Canadian Web Hosting Blog and News

Paid Google Local Business

kevin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:52:47 +0000

For only $25/mo, you can now stand out from the crowd with a yellow price tag that shows up on the map as well as the listing. This is unfortunately not available in Canada at the moment. It is currently available for all US states on standard and mobile browsers. From the screenshot below, [...]

Bing Social – Hot Trends from Facebook and Twitter Feeds

kevin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:34:03 +0000

Instead of focusing every week on Google, I decided to shift it to another search engine by Microsoft called Bing! In June, Microsoft Bing released Bing Social. It's a new section that displays the hottest trends from Facebook and Twitter. Bing uses these two resources to find out what links people are sharing, then aggregates that content and [...]

Block Adult Content with Free Family Internet Filter

kevin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:36:12 +0000

I talked about the advantages of using a third party dns provider, such as OpenDNS back in December. Last week, they released a new free service targeted at families. Unlike their other free basic service which allows users to block content such as adult themes, pornography, proxies, and gambling, this new FamilyShield had been designed [...]

Google Personalized Search – How to turn off when you are signed out?

kevin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:36:39 +0000

Even though I am logged out of Google personalized search, my search results on my laptop are different from those on my desktop computer. I want the ability to see results that the vast majority of users are seeing regardless of location. Google personalized search is definitely the future of search but it can [...]

Google First Webinar – Place Pages

kevin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:02:04 +0000

In April, Google changed "Google Local Business Center" to "Google Places". The reason behind this change is to better connect Google Place Pages with the place where local business information is claimed, entered and enhanced. There are some additional changes: Enhanced Listings ($25/month) - now known as tags Business Photos - free interior photography of the business Customized [...]

Microsoft Releases Office Web App Suite

kevin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:06:42 +0000

Microsoft has released Office Web App Suite http://office.live.com in four countries, Canada, USA, UK and Ireland. Similar to its desktop version (but limited in features), users can now use a web browser to start viewing, editing, and sharing Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and One Note documents. All the documents are saved in the cloud [...]

Google Algorithm Change Affects Long Tail Keywords

kevin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 06:10:24 +0000

During the first week of May, Google's new look was released. This included a minor change to their homepage Google logo plus new links on the left menu bar on the SERPs (search engine results page). Also, during this time, a lot of webmasters saw a drop in Google traffic for long tail keywords. [...]

Google Reveals Page Speed Facts

kevin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:07:01 +0000

As to my earlier blog post that Google now uses page speed as one criteria for ranking websites, here's a little more research from them. A site that is half a second slower can reduce traffic by 0.2 - 0.6% and can get worse the longer the delay is in effect. Even if [...]

6 Steps To Optimizing Wordpress Blog For Higher Search Rankings

kevin — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:59:39 +0000

Wordpress is one of the most popular open source blogging software on the internet. However, there are some ways to change the settings or with the use of plugins, you can gain higher visibility in search rankings. If you want to try out Wordpress, just login to cPanel and click Fantastico or Softaculous and [...]

Optimizing Your Ads with Google Adwords Sitelinks

kevin — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:10:09 +0000

Google recently introduced Google Sitelinks which enables the advertiser to add 4 additional links underneath the ad. You can choose any links that you feel are relevant to your searchers. Unfortunately, this is not enabled for all advertisers. According to Google: Currently, the option to set up Ad Sitelinks will only appear for advertisers [...]