Follow these instructions.

Go to the Google Chrome Shortcut on your desktop or toolbar and right-click on it. Choose Properties. Look for the Target field.

Add this line:

- -pinned-tab-count=x

to the end of this string in Target. C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe so it looks exactly like this:

C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe – -pinned-tab-count=x

Now all you have to do is change the X to represent the number of tabs that you want to make permanent on the chrome browser and it will look like this every time you open your browser:

Simple as that!

Thanks to Addictive Tips for that info. Was exactly what I was looking for!

Here’s what I’m talking about.  The new app for Google Goggles.  Take a photo and get the details.

Whats your thoughts on this technology and its future?

Property prices and house values are one such indicator, and when combined with other metrics, such as unemployment – used to make important decisions. However, one of the primary problems, and challenges facing economists, is the speed at which data is received. Often, the data is out of date by the time it gets into the hands of the people that matter.

Web Development in Property

Thankfully, the web’s is advancing at a speed of knots, bring information delivery ever closer to real time, and products such as Twitter and Facebook, whilst used primarily as a social tool now, are undoubtedly laying the ground work for other real time streams of information.  In addition to their technology, Google have also recently changed internal architecture at the Googleplex, with their ‘Caffeine‘ technology enabling a must faster indexing of the web.

One of their more interesting products that we have a lot of fun playing around with internally, is Google Insight’s for search. This tool allows users to see both past trends of searches that happened previously on Google, and it also offers an analysis of future potential trends. Think of it like a stock market for searches. If there is a peak in the results, for example for searches such as the Winter Olympics, you can pretty much pinpoint an event. i.e The Winter Olympics in Canada happened around February.

Applying this logic to the property market provides pretty interesting results, for example – if we want to drill down into specific searches that happened in particularly countries, we may be able to identify if searches within the property sector are on the up, or still on the way down. Take a look at some of these searches and the associated results.

The following is a graph showing the trend for ‘searches in Northern Ireland’, for property, over the past number of years. It pretty much reflects what happened in the property market – with a serious lack of confidence, the second half of 2007, and after September the 11th. It also shows a gradual increase in volume of searches, indicating consumer confidence if nothing else. Granted, it is no-where near what it was, but a positive incline none the less.

Searches for Property in Northern Ireland.

Another tell tale indicator of the market, would be the number of sale searches, verses rentals across Google. The graph shows a gradual increase in rentals, although sales searches are still greater in number. Searches for ‘house prices’ are indicated by the red line on the graph, and follow closely the pattern for sale searches.

The jobs market should also indicate the general state of the economy. Searches for “belfast jobs” – one of the highest searched terms on the web should reflect the current state of unemployment in the city. According to Google, we are pretty much hitting our peak right about now, and there’s still a number of people looking for work.

Searches for “Belfast jobs”

This is obviously not an exact science, and the tool suffers from the same issues mentioned with house prices- the data is still out of data, but as Google continue to develop this tool, improve the predictive algorithm (perhaps even using some of the data from their finance product) – and integrate it further with the real time web, it will most certainly become an important tool for predicting market swings. Combine that with live data from government departments (supplied direct to Google via a feed?) – with data from products such as Google checkout (number of purchases over time with average price of purchase), with existing organic and PPC data– and Google could have a pretty interesting tool for predicting the economy.

About PropertyPal

Today’s guest blog comes from Paul Anthony, who works as Internet Marketing Manager for Northern Ireland’s largest property website, PropertyPal.com. His role within the company includes managing all search engine optimisation, search engine marketing and social media activity.

PropertyPal.com is Northern Ireland’s number 1 property website, displaying details of more homes for sale and rent than any other website. It has around 95% of all properties for sale and rent, and at any time stocks over 40,000 properties to buy or rent. Including at time of writing approximately 5,000 houses for sale in Belfast, and 1,770 houses for rent in Belfast
It is independently owned and has more properties to rent in Belfast than any other Northern Ireland website since January 2010.
What do you think?  Let us know in the comments.

