Thoughts on International Women’s Day #OneDayIWill

International Women’s Day is March 8, and Google is encouraging women everywhere to share their aspirations that day on social media using the hashtag, #OneDayIWill.

The team from Google Doodle reached out to see it I wanted to be part of of the day, but I had to come up with a single aspiration. This, as a friend said, is a problem that happens too rarely. What could I possibly say that would, in one Tweetable sentence, say everything I wish for women everywhere?

I asked friends. I asked my daughter who works at a University. I asked millennials (thinking perhaps they had a better line on this than me). No one's input expressed exactly how I feel. There's no way I could be snarky. This had to be real. 

So, after a weekend of thinking and writing lots of notes; it was time to turn in my aspiration - for women everywhere.

After watching the Academy Awards, it came to me. It seemed like there weren't enough women represented. Where are the women ready to take on the projects that will be honored by the Academy?

Problem with Fonts in New Version of Chrome? Here's the fix

Here's a short post on how to fix a new problem. If you have downloaded the new Chrome browser, Version 37.0.2062.103, you may find that many of your pages are basically unreadable. It seems to convert many pages (including gmail into a narrow sans serif font.

Here's the fix. Type into your browser address bar:

chrome://flags/ 

On the resulting page, click the link to Disable under Disable DirectWrite Windows
This will disable the use of the new experimental DirectWrite font rendering system.

A box will appear at the bottom of your browser saying : 
Your changes will take effect the next time you relaunch Google Chrome.
Click the box to Relaunch Chrome that will appear underneath - and voila. Your fonts are back to normal.

Looking for Big Numbers in Social Media? Why?

If your online goal is to conclude a sale to (or build your brand) with your social media friends and fans, you’ll have to give these folks a cold, hard look. Some believe that more is better. But more what? You need to focus on people who, at the end of the day, may purchase something from you directly or through your website.

Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, and other tools will help you decide if you’re playing in the right ballpark. If your message isn’t being received by the right people, you’re wasting time and money in social media.

Visit my website to read Big Social Media Numbers Don’t Always Equal Dollars for the cold hard facts - and just how to measure your numbers.

Take Control of Your Google+ Calendar Events

Does your phone (tablet or computer) ever notify you of a meeting when you don't expect it? Yea, me too. Then I open my Google calendar only to find I have been invited to an "event" - hosted by someone I don't know - in a far away time zone.
Mind you, I enjoy being invited to events that are relevant to my work, but the Google+ invitations are more than invitations. Just about anyone, even if you are not in their circles (or they in yours) can reserve space on your personal calendar.
The settings to prevent this are not obvious (one would think you'd find them under the Calender tab, but no), so I thought I'd share...

1. Go to your Google calendar https://www.google.com/calendar/render?tab=mc
2. On the far right of the calendar, you will see a cog icon next to the word More. Clicking the cog will open a drop-down menu
3. Scroll down the page until you find the following words"Show events you have declined" as shown below

4. Click your mouse in the three radio buttons indicated in my screen shot. In essence, what this does is by selecting no, you will no longer see any events on your personal calendar except for those to which you've responded yes.

That should do it. From now on only the events you see will be the ones you put on your calendar. Note that if you share your calendar, others who see your calendar will see those events.

Thanks to +Kelly Lux  for inspiring this post!

8 Simple to Apply SEO Tips for Your Online Store

    

If a consumer searches Google for one of your products, what would they find? Would your online store be at the top of the results? If your site doesn’t appear within the first few pages of search results, you’ll lose the opportunity to earn additional traffic and potential customers. While you may advertise your store through social media or paid advertisements, if your ecommerce site isn’t properly search engine optimized, then you’re missing a big piece of the pie.

By implementing SEO techniques, you help search engines like Google and Bing better crawl and index the content on your site. This means your website and product pages are more likely to show up when users search keywords relevant to your online store. While search engine optimization can be a full-time job, there are eight steps you can take right now to improve your site’s standing and increase its visibility:

