Netvibes Wasabi RSS Reader:
The Best Feed Reader?

It all started when I became aware of the new Netvibes Wasabi edition. This version was released last fall (here and here).

Wasabi provides an alternate format for viewing feeds within Netvibes. The new Wasabi reader is more in the style of Google Reader as compared to the ’start page’ (or ‘widget’) style Netvibes reader I’ve been using for some years. You can switch back and forth between the ‘widget view’ and the ‘reader view’ with a click of a button.

While my initial reaction to Wasabi was very positive, I had some problems with my feeds. Thus began a month long re-look at all the major Windows RSS readers to see if there was something better.

At the same time I starting looking into the top feed readers, I also cleaned up and expanded my custom feeds. These include feeds generated by Yahoo Pipes, Google Alerts, Google News, and Twitter Search. Turns out these custom feeds are fairly problematic for many feed readers and were the stumbling block that got me looking elsewhere beyond Wasabi.

Here’s a recap of what I found about the best RSS readers for Windows.

The Most Popular Windows Feed Readers

There are quite a few Windows feed readers available, but the main options I looked into were:

• Netvibes – Wasabi edition
• Google Reader
• Bloglines – beta edition
• FeedDemon (by Newsgator)

There are some other readers out there, but none of these seemed compelling enough to try. A few others I glanced at included: FeedReader3, RSSOwl, and BlogBridge. All of these are Windows desktop readers, but browser-based readers seem the way to go.

Windows RSS Readers Comparison

So with the top 4 feed readers, I did a deep dive review of their various features. I installed and configured each of them with my 100 or so feeds. I used an OPML import to get things going and then spent a fair amount of time with each reader customizing the layout and setup. Among other things, I worked on getting the individual feeds and feed groups organized in a particular (non-alphabetic) order that I like. I also spent a fair amount of time using each reader, though Netvibes and Google Reader got the most playing time.

The main things to look for in a feed reader are: feed handling and readability. In addition there are some secondary features worth looking at, such as sharing, saving, tagging, and feed importing/exporting.

Comparison of Windows RSS Readers

Features	Netvibes Wasabi	Google Reader	Bloglines Beta	FeedDemon
Cost	Free	Free	Free	Free
Type	Browser	Browser	Browser	Desktop
Feed Handling
Normal feeds
Yahoo Pipes feeds
Google Alerts / News feeds
Twitter feeds
Readability
Layout / readibility	most readable, good use of color, lines	simple, functional design, least readable for me	nice design touches, 2nd most readable	could be good – but the chiclet count is off the charts
Viewing options	3 – list, expanded, mosaic	2 – list, expanded	3 – list, expanded, hybrid	3 – list, summary, expanded
Organizing feeds	any order (Ajax)	any order (Ajax)	fixed order, alpha only	fixed order, alpha only
Themes / skins	many skins, but can’t change feed/item colors	none	none	1 skin, but nice options to change feed/item colors
Other Features
Sharing / Saving / Tagging	email, social sites (FB, Twitter), save (no tagging)	email, save, tag (no social sites)	email, save (no social sites, no tagging)	email, save, tag (no social sites)
OPML Import / Export	/	/	/	/
Pros & Cons
Pros	most readable / best design by far handles most feeds cleanly / fast ‘widgets view’ option with huge library of widgets	handles any type of feed fast feed updating rock solid, reliable can be used to feed a lot of smartphone mobile RSS readers	2nd most readable layout 3-pane viewing option is nice	nice transitions between feeds some nice readibility touches
Cons	slow updating of ‘non-standard’ feeds (e.g. Pipes) sometimes requires page refresh to update feeds hot links to original posts too small, bad position still a work in progress	overly functional hard to read	worst feed handling – even a lot of ‘normal’ feeds didn’t work or updated very, very slowly no ‘refresh’ button to update feeds can’t reorder feeds no OPML export	can’t reorder feeds way too many chiclets & icons not browser based – items open inside FeedDemon ‘browser’ (not good) or in your regular browser

What’s the Best RSS Reader for Windows?