The first obvious change is the inclusion of local business analytics reporting showing impressions and actions taken on your local listing and a list of the words used to reach it.  The second is the addition of a “coupon” system that can be used as an advertising incentive offering on your products or services. Its also a distinct possibility that I just haven’t logged into the business enter for so long that I never noticed the stats, but regardless I thought it was worth mentioning.^^

Check out the screenies below.  At the moment I’m still trying to figure out how this relates to Google Analytics.

Google Local Business Center Analytic and Reporting

Google Local Business Center Coupons

If you have a google profile you can login and set up your local business listing, it wont take long, add its location and details to google maps and your off.

But in terms of business, Im wondering how they will recieve it as just another tool to learn rather than understanding the advantages of the application.

Then again maybe we are giving Google to much, we see what happens when Gmail goes down, what would happen if Google wave went down…never mind all the other information they will have access to.

Basically it adds in a panel to the side of the browser and allows you to do some pretty cool features regarding commenting on a post, article or even a specific piece of text or information.

All of the comments are aligned with your gmail account so its all “networked” back to your google profile, so thats a nice feature as well, but Im beginning to wonder if the good will be out weighed by the bad at some point.

Heres what has occured to me as being somewhat negative and is worrying me a little, though it is early days:

1. The sideWiki allows comments to be made on any page in the site on any piece of information but it DOES not notify the site owner that a comment has been made, so it will prove to be impossible to reply to sidewiki comments on larger sites.

2. Community is diluted in the site itself as the option to comment directly on the post has basically been liquidated.  I can effectively comment on any page anywhere.

3. I cannot moderate the comments, so spam is already a worry, but also, the opportunites for untrue or even slanderous comments is wide open and must be a serious worry for businesses. (I dont worry about arguements, love them actually but its difficult to enjoy one if I dont know it exists –> see point 1).

4. SEO wise, I really cant see what effect this will or would have on a site directly and how open the whole thing is to manipulation.  Will play a little more on the weekend with it and see what conclusions I can draw.

Anyone else got anything to add?

(I wonder how many of you smart alec’s will add your comments to the sidewiki instead of the comments on this post…  :P)

Why is it important to address your WordPress load time?

Don’t underestimate load times on a site or blog, especially your own. Just to make the point, lets illustrate.

If you click this image below:

It opened a page with an image of your site that a first time visitor will experience for the first few seconds. If this stays the same for longer than 3 seconds, how does it make you feel.

• Is it worth waiting on? (impatient)
• Is it actually loading? (uncertainty)
• LOAD DAMMIT! (frustration)

Not the best way to introduce someone to your site is it?

The importance of your blogs load time

While you may look at your blog everyday, its easy to become complacent about your blog load time especially if its cached on your computer after the first visit making it appear  to load faster than it actually does, but that’s only for you.

Lets put it into reality here to show how important load time is. Have a read at this:

According to research if your blog takes more than 3 seconds to load you are losing around 40% of your visitors.

That rate goes to 90% if it takes more than 8 seconds to load.

rumbling – Improve load time of your blog

A 40% loss of traffic is bad, a 90% loss is ridiculous!

For Google an increase in page load time from 0.4 second to 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. For Amazon every 100 ms increase in load times decreased sales with 1%.

Gabriel Svennerberg

What a fickle bunch we are!

Fortunately, with a little bit of graft, a few excellent wordpress plugins and some handy applications and extensions, addressing your blogs loading time shouldn’t be a big issue and can be addressed quite simply IF you are able to code.  There are a few plugins that are helpful, but they can only do so much unfortunately.

Fist of, check out the post 40 essential tips for wordpress blogs – Joost De Valk and the first section:

Making your WordPress Blog FAST

and

Maintaining your WordPress Blog

Done that?  Good.

