Jenn Mears Web Design

Google Hack! Copying a webmail signature into a gmail message

To be honest, there’s a real workaround out there that you can install with the Greasemonkey Firefox extension, but this is a quick trick if you are on the go, or don’t have the time to deal with the install just yet. I found this down and dirty method when I wanted to reply to a client’s email with some links to show them some examples of social networking in action.

Step 1: In your Webmail account, go to your Settings folder and select Compose. Then,create your webmail signature with interactive links in the compose window and save the changes.

Tip: Make those links as user-friendly as possible. Luckily my Doteasy webmail GUI lets me include tooltips in a link. That way people will have some idea of what they are going to see when they click the link.
Step 2: Go to your webmail mailbox and send a message to your Gmail account with that new signature.
Step 3: Go to your Gmail account and open up the message you just sent and give it a test drive.
Step 4: Now you can keep that message handy and copy and paste your signature from there when you want to include it in a Gmail message. When you want to include that signature, simply view that message with your signature, highlight the signature and then copy and paste it into the new message.
Please Note: This only works if you launch Gmail in its own window. (top left corner of inbox window;”Launch Full Gmail”)
Easy!

Google’s mysteries revealed

This is an article I found today on Lorelle’s amazing Wordpress blog. It’s the perfect answer to that ever-popular question, “How do I get my site to rank high in Google?” I wish there was a “silver bullet answer” to this question too, but it’s a not so much a magic formula as it is a carefully planned campaign.
Lorelle does a great job of explaining the various factors, but in a nutshell, Google bases it’s page ranking system on a combination of the following factors:

Links: Quality over quantity. Don’t go for those “pay for us to link to you” services. Google prefers a few links to your site on well established web sites rather than a ton of links on spam sites.

Domain Age: Spam sites tend to be fly-by-night operations and the longer your site has been around, the better. However, just letting your site sit there on the server isn’t enough. Google also notices the freshness of your site’s content.

Click Through Rate: Google checks on how people find your site and how they get there, whether via a search engine or from a bookmarking site.

Trends, fads and seasons: Keywords have trends too. So you can probably stop typing in “Paris Hilton Video” into your meta-tags now. ;^}

Posting Frequency: Like Alex the Lion says in Madagascar “You know, keep it fresh!”. The more you reward your loyal visitors with useful new information, the more they will visit and recommend your site via incoming links.

Keywords: There are a few areas where it’s really important to place the words that you think people will use to search for your site. Titles, as in the title that shows up at the top of your browser when you view a page, links, headings and tags.

Traffic: How heavily your site is visited, which pages people go to and how long they spend clicking around.

Code: It’s important to keep your site’s code clean and easy to scan through. Hiding your text in a fancy animation or burying important info under tons of scripting makes the engine work harder. I tend to think of code as being like motor oil, the cleaner it is, the smoother your site runs.

Getting Photos into your Google Map

Since I’m currently working on 3 different sites that require working with Google’s map feature, I’ve had a chance to find a few quirks in their map interface. Continue Reading…