After way too many hours fiddling around with this, I think the answer is ‘none’ – in the sense that not one of the 4 readers did all the key things you’d like it to do. Two of the readers – Netvibes Wasabi and Google Reader – are clearly way ahead of the pack. They win top honors, for sure. Which one of these two is best for you depends on your specific needs.

Netvibes Wasabi is the most readable, user friendly feed reader of the bunch – by far. It is uses colors and lines, font treatments, skins, etc. to make reading feeds a (comparative) pleasure. On the downside, Wasabi feed handling isn’t rock solid. Wasabi does a decent job with most feeds most of the time, but now and then it can be slow to update mainstream feeds (like Techcrunch last week). Plus, it definitely struggles with some of my custom feeds, especially feeds off Yahoo Pipes. I’ve been in touch with their tech guys and I know this is a recognized problem that they are working on. If/when Netvibes delivers bullet proof feed handling, Wasabi will be the top reader for most everyone. In the meantime, I’d recommend Wasabi as the best feed reader for anyone who mostly or exclusively uses ‘normal’ feeds.

Google Reader shares the top honors with Wasabi – and it is the most popular reader in terms of numbers of users. Google Reader delivers bullet proof feed handling – but the big issue I have with it is readibility. Some folks may prefer the stark layout, but I find it very tough to pour through a lot of content on Google Reader. The layout is either over-dense (‘list’ view) or it is not dense enough (‘expanded’ view). The overly functional design just doesn’t offer up enough in terms of readability features. Beyond readability and feed handling, Google Reader also has another huge thing going for it: many mobile RSS reader apps (e.g., Newsgator’s NetNewsWire for iPhone/iPod Touch and most Android RSS readers) use Google Reader as a launching point. They pull feeds off Google Reader and repackage them for delivery onto your smartphone.

FeedDemon is the next best RSS reader. It is outstanding when it comes to handling feeds. From my testing, it appeared to deliver feeds as well as Google Reader. But on the downside, the fact that it is a separate program is a real drag. FeedDemon has a sort of built in ‘browser’ to view the original post on their live sites, but the browser isn’t that great, so you end up having to switch back and forth between your browser and FeedDemon. That’s no good. In terms of readability, FeedDemon is in the middle of the pack – some good features, some not so good.

Bloglines Beta, while it has a nice pretty nice design – the 3-pane viewing layout seems promising – so I rate it as the second best in terms of readability. But the killer is that Bloglines just doesn’t handle feeds that well. It wouldn’t display any of my custom feeds at all – Pipes, Google Alerts, Twitter, etc. Worse, it isn’t even able to deliver a lot of normal feeds like the Google Blog or this blog in a timely fashion (e.g., when I posted this article, the other readers had the feed item within <2 minutes - Bloglines? not so much). I'm not sure how this could be, but adios Bloglines.

Bottom line

Netvibes Wasabi and Google Reader are the top two Windows RSS readers, for sure. However, since neither is the perfect complete package, you may find that you need to maintain them both — especially if you are a heavy consumer of RSS fees. Netvibes Wasabi gives you the polished, user friendly readability features you want while pouring through piles and piles feeds day after day. But the rocky Netvibes feed handling means you want Google Reader at hand in case there’s a glitch.

As well, you may have to have Google Reader around to power the mobile RSS reader you use on your smartphone. If you are on an Android or iPhone, it’s pretty likely that your mobile reader is going to pull your feeds off Google Reader. Blackberry not so much.

Drupal Related Content Modules

I came to use these two after trying out a whole bunch of Drupal related content modules. Check here for a good review of the related content choices – there are a lot of them. And here’s another useful, but less comprehensive review of Drupal related content modules. I suspect neither list is actually completely complete.

Most of these modules work off taxonomy terms in various ways. Some are more widely used than others and/or better supported. Interestingly, none seems to have really gained traction as the ‘go to’ module for related content.

I went with Similar Entries because it develops matches off the title and the body content vs. just taxonomy terms. In general, this seems like a good idea to me. As well, at the time I wasn’t using tagging on my sites, so Similar Entries was one of the few modules that would work at all. Now I do use taxonomy, but I’m not a prolific tagger, so I still like the idea of matching off titles and body content.

