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[image credit : LTSeo]

For hundreds and thousands of businesses, the term “Google is God” is true. It helps business owners to generate their living-hood and the best part is that they ensure that it can help in every possible way and that too with ease! Google provides various tools that help webmasters in ranking your website well in Google’s search engine index. Here are some of them -

Google Adwords

To start with a commercial product, Google Adwords is the program that helps you in generating targeted traffic for your website. It lets you target the visitors from every possible manner. You can target visitors specific from a city, state, country and who are searching for specific terms. This is now considered to be de-facto of getting the most targeted traffic!

Google Adsense

If Google Adwords is for business owners to get targeted visitors, Google Adsense is the program that helps business owners in making money from the visitors they get on their website. I’m sure that there would be no one on the internet who wouldn’t have seen those ads. Well, there are business who’ve made millions out of it!

Google Analytics

How many people are visiting my website? Where are they coming from? Whey are they going to? Well, there are whole lot of questions like these that get answered by Google Analytics, one of the most powerful tool given for free by Google! It integrates with Google Adwords & Google Adsense to give us the overall picture of the traffic of the website!

Google Webmaster Tools

GWT is one tool that tells you if there are any broken links on your website. If Google is able to crawl your website to include in the index or not. It gives the ability to control the speed of Google Bot’s visit, finds out if your website is infected from malware. It also tell you that if your website is loading slow for users. Isn’t that a must have a tool?

Google Keyword Tool

Google keyword tool is a true gem! As a business owner, you can find out that what exactly visitors are searching for. With the correct strategy, a business owner can easily get their website ranked for the right keywords and thus can reap the benefits easily!

Google Ad Planner

This tool from Google can help you in digging out some very useful information about the competing websites. Not only that, it can certainly help in finding out that what all keywords one should target. After all, choosing the right keywords means eliminating maximum competition!

Google Traffic Estimator

This little nifty tool will help you find out that how much traffic will you get for the keywords that you are eying on. Of course, this is integrated with Google Adwords and thats why you see Google Adwords Logo on top of it. But does that matter when they aren’t charging a single buck from you?

There are other fantastic tools that will surely help you in one way or the other. I’m sure that you’d find them equally useful – Google Zeitgeist, Google Trends, Google website optimizer and Google Insights for search. If you know any other tool, please share it with us and I’ll include it over here.

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Image Credit - AyudaWordPress

I’m completely sane and I haven’t ditched WordPress for Blogger at the moment. I’m talking about the time when WordPress was pretty young and like the infamous “browser wars”, blogging world was buzzing about “Clash of Blogging platforms!” It was nearly 4 yrs. ago when I started jumping in Blogging and at that moment, WordPress was already giving good fight to Google’s Blogger. Questions can be asked that why am I writing about this after so many years, the answer is that Keith has asked this question from everyone. Don’t forget to post your response too!

So, coming back to the question – during that time, I was super excited about every product from Google and Blogger was no exception. My technical knowledge was limited to fixing up Windows and I was just trying to take dip in the world of being a true webmaster.

So Why Did I Ditch WordPress?

  1. Ease of Use – Blogger has always been a wonderful platform for those who are technically challenged. At that time, WordPress was considered to be choice of techies and surely wasn’t as easy as Blogger.
  2. Not extensible – WordPress at that time didn’t have as many powerful plugins as we have now. However, there were already lots of hacks, tutorials available for Blogger. I’ve learned almost everything with the help of mighty Google. It didn’t take me any time to play around with Blogger that much.
  3. Fear of screwing up things – Even though techie by nature, the initial hitch of trying something more techie gave me chills. I always had the question “what if” haunting me. However, there was hardly anything in Blogger that scared me. There were times, when I wanted to put Flash widgets in my blog and found it super difficult in WordPress where as Blogger made me feel as if I’m home!
  4. Google’s branding – When you know that such big name is behind a service then you feel comfortable. You know that nothing will happen to your blog if you don’t do dirty things. However, WordPress was only developing at that moment. So, my inclination was more towards Blogger.
  5. Not many beautiful designs – Blogger’s template engine has always been pretty similar to the normal HTML, so it was very easy for designers to create templates for it. For this very reason, there were ample amount of beautiful templates for blogger as compared to WordPress.

Keeping those points in mind, I decided to ditch WordPress against Blogger, however after few months of Blogging, I realized that if I have to become professional blogger, I would have to shift my Blog to WordPress and face my fears. The moment, I got the feeling of having no other option, I decided to take the step and since then I’ve been using WordPress. I was actually surprised to see that, things were tremendously easy in WordPress and with in no time, I was playing around with it pretty comfortably.

Now I can’t imagine my life without WordPress, not only it helps me keep our blog running smoothly, it helps me in earning my bread and butter too. Moreover, there are far too many resources available that ensure that you are never stuck even if you have any problem.

What was your reaction when you first used WordPress? Were you scared like me or was your reaction like that of Keith’s? Do share your experience with us or write a blog post as I did.

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Google reader has been the best web-based RSS reader and one of my personal favorites too. Although, upon logging for the first time in the day, I realized that Twitter was able to rub its status update feature on it. In this update, Google lets you choose that which all people you would like to “follow” (doesn’t that sound like Twitter lingo) to get the updates from them.

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Google adsense team has started this wonderful five-weeks educational series where they’ll tell the bloggers and webworkers to speed up their business in the time of recession. They’ll tell us that how we can make use of Google tools to increase the revenue. The posts will be updated every thursday, so keep an eye on this page or subscribe to their RSS feed.

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Few days back, Google introduced a new feature in its Adsense program that lets you customize the font size of the adsense units. Back in February, Google came up with the feature of letting the publishers to change the fonts of their adsense units and now with the ability to change the fonts, we publishers have got more options to optimize the adsense units for better results!

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There were times when search engine optimizers were completely against Flash based websites and suggested the webmasters to not have flash based content on their websites. However, after Google made changes in how its bots dealt with flash content, we can be rest assured that we’d see more use of flash in blogs or website designs!

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Rajesh needs no introduction in WordPress community as most of you already know him as the author of popular “Platinum SEO Pack” plugin for WordPress. Few days back, he released another plugin that allows blogger’s to blog in various Indian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada) and in Arabic too!

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