1. Create unique, user-friendly content on each page. Search engines are placing more value on quality content that results in lower bounce rates, longer time spent on the site, better user experience, and diversity of site traffic. Be sure that you’re using relevant keywords on each page, but write content that’s meant to be read by humans, not just search engines.
2. If you have different URLs that lead to the same product page, avoid getting dinged for duplicate content by indicating a canonical (preferred) URL. See more on canonicalization here.
3. For each product page, include the product name in the URL, title tags, text, and the titles and alt text for images. Since search engines can only index what they can crawl, try not to leave any element “unreadable” by search engines.
4. If you sell a coffee mug in black, red, or green, state the color options on the product page in addition to having color swatches (with alt text), since users might be searching for “coffee mug” or “green coffee mug.” A warning about creating different pages for each variation of a product: this can result in “thin” content that could be penalized by search engines.
5. Be smart in the long-tail terms you include in your copy, since these keywords can drive better quality traffic (i.e., consumers closer to making a purchase). Plus, your site is more likely to rank high for detailed keyword phrases like “tan Italian leather loafers” rather than a very popular and general term, like “loafers.”
6. Allow your customers to leave feedback, reviews, comments, photos, etc., so you get additional content on each page that could help drive more long-tail traffic. Including reviews on your site also improves the user experience and builds better customer relationships.
7. Use rich snippets to display additional information underneath your URL and meta description in search results. Rich snippets provide additional information such as a product’s price, availability, and ratings, which could help users decide to click your link. See more on rich snippets here.
8. If you are serious about your SEO efforts and don’t mind spending a little money, you could take advantage of Google products, such as AdWords and Google Shopping, to help boost your web traffic.

via thinkingforward.tumblr.com

 

Valuable Feature: Google Using Data to Protect Online Users from Malware

Originally posted on Google Online Security Blog

The Internet brings remarkable benefits to society. Unfortunately, some people use it for harm and their own gain at the expense of others. We believe in the power of the web and information, and we work every day to detect potential abuse of our services and ward off attacks.

As we work to protect our users and their information, we sometimes discover unusual patterns of activity. Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware.” As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results:

This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called “proxies.” We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.

We hope to use the knowledge we’ve gathered to assist as many people as possible. In case our notice doesn’t reach everyone directly, you can run a system scan on your computer yourself by following the steps in our Help Center article.

via googleblog.blogspot.com

More Notes from Google:

• The malware appears to have gotten onto users' computers from one of roughly a hundred variants of fake antivirus, or "fake AV" software that has been in circulation for a while. We aren't aware of a common name for the malware.
• We believe a couple million machines are affected by this malware.
• We've heard from a number of you that you're thinking about the potential for an attacker to copy our notice and attempt to point users to a dangerous site instead. It's a good security practice to be cautious about the links you click, so the spirit of those comments is spot-on. We thought about this, too, which is why the notice appears only at the top of our search results page. Falsifying the message on this page would require prior compromise of that computer, so the notice is not a risk to additional users.
• In the meantime, we've been able to successfully warn hundreds of thousands of users that their computer is infected. These are people who otherwise may never have known.

 

How does Google Search work? What exactly happens when you click?

via marcandmarsha.com

Here’s a video that should answer some of your questions as to how Google works. It provides a very brief and easy-to-understand explanation of what happens when you perform a search in Google! It even gives you some interesting SEO (search engine optimization) ideas. The person presenting is Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group in Google.

Update after talking to Google RE: Buzz

It seems my last post created quite a stir. Today I got an email from Google Buzz Communications. It seems that no one at Google Buzz team had considered that the profile part of the Google Profile was what should show as a default. It took me quite a while, along with a description of how I use my Google Profile (as my online business card) to show it's importance. Finally my words "It's called Google Profile, so shouldn't the Profile show as default? Otherwise it's Marsha Collier's Google Buzz page" did the trick. Google said "they would consider the suggestion."

I don't want to sound paranoid (or maybe I've read too much George Orwell), and I don't want Google to pull the plug on any of the fine services of theirs that I use (like this blog). I would like to reiterate the following:

• You can have a Google Profile without Google Buzz
• You have to disconnect any of the social media sites you have connected to it (via Buzz in Gmail) 
• You have to disable Google Buzz in your Gmail (via the Buzz tab in Gmail Settings)

... but since you're not sharing any items, or using Buzz, this is effectively meaningless. 

Ever said OMG after you've sent an email?

Sure you've done it, we all have. Maybe you're not drunk, but you're overtired and cranky and had a burning desire to state your feelings in an email? Once you click that send button, you know (accompanied by a sinking feeling) that you've made a terrible mistake.

Google has to our rescue. They've come up with a cool new tool for Gmail that may prevent us from emailing while drunk, Mail Goggles. Once you hit the send button on that email you composed in the dark of night, Mail Goggles will present you with five math problems that must be solved in a limited amount of time. Only if you complete the computations in the given time will your message be sent. I've always felt that doing math (even simple math) is a sobering experience.

Mail Goggles, by default, is only active on weekends and nights, but of course you can adjust that to be more in balance with your personal 'happy hour.'