The module works pretty easily out of the box. It has relatively few settings, but has enough to get the job done well. Configuration involves activating a Similar Entries block somewhere on your page – then you check off several configuration options. These are related to teasers, to search engine handling, to the number of matches to display, and to the types of nodes used in generating matches (you can exclude some types).

I used this latter option – type of nodes to use in matches – to help solve a problem I was having with the module: from time to time, it would offer  up matches like my privacy policy or terms of use pages. This was absurd, but it was quick work to fix this by defining a new content type and reassigning these types of pages to that new type (using the Nodetype module). Then I excluded that node type from the matching process and, viola, worked beautifully.

The most complicated configuration option has to be with how (if at all) you want Similar Entries to factor in taxonomy tags. If you choose one of the tag-dependent options, the module will determine best matches by scanning title / body content within a relevant set of tags.

Node Recommendations is a newer module and has very few users, but it is very powerful and flexible. At the same time, it is considerably more complicated and requires more energy to implement — it sufficiently complicated that I’m still not sure I’ve got it configured correctly.

Since I operate a lot of small sites, added configuration complexity effort is not a good thing — especially since these options are spread out over multiple screens in different admin locations. It seems like a lot of presence for a relatively simple function.

Node Recommendation module supports both automated matching and manual selection of related pages. The automated matching is done entirely off tags (which doesn’t work so great on my older sites which aren’t fully tagged — or even on my newer sites since I’m somewhat skimpy with tags).

Node Recommendation also allows highly customized page-by-page matching. For each node, it allows you to override the default matching parameters and/or to hand pick individual ‘related content’ matches. This feature seemed like an awfully good idea when I had only a few sites and was obsessed about the quality of matches for each and every page, but became wildly impractical as I launched more sites. I realized I just gotta live with some imperfection.

Neither of the modules generates match results for pages generated by the Views module. Both modules work well on pages with a lot of CCK content – though Node Recommendation probably gets the edge here because Similar Entries doesn’t have as much body content to work with.

At the end of the day, the choice is clear: Similar Entries is going to be my default related content module for my Drupal sites. It generates the best match results over the widest variety of conditions. It is also much easier to administer. Node Recommendations is just a couple notches too complicated – though I will miss the option to do manual selection

Tray icons missing or grayed out

In my case, the missing icons are usually one or all of the volume icon, the network icon, or the power icon. The clock icon always shows up for some reason.

When I try to re-enable them, they are often grayed out and I cannot check the boxes. Sometimes, they aren’t gray.

After some googling, I found a solution to this missing tray icons problem – though apparently not a permanent one.

This page provides a recap of Microsoft’s official method for fixing the problem. It involves going into your registry keys, deleting the ‘iconstreams’ keys, and then restarting explorer.exe (which runs the taskbar / start menu). The fix works for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

I tried this method a couple of weeks ago – and it worked! — for a while. Unfortunately, here we are a couple weeks later and my icons are graying out one by one. Now back to where I started.

I guess what is happening is that the registry keys are getting corrupted over time.

So that means I need a repeatable way to fix this problem – ideally one that doesn’t require a system reboot as the Diurnal / Samuel’s blog methods do. System reboots just take too much time.

My new, improved methodology is as follows: download and use Microsoft’s ‘Fix it’ program which repairs the missing tray icons problem. You can download this little program off Microsoft Windows 7 missing tray icon help page.

I have saved this mini-program to my desktop and now can run it anytime I start seeing grayed out tray icons.

This method has several advantages:

1. I don’t have to mess around with registry keys.

2. It creates a ‘restore point’ during the repair procedure. This adds a measure of safety.

3. It doesn’t require a full system reboot.

4. It involves fewer steps.

One thing I have noticed is that after running the Fix it program is that the icons are not always re-enabled. In such case, I have to take a couple of extra steps:

1. Stop and restart explorer.exe as shown in step #8 of Microsoft’s manual repair process as follows:

8. Restart the Explorer.exe process. To do these, follow these steps:

1. Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.
2. On the Processes tab in Task Manager, click the explorer.exe process, and then click End Process two times.
3. On the File menu, click New Tasks (Run), type explorer, and then click OK.