Now here are a few other handy tools and firefox plugins and google apps you can use to go a little deeper and get that blog load time even lower.

**Before we start I would suggest you keep a note of this page address as this process requires you to restart your browser a few times to complete installations. Wouldn’t want you getting lost half way through would we!**

If you want the short version of this and don’t need to follow all the info and instructions  below I thought it would be a good idea to do an overview for those folks who like things in a convenient short list:

• Downlod install Firefox
• Install Firebug
• Install YSlow
• Install Google Page Speed
• Open your site
• Activate FireBug
• Along the FireBug options bar choose the extension and run
• Digest the data and address the errors
  

Now for more details.

Page Load time extensions guide

The first thing you will need is to Download and install Firefox to use these apps.

Once your done, you will need this handy plugin for the browser called FireBug (an essential tool for any designer or developer anyway). Once its installed you will be able to activate the extension by clicking the little bug icon in the bottom right of your browser screen while you have your website open.

When you open the extension you will end up with a screen like this:

Click the image to enlarge

FireBug alone is a great plugin for editing CSS code but its the next two extensions that address the page load time.

YSlow – blog load time analysis

Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web site.

Install the extension YSlow. This extension focuses on Yahoos criteria for page load times and will report back on errors and areas to be addressed on your blog.

Once you have it installed you will see the icon for the extension beside the FireBug icon in your browser window.

Open your site and while viewing hit the YSlow icon to be presented with this:

Run the test on your blog to begin the analysis and get a report on items that need to be addressed. Each area is graded from A to F, A being perfect and F being bloody terrible. All the results can be filtered by:

• CONTENT (* Number of errors detected)
• CSS (*)
• IMAGES (*)
• JAVASCRIPT (*)
• SERVER (*)

As you click through each section it will display a list of problems and a short description of  what the error and how to resolve it.  More details are available to help you understand the error and address it directly.

At this stage your own your own im afraid as each site will be completely unique in the fixes that it may require.

*Special thanks to Ian Miller for pointing this extension out to me.

Google Page Speed

Googles open source code for best practice web page performance

Never ones to miss a trick Google, of course,  also have a FireFox extension available to evaluate your page performance and offer analysis and suggestions on errors to be addressed. Just like YSlow, the extension requires FireBug to be installed in order to work, so since we have covered that lets go straight to the download page and install it.

Install the Google Page Speed extension.

Once thats complete, open your blog or site and activate Firebug:

You will be presented with something like this. Click on the highlighted otpion, Page Speed:

Click on the image to enlarge

You will be presented with this, just hit the button to begin the analysis:

And low and behold your presented with a report and details of all the errors that need to be addressed on your page to make it load faster evaluate the page speed. The interface is easy to understand and review and clicking on the titles will open a page with explanations and definitions to the error with recommendations on how to address them.

Clicking the “+” icon opens a list of all the pages affected by the error or causing it.

Again, your basically on your own here as each and every page will be unique in the issues that need to be addressed.

Addressing load time issues

All these options may seem a little overwhelming at first, but take you time and address the points you can do quickly and easily to begin with. Doing this should make a noticeable difference on your page load time immediately.

Some of the errors will simply boggle your mind and really I would be surprised if there’s any page out there without errors or points that could be optimised. Try running it on your Google search page to see what I mean, it even has errors and warnings.

The point it that all this is about optimising the page, not making it 100% completely perfect. Its about doing the best you can to make the time to load as little as it can be and in combination with the plugins on the other post mentioned above it should help get that load time down to a more than acceptable level for your visitors.

Best of luck all, and as per usual, I would love any comments or feedback, suggestions or points to this post, so don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything I have missed or could expand upon.

Its an hour and 20 minutes long but I think its worth checking out. If you would prefer to read about its features then check out this Google Wave: A complete Guide from Ben Parr over at Mashable for a more indepth preview and understanidng of the features.

We’re changing! Check out our new look!

And its all yours.

