all the others combined don’t equal Google.  This has the advantage of leaving your focus just on the Google results though.  If you do well on Google, you almost always do well on the other search engines as well anyway.

PageRank

The most important thing when it comes to your Google search results placement is the PageRank of your page.  In Google’s eyes, a page is not a site.  A site is made up of one or more pages and Google only ranks based on the pages, not the site.  So for example, mysite.com is one page and mysite.com/help is a different page.  Your main page might have a high PageRank and your other pages may be low.  Your goal should be to get your main page or wherever you want people to land (arrive to your site) to have a good PageRank.  If you install the Google Toolbar in your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser, you can see the PageRank of each site you visit.  These numbers are not quickly updated by Google so it might take a month or more to see a change there that actually already took place.

PageRank Improvements

So how does one go about getting a higher PageRank?  This is actually the simplest part to understand.  The more links to your page, the greater your PageRank.  The hard part is figuring out how to legitimately get more links to your page.  The way to do this varies greatly depending on your field.  If you make software for example, be sure to list your software on all the software download sites, many of which will let you link directly to your site.  You can submit to open internet directories such as dmoz.org.  You can try to list your site on reputable forums in your area of interest.  If you have a good product and people start to notice, you may gain links from others as well such as being mentioned on a blog or newspaper site.  The greater the PageRank of the page that links to you, the more helpful it is to your page.

Relevant Keywords

If you want to show up well for certain phrases in search results, be sure you use those phrases on your site several times.  If you don’t have the phrase, don’t expect to be found when searching for it, no matter what your PageRank.  Hence, it is most important to decide what people might be trying to search for to find your product or service.  If you think people are going to search for “big hats”, then don’t use “Hats that are big” on your site.  Use the actual phrase that you think they will search on.  In general, the more you use a phrase, the better you do but there is a limit.  If you overuse, Google will catch on and actually penalize it.  A good rule of thumb is to make your site still read well to a human.  If it starts to sound weird, you are going too far.  The more unrelated text you have on your page, the more it will dilute the important words.

Keywords in the Page URL

If you want to sell big hats and you make your page mysite.com/big-hats/,  those keywords will do better in the search results with that page URL.  You can use dashes or not although dashes can help differentiate exact words.  Similarly, if you can buy a domain with the keywords that are most important to you, that can help even more.  You may want to use mylastname.com but mybighats.com would win the search results battle.

Link Keywords

Whenever you are able to get links, it is preferable to use your desired keywords in the link text, also known as anchor text.  This is the text that is displayed in the clickable link.  If you do this, those keywords will get a bonus in the search results.  Unfortunately, with many of your links, you may not have such control but whenever you do, try to utilize that benefit.

Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords

There are 3 more useful areas to be sure to use your most desired keywords.  The Title of the page is very prevalent to the human eye and also can get you a bonus in the search results for the words you use.  If you have multiple pages on your site, be sure to use appropriate titles on each page.  Remember that Google ranks pages, not sites.  The same goes for the meta description and meta keywords.  These are hidden items in the html of your page that only search engine robots will see.  Within the <body> tag of your html, you can add the following:
<meta name=”description” content=”Big Hats at great prices in the Washington D.C. Area”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”big hats, washington d.c., dc”>

The meta description will also be shown in Google search results under your site so it is extra important to make that text short and descriptive to bring in visitors.  The meta keywords help guide Google by telling it what you think your page should do well on.  However, Google will make up its own mind on this so if you list keywords that aren’t found on your site, it won’t help.  Be sure these meta keyword suggestions are also in your page content.

Study the Enemy

A great way to climb the ranks for a certain search phrase is to look at the top results for the phrase you are examining.  Try to figure out why they are the top.  What is their PageRank?  How often do they use the search keywords on their page?  What is in their title or description?  Who is linking to them and can you get similar links?  With the Google toolbar you can install in your browser, you can look at the backward links (links going to the site you are examining).

What Not to Do

It is just as important what you don’t do as what you do.  If you get links on blacklisted link farms or on bad forums, you may be hurting your PageRank and search results.  If you are trying to get a link from a certain page, be sure to check out its PageRank first.  If you list referral (paid) links to other sites, you may be penalized for that as well.  You should also not try any tricks in your html such as links that are invisible to the human eye.  Google looks for such things and will penalize or totally blacklist you for it.  If you have too many links on your page going to other sites (100 or more), you will get penalized for that as well since you’ll appear to be a link farm yourself.

Patience

Last but not least, you must be patient.  Most of the changes you can make to your site won’t quickly have any influence in search results placement.  Changes can take weeks to influence the results so don’t rush into conclusions before you give an idea time to work.  The amount of time it takes can actually vary from a few days to about a month.