2. Recheck the missing tray icons: right click on taskbar / menu bar, choose ‘properties’, choose ‘notification area’ tab, recheck missing system icons, click ‘ok’.

For me, I’ve found this makes things right again – and is as close to a permanent solution as I’ve found.

Windows Vista UAC Takes a Dive!

Yesterday, I disabled User Account Control (UAC) in Vista for good. Could there be a more invasive, yet ultimately useless program?

After 13 frustrating months using UAC, I still have no idea what it is supposed to be protecting me from — whatever it is, it has never, ever happened.

As part of my recent efforts to increase productivity and streamline workflows, I realized it was time for a change yesterday when, for the nth time, I tried to figure out what UAC is supposed to do — and I couldn’t.

In my search for answers, I found only techie jibberish or vague explanations, such as this from Microsoft’s website:

User Account Control (UAC) is a feature in Windows that can help prevent unauthorized changes to your computer. UAC does this by asking you for permission or an administrator‌ password before performing actions that could potentially affect your computer’s operation or that change settings that affect other users. When you see a UAC message, read it carefully, and then make sure the name of the action or program that’s about to start is one that you intended to start.

Uh, huh. I suppose it sounds vaguely useful – until I realized that not once in the 13 months has it ever activated when I haven’t been explicitly trying to do something. Unlike my Norton Anti-virus program which is constantly (and more or less silently) picking off various threats that are invisible to me. UAC is constantly stopping me from doing things that I purposefully want to be doing. How is that helpful?

Even after trying to understand, I still don’t really quite know what the point is — or what some relevant ‘use cases’ might be. Is it to stop my cubemate from tinkering with my computer? Except I don’t have a cubemate. Is it supposed to prevent viruses that somehow get past Norton from doing more damage? Except that has never happened.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I soldiered onward with UAC for so long given how much time I’m on my computer — or how bogus UAC alerts I’ve clicked thru. I think I’d have ditched it much earlier if I hadn’t been using Norton Labs’ UAC tool. That program has probably cut my warnings by 90%, but even the remaining 10% is too many.

So when I paused and realized that it had never, ever stopped anything I hadn’t wanted done, I realized it was time to say…

Bye, bye!!

Click here if you want to turn off UAC, too.

Google Chrome launches extensions

I’ve been using the Chrome Developer version for many months – it was the only version that worked well with my dual monitor setup.

In December, Google launched an apps store for Chrome – except that they call apps ‘extensions’. I’ve been using these extensions for several weeks and LOVE them! but they haven’t been available in the general release versions of Chrome.

Today, Google unveiled a new general release version of Chrome – now extensions are available to everyone. You should definitely try them out. Quite fantastic stuff!

My favorites are:

• xmarks - manage bookmarks across browsers and/or computers located anywhere
• lastpass - manage passwords and login info across browsers and/or computers
• evernote - the official extension for the evernote note taking / web clipping service that is all the rage (and deservedly so)
• delicious - beautifully designed widget for adding bookmarks to your Delicious account. cleaner and better than the Firefox version.
• netvibes - auto-detects RSS feeds in Chrome and provides one-click button to add it to your Netvibes RSS reader (still only available for developer version, i think).

These are essential in my book.

I’m also trying out the aviary, picnik and webpage screenshot extensions for taking screenshots. They all seem to work fine, but not sure I am 100% sold on any of these yet and I may be sticking with jing, a  program I’ve been using screenshots for a while.

I have also been using one of the several Page Rank tools – Kuber Page Rankchecker. This seemed the simplest and best of the bunch. Some of the others seemed to be trying to do too much and I worried about slowing down my page loads while they collect all their data.

I haven’t been too happy with the RSS auto-detect extensions for Chrome. Unlike other browsers, RSS auto-detect isn’t built in, so you need an extension to handle that. The existing ones all seem geared to plugging the feed straight into your reader, especially your Google Reader (which I don’t use – I prefer Netvibes, especially since they launched their new Wasabi Reader which is fantastic). I’d like a Chrome RSS extension that simply does auto-detect and then shows you the actual feed url.