Lets define a keyword.

A keyword or more commonly a key phrase is a particular set of words a searcher will type into a search engine to find a specific result. While referred to as a keyword in general it is generally accepted that this is actually more than one word.  For more detail on keywords and the process behind choosing them you can see my other post Keyword targeting for Businesses explained.

Understanding keywords

Keywords are not generally set in stone, they are not permanent and they can be affected by a variety of external elements.Trends and trending circumstances can serve to create new keyword combinations, things such as breaking news, a new development or a political crisis for example.

Time is also a major factor in marketing to a keyword, for example, do more searches occur for Golf in the Spring and Summer than the winter months.  All these aspects are critical in adapting to current market gaps and its demand, all generated by searches from individuals.

Taking it a step further even a mood can affect a keyword.  Think about the economic crisis, downturns in the market and the credit crunch, these search terms where basically non existent 3 years ago but today they are being dictated by the mood of the economy and the people, a completely new set of important terms.

Business and the keywords they need

In the business world you will have heard the term “keyword” brandied about quite a bit when it comes to marketing and specifically when it comes to search engine rankings and marketing. But do you really understand the significance of a keyword and more importantly does the person who has broached the subject understand what a keyword is?  Many can talk about it with convincing authority but in  fact they fail to take into account various other factors.

Many of the businesses I speak to will have an idea of what keyword they want to be number 1 for when they are marketing a website or service. It inevitably turns out that this is not where they should be aiming for however after some research and analysis is performed and on occasion some quite surprising results can be produced.

Taking into account the points above, small variations in even the simplest of terms can have massive changes in results, for example if you happen to be searching for a job the tendency would be to assume that searchers will type something like jobs in New York. Analysis could show that simply changing the word jobs to work or employment can have incredible differences in returns and traffic but also competition. Moving forward in keyword marketing without proper research is like sending a blind man into a forest and asking him to find the only apple tree.

Preparing your keyword research

There are a variety of methods to establish the correct keywords any individual or business should be targeting and these are serviced on three different levels by:

• Keyword research tools
• Website analytics’s software
• Search Engines

Keyword research tools can include WordTracker (probably the most accurate) and Googles Keyword Tool to help display approximate searches by day, month and also the advertisers currently paying for top ranking privileges. These results are external reports showing the use of search engines by location from anywhere on the net.

Website Analytic tools, such as the free Google Analyitics can report back on what keywords are generating traffic to your site currently and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of this can provide valuable data in conjunction to an external tool in regards making decisions and creating strategies for meeting ranking targets.

Finally there are the search engines themselves and performing a normal search will allow you to see the competition for your industry, and this has only recently become more complicated. If you do a search on google you should also be aware these important points:

• The results in google.es will be different than the results for google.com
• The results for a search FROM the UK in google.com will not necessarily return the same results for a search performed in San Francisco on google.com even if the search term is exactly the same
• The implementation of personalised search results (when you are logged into your gmail account) can cause a totally different set of results if the results have been manipulated by the user previously.

Thus as you can see the selection of specific keywords and phrases is far from an exact science.

Keywords searches and language

This speaks for itself really. A search for job in English will obviously be a search for trabajo in Spanish but lets not dwell on multi lingual search criteria. Lets focus instead on keyword formation.

To illustrate, an English person from the UK may search for “new employment opportunity” but an English speaking person in New York may search for “new opportunity in employment”. This single change in the structure of the keyphrase can also prove (although not always) to produce another completely different set of results!

The need for keyword analysis and research

As you can see the variations and intricate knowledge and awareness required to effectively meet keyword requirements is extreme and is only one small part of the overall SEO strategy. In some cases people have even said to me”why bother if its impossible to target?”.

The point is that its not impossible to target keywords, its just damn difficult. After all would you prefer to place your business in a totally useless position on an assumption or would you prefer to have an educated idea of where you could and should be, no matter the inaccuracies involved?

You decide.