Online Real Estate Tools in Washington D.C. Area

Whether you’re buying, selling, or just want to know what’s going on, it’s easier than ever to follow real estate online.

Finding Comparables

Zillow provides a property value estimate based on neighboring comparables and their sale prices. It was started in 2005 by the people who started Expedia.com because they were frustrated that these tools were only available to real estate agents.

Real Estate Listings

Google recently added Real Estate to their Maps option. Google Base also recently began listing Real Estate with full search capabilities.

Long and Foster has been one of the most popular sites to search MLS listed properties.

Credit Report

Before buying a house, you need to know your credit score. You should also check it occasionally just to be sure that there are no errors. It is not uncommon to find that someone has impersonated you or that the credit agency just got something wrong.

AnnualCreditReport.com allows you to request your credit report for free once every 12 months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

Mortages

Bankrate.com provides a good starting point for finding mortgage rates.

If you are in the Military or part of a Military family, consider Pentagon Federal Credit Union or the Navy Federal Credit Union. There are local offices in Washington D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.

Realtors

If you understand the comparables and have done the search yourself, you should consider a low-cost realtor.

Both ZipRealty and PenFed Realty (for Military personnel) both offer low fees or cash back.

Real Estate News

The Washington Post – Real Estate section provides real estate news and stories in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.

Google Chrome Browser First Impressions

Today, Google has launched their own browser called Chrome.  There’s no doubt Google is trying to control all things on the web and this is yet another step towards that goal.  Their search engine is dominant and they’ve been trying to push online applications such as Google Docs.  By creating their own browser, they can more tightly integrate their web applications with the browser.  

Speed

The first thing I noticed when trying out Google Chrome was the speed.  It felt very fast to me so I ran some simple speed tests trying to render amazon.com using the latest Firefox and Safari.  Firefox and Safari were very similar taking slightly less than 5 seconds.  Chrome did the same site in less than 3 seconds.  There’s no doubt it is a fast browser.  Google claims it has the fastest javascript engine which may be the reason it loads faster than the other browsers.

Bookmarks?

Chrome tries to simplify their browser.  The end result is the default has no visible bookmarks, menus, or even a button to add bookmarks.  Type something in the address bar like “firef” and it will list the Firefox site that you can arrow down and select.  It does this even if you’ve never been there before so the browser has some intelligence about where you might be trying to go.  It is as if Google is saying bookmarks aren’t necessary.  Another feature saying you don’t need bookmarks is the most visited page which is the default page shown when you load.  It displays the 9 pages you visit most with thumbnails of each displayed so you’re one simple click away from your most favorite sites.  You can add a bookmarks toolbar but there is no menu of any kind.

Mac? Linux?

I expected Chrome to be lame and pointless since there are already several good browsers out there.  But its speed has impressed me and makes me want to see more.  Unfortunately, they have not released Chrome on Mac or Linux yet.  I’m sure they eventually will but it could be a while.

Endgame

Google recently extended their deal with Mozilla, makers of Firefox, until 2011.  Google pays Firefox to have google.com be the default search.  But what will happen then when Google no longer needs Firefox to point to their search?

Mosso Cloud Computing

Mosso is a very ambitious web hosting solution designed to be infinitely scalable. It accomplishes this by clustering together as many servers as they need to handle their load.  For just $100/month, you get 50GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth for as many sites as you want.  You can use some of the most popular web development technologies such as PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, .NET, ASP, MySQL, and MS SQL 2005.  Because this is a clustered environment, you lose a few of the pleasantries that a dedicated server gives you such as shell access and root access to the server allowing you to run any processes.  On the other hand, you gain scalability and you don’t have to worry about managing your server.  If Mosso goes down, everyone notices so they address it as soon as possible.  The biggest problem is that it does seem to go down.

Mosso appears to be targeting less mission critical websites such as blogs that can afford to have a little downtime every now and then.  It is slower as far as web pages loading than using a dedicated server but on the other hand, if you grow in visitors, the speed will be the same whereas on a dedicated server, with increased visitors, your server may become overwhelmed.  For non-essential websites, Mosso appears to be a very nice hosting choice.

The most impressive aspect of Mosso is all the technologies they try to support.  Google has a very similar service called Google App Engine.  It only supports python though so it is very limited.  It can’t even support SSL certificates like Mosso can.  Amazon also has a cloud solution called EC2 but it is really only for tech experts.  It does not scale automatically by default like Mosso.  Instead, you have to turn on more servers as you need them.  You can program your Amazon servers to do this themselves but that’s part of why this is expert only.

It looks like we’re headed towards more scalable hosting solutions for the future.  Managing your own dedicated server is both difficult and time consuming. Mosso needs to work on their reliability and uptime but I think they are a company to watch since they seem further ahead than others when it comes to cloud computing.