The Chrome Firebug extension isn’t where it needs to be – or at least it wasn’t a couple of weeks ago. The Firefox version wins hands down at this point and is largely why I continue to use Firefox very heavily. Hopefully, the Chrome version comes along and becomes a near clone of the FF version.

I also hugely, hugely like how all the Chrome extensions present in the exact same area in the browser frame – vs. Firefox where they can be located in any of at least 4 places in the browser frame. That’s very confusing and means you need to remember exactly what extensions are located where – and I’m not smart enough to remember stuff like that.

I do notice that with a pile of extensions running, Chrome doesn’t seem quite as light as it did before. I believe each extension opens up a new process on your computer, so now I’ve got a lot more Chrome processes running and consuming memory. That’s a potential issue that they maybe need to address – trimming Chrome memory consumption.

Links:

Find Chrome extensions

Download Chrome

Some other bits about this from ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch.

Comment tracking & aggregation

But how? The answer: Backtype, a free comments tracking service. Backtype describes itself as a “real-time, conversational search engine” because as a result of tracking people’s comments across the web, it also includes features that allow you to search web comments in a way that you can’t with Google. I don’t have too much interest in the searching function, so the value-added function for me is having Backtype track and catalog my comments on the web.

Backtype works by scouring the web, indexing all the comments people make on blog posts. It doesn’t spider every single blog, but covers all the major ones and lots of not so major ones, too. It also seems to index blogs of any size that reside on the major hosted blogging platforms – e.g., Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Posterous, etc. That’s why the comments on my tiny, tiny personal blog, John’s Bytes, are getting indexed.

Once you register and identify yourself, it keeps track of your comments on a personal webpage – here’s a link to my web comments. It does this on a continuously as it tirelessly scours the blogs. New comments are posted to your Backtype page on reasonably timely basis – usually within 24 hours, often much faster.

Backtype seems to identify your comments by tracking against the URL you enter when you leave a comment. It is not clear to me whether that domain name has to be unique to you or can be something that multiple people might use. In other words, using my own domains (like this one – www.WebBizGeek.com) works fine, but what if you worked at Fidelity or some other company and didn’t have your own URL? I’m not sure how that works. Perhaps by tracking against both a URL and your ID / username, it works out.

If you aren’t entering a URL when you make a comment (for instance, in many forums), then Backtype seems not to have a way to trace comments back to you. That means that a lot of comments I make – e.g., in the forums on drupal.org, openx.org – aren’t tracked. That’s sort of a disappointment, but perhaps they will eventually figure out how to track those, too.

Backtype is similar to another service called CoComment. Both are widely used. I’ve not tried CoComment, so can’t say which is better. Maybe I’ll give it a shot as some point just to see.

As an added bonus, today I was able to integrate my Backtype comment stream directly into my blog here: my Backtype comment stream. I did so using a Wordpress plugin called My Comments Elsewhere. Installation was quick and straightforward. The plugin supports both Backtype and CoComment. You need to have an account with one of the other since it relies on those services for the actual comment aggregation.

If you want to keep track of your comments, too, I recommend you give Backtype a try.

So long IE!

I do this reluctantly, however, because IE is still the dominant web browser on the planet – and since I build websites, I want my sites to work properly in it.

Until now, I have always tried to do some major tasks each day in IE as well as in Firefox and Chrome.  I thought that it was important to use all the major browsers regularly to stay up to the minute with how they worked.

But over time, I’ve used IE less and less because, for whatever reasons, it just seems to break an awful lot – plus it is slow and lacks the add-ons / plug-ins that have become so valuable in the other browsers.

Instead, I’ve used Chrome and Firefox more and more because they hardly ever have problems, they are both a lot, lot faster than IE, and their plug-in libraries add lots of great functionality. When, from time to time, those programs do have problems, they normally fix themselves with a quick shutdown and restart of the program.

With IE, stuff happens and I just can’t figure out what the problem is. Yesterday the deal was that something was wrong with how a web page was trying to use one of my plug-ins. I don’t actually know which one since the error message didn’t say and there was no obvious way to trace it. Usually the problem seems to relate to Flash, but who knows in this case.

Last week the problem was with my Yahoo mail account. For some reason (and for a long time), I get error messages when I manage my contacts. Since I just switched to using Yahoo as my primary contacts manager, this became a serious issue. I’ve contacted Yahoo and they say the problem is with IE – which it probably is, but I haven’t a clue what.

And for a long time – I think since I installed IE8 – I’ve experienced terribly long delays in opening up a new tab in IE. It can takes 20-30 seconds to open a new tab – during which time everything else in IE is frozen and inaccessible. No clue what causes this.

Anyway, time to reduce frustration and that means no more IE — well, that’s not really true. I will still need to use it from time to time to test that my sites still work in it.

This Microsoft forum page on IE8 slowness proved a good starting point and here’s what I did:

• Modified my ‘hosts’ file to remove website URLs for restricted sites. There was a huge list there – about 6,000 lines – generated by a program called Spybot. This page indicates that scanning this list can cause delays. I don’t even use this program anymore, so these are a relic from my previous computers. Note: I did not do the deletion via the method described, so I can’t attest to whether it works or not (it seems to for other people). I edited the file directly.
• Per this thread, I also removed a program that I was still using – SpywareBlaster. I was thinking to remove it anyway since Norton Internet Security 2009 seems to work so extremely well and maybe I’m doing overkill on the anti-spam stuff.
• Disabled all but a few ‘accelerators’. I had many running, almost none of which I had enabled myself. Removing them all was painless.
• I reset all all security settings to the original defaults per these directions from Microsoft (step #2).
• I disabled all but the most essential IE add-ons. As with accelerators, there were many that had accumulated and were probably unnecessary. I left in place ones. I left enabled Flash and Java and other ‘technical’ sounding add-ons, but disabled anything that sounded optional (like ‘research’ and ’sharepoint spreadsheet launcher’)
• Removed all search providers but Google (though I doubt this did much of anything, I figured it couldn’t hurt).
• I also chopped back the disk space for ‘temporary internet files’ as these can sometimes contribute to slowness. I went with 50Mb which is quite small, but you can increase later if need be. Get there via: internet options > general > browsing history > settings > disk space.

I closed down and restarted IE after each of these steps to make sure nothing broke in the process. I also cleared cache completely a few times.

Not sure how much each individual step helped, but all together they produce a pretty dramatic improvement. New tabs, which used to take literally 20-30 seconds to open, now open within a 5-8 seconds. Still not nearly as fast as Firefox or Chrome, but at least it doesn’t make me want to scream!

iYogi refund complaint

iYogi provides remote technical support to solve computer problems and whatnot. After comparing their services and prices to several other firms, I decided to give them a try. They seemed to have something that could be pretty useful.

I signed up in mid-January 2009 — but then closed the account within 2 hrs because they didn’t service 64-bit Vista machines (which they could have made clearer on their website).

I asked for a refund and received immediate confirmation email that they’d processed it. The email appeared official and definitive.

“Based on your request we have processed the refund for your subscription. This will reflect in your bank records/credit card statement within 7 business days, depending on your billing cycle.”

Silly me, I never checked my bank account. Only last week while doing year end financial tallies did I realize that no refund ever hit my account.

Spoke to them at great length on Dec 29 – routed thru about 3 people with each needing to hear the story in detail asking the same questions again and again and again. Was finally assured by a woman that they would call back within 24 hrs to confirm refund. Never heard from them.

On Jan 5, I spent about 2 hours on phone or on live chat in a series of calls trying to sort out. They seemed to have no record of the call from the prior week or much of anything else about my account.

In each of 3 calls, they spent long time gathering my info and then transferred me to Customer Service at which point the calls were immediately disconnected. This happened 3 times in a row which can’t be put down to operator error or telephone glitch. Then I tried their main 800# again and it either would not connect at all or would disconnect me immediately before speaking to anyone.

Then I tried doing via online chat. Guy initially said he could assist and seemed quite helpful, but then asked me repeatedly the same questions over and over even though the answers were already provided and were plainly visible in the chat stream. It was like talking to a drunk person – it was surreal. Eventually, he said I needed to call Customer Service. Fortunately, he provided a different direct number than previous (866-914-9049), so that seemed like progress.

Called that number and waited for many, many minutes for pick up. Went through the same routine with this new guy. Provided same acct info to him at least 3x. Then he went away for a while and came back saying he couldn’t find info and would need to call back within 1 hr.

He called back 20 mins later and said he could not reach anyone who could tell him what to do. He said he needed my physical address and asked me again all my acct info. He said he wasn’t sure if I would be getting a refund or in what amount it might be if they did, but that if ‘they’ decided to give one, it would need to be in form of a check mailed to me. He was not able to say when they would be able to confirm that I would receive a refund, but that possibly i should call back again the next day and ask or maybe someone would be calling me.

Nobody has called back the next day (today), so I called them late afternoon. After checking with HQ, acct rep told me that they had processed a check for the full amount due and that it had been mailed to my address – hallelujah! I guess the guy was able to make it happen overnight.

“You should receive within 3-4 business days” – it’s being mailed from India apparently.

So now we will wait to see what happens. I will be grateful if/when the check arrives, but regardless, this has been way, way too much work. I hope they use their new funding to improve their customer support systems.

UPDATE (7 Jan 10): I am pleased to report that today iYogi has wired the full amount of my refund into my bank account. Yeah!

Unexpectedly, I received 2 calls today from a very attentive Customer Service Manager who really knew what she was doing. On the first call, she collected my bank information and said she’d try to get a transfer done right away. On the second call, she confirmed the money had been wired and that if I had any problems, I should contact her directly.

She was very professional and apologized profusely for the difficulties I had had. It was a welcome and much appreciated change.

Java is a programming language used in browsers – like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Java plugs into these browsers and helps them to do things like display graphics, play games, run widgets, etc.

I wasn’t sure if I needed both versions of the program or not, so decided to investigate.

It turns out that one version of Java on my machine is an x64 version (64 bit) and the other is an x86 version (32 bit).

Did I need both? Answer is ‘yes’ – at least in my case.

Reason is that I need the 32-bit version to run in tandem with 32-bit browsers that I use – and I need the 64-bit version to run with the lone 64-bit browser that I use (Internet Explorer x64).

Further information can be found here: Java on 64-bit Windows.

Need Java? Java downloads

As a result, small businesses must be more calculating and deliberate in choosing keywords – they need to choose terms which can get them to the top of Google SERPs (search engine results pages) without a big investment of time or money.

The first step is to do some analysis to figure out what keywords are the most likely to help you gain search engine visibility on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and other search engines. By ‘keywords’, I mean both individual words as well as short 2-5 word phrases that are relevant to describing your business.

Your goal is to achieve search engine ‘visibility’. Seach engine visibility happens only when you are able to break into the top 10 results of a search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other search engine. If your website is not in the Top 10 results – meaning on page 1 of the SERPs (search engine results pages), then your chances of someone finding you drop significantly.

In fact, even on page 1, your chances of being clicked on drops sharply from postion #1 to position #10. Ideally, you want to be in the top 3, perhaps the top 5, for the best possible search engine traffic generation.

What Are the Best Keywords?

Getting into the top 5 search engine results sounds pretty hard. What are the best keywords to get you there?

Counter-intuitively, you want to focus on narrower and more specific terms, rather than broader and more general terms.

Which is to say that the ‘best’ keywords for small businesses are almost always in what’s called the ‘long tail’ of search. The ‘long tail’ of search refers to words and phrases that are not the most commonly used terms, but rather are less commonly used ways of saying the same thing.

Usually, these less common, and generally more specific, terms are not individual words, but rather are phrases consisting of 2-5 words. So, as a small business, you should be more concerned with finding and targeting highly specific keyword phrases vs. unspecific individual words.

Back to top

Long Tail Keywords Example

‘Long tail’ keywords (or keyword phrases) can usually be found in varying degrees of long tail-ness. You want terms that are ‘long tail’ enough to be distinctive, but not so long tail that nobody would use the term.

Here’s an example from the remodeling industry which illustrates the concept. As we go down the list, the terms become increasing ‘long tail’ – meaning more and more specific.

This specific long tail keyword pattern above applies to most any locally oriented business where you can use geography to help focus the meaning. But there are other types of patterns – for instance, the ‘luxury’ variant – where other types of modifiers help distinguish a specific type of thing from a more general class or category of thing.

One of your big challenges is to figure out the ‘long tail’ patterns that apply to your business.

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Easier to Make Google Page 1 SERPs with Long Tail Keywords

As a small business, you want to use more precise ‘long tail’ search terms for 2 major reasons:

1. There are fewer websites competing for the top slots for those terms
2. Many Google searchers are going to use these terms to try to find you because more general terms don’t yield what they are looking for

Regarding the first point, in the table below you can see how as the keyword phrases get more specific, a smaller and smaller number of search engine results is found.

As the number of results declines, your chances of being able to make it into the top 10 search engine results increases. Still not easy, but much more workable.

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Long Tail Keywords Produce More Qualified Visitors

At the same time that the number of competitive search engine results declines, it is also true fewer and fewer searches are done as a keyword becomes increasingly long tail. In other words, there are going to be more searches done for a popular generic word than for a less popular 3 or 4 word phrase. Sometimes the drop-off is really precipitous; at other times, less so.

The table below shows how search volume declines from 2.2M searches per month for the generic term ‘remodeling’ to just 28 searches per month for the term ‘luxury kitchen remodeling atlanta’ (Note: All figures are approximate. Source: Google keywords analysis tool)

While it may seem like you’d rather be competing for 2.2M searchers than for 880, keep in mind that those 880 are a lot more ‘qualified’ than the 2.2M. A searcher for ‘remodeling’ could be looking for any number of things from anywhere in the country – and is highly unlikely to be a serious buyer. A searcher looking for ‘kitchen remodeling atlanta’ is probably a lot more promising as a potential buyer.

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Long Tail Keywords Will Yield More SEO Traction

As a small business, you stand a much better shot of getting into the Top 10 search results when you are competing against 335,000 or 69,000 other websites than you have when competing against 30.1M sites. Since being in the Top 10 is crucial for SEO success, you can see that going with a long tail keyword strategy reduces the competition and offers a more realistic shot for your website to get search engine visibility.

Of course, beating out 335,000 other search results is still no layup, but 99.999% of those results are complete junk and pose no real obstacle. The only results that you really care about are the existing results in the top 10 – your job is to figure out a way to displace one or several of these guys to get yourself onto page 1 of the Google SERPs (search engine results page).

As you start out, it is worth looking at these existing sites one-by-one and see what they are doing. Do this by using Google to actually run a bunch of your possible long tail keywords. With each term, take note of how the top websites are using these terms on their pages and figure out ways you can do it a little bit more or better. Sometimes, it can be surprising how, with a little elbow grease, ingenuity, and time, you can be displace pages in the Top 10.

In fact, if you choose your keywords right and tune your site accordingly, you may be amazed how quickly you can pop to the top if you play your cards right.

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Integrate Long Tail Keywords into Your Website

Once you’ve put some thought into what long tail keywords are going to give your site the most search engine traction, your next challenge is to carefully sprinkle these keyword phrases throughout your site. This means ensuring that your keywords are strongly represented in your website’s ‘meta’ (i.e., page titles, page descriptions, urls, etc.) because these form the foundation of your SEO performance. It also means reworking and tailoring the content of all your web page to emphasize these terms in your page headings, boldface text, etc.

In fact, once you’ve figured out what keywords you are targeting, you may well find yourself creating some additional pages specifically designed to showcase these terms. Of course, you must do this in a judicious way that doesn’t appear ’spammy’ to Google, but such purpose-driven pages can often gain outstanding search engine traction.

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Integrate Long Tail Keywords into Your Google Adwords Campaign

If you are also doing some pay-per-click advertising using Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or other program, you should seriously consider integrating your long-tail keywords into that effort.

Doing so will yield several inter-related benefits. One is that there are generally fewer companies competing for long tail keywords and so prices are going to be (somewhat) lower. Second, because Google AdWords incorporates elements of search engine optimization into it’s placement and pricing algorithms, you may be able to save further by using well targeted ad text that utilizes your long tail keywords. And lastly, if you point targeted AdWords ads to highly relevant web pages in your site, you are going to drive higher conversion rates. Higher conversion rates means more customers for less ad spend.