Is adwords Playing Up?

Is it just me or is adwords being a bit temperamental today? Some campaigns that I can see as being active are being flagged as inactive when I hover over the magnifying glass icon. Some new ads setup this morning still aren’t showing. Anyone else seeing any funnies?

Here’s a thought… this little adwords magnifying glass which has recently acquired the green chevron, could be more useful. Rather than me having to hover over it to see if all is okay with my keyword phrase, why can’t it be a different colour when the ad isn’t being triggered for the keyword? Maybe there are already plans for the green chevron to turn red at some point?

Free Stock Photography

If you’re artistically challenged like me then it’s likely that you’ll find free stock photography a god-send. There are a few sites out there that offer free stock photos but my personal favourite is stock xchng

There are absolutely thousands of categorised images to choose from so you should find the images that you’re after. Just make sure you comply with the photographers usage guidelines – if you don’t like the restrictions for a particular image,  rather than ignoring them just use another image. After I’ve downloaded an image I use the free and simple-to-use irfanview utility to resize/crop/edit the photo before uploading to my host server.

Where do you get your stock photography from?

Blogger Backups

The always informative, thorough and sometimes techie googlesystem blog has a useful post telling you how to back up you (new) blogger blog. A top tip.

Backups ….now I vaguely remember those.

blogger backups

Keeping Up With Google Blogs

If you’re anything like me then you’ll be trying to keep up-to-date with several of the official google blogs. Stuff like adsense, adwords, webmaster guidelines and the like. Thing is, google appear to have official blogs for just about every area that they’re involved in, so it can get a little difficult to manage your feed reading.

I stumbled upon a great tip the other day (for the life of me I can’t remember where I read it, so I can’t credit the source) …. if you use google reader to manage your feeds then you can just subscribe to this (a shared feed I think it is):

www.google.com/reader/view/user/10949413115399023739/label/officialgoogleblogs

You can keep up-to-date with every blog post from all the google blogs, all in one place. Rather handy.

Google Reader Is Dead Good

Have just spend some time setting up google reader to better manage my blog (feed) bookmarks. It’s really good and I’ll be using it from now on. Go take a look for yourself.

And another little tip for you firefox users out there. If you want firefox to startup with multiple tabs pointing to a particular URL simply go …. tools/options and in the homepage input box specify the desired urls, delimiting by the | (pipe sign) eg:

http://mail.google.com | http://www.google.com/reader/view

dead good!

Website Thumbnails

Want to make a thumbnail capture of a website to embed within your content?

You do? Well try either of these nifty little free services: webthumb and websnapr (I seem to be queuing though for ages in websnapr – demand must be high). The latter also offers a smart hyperlink bubble script.

Here’s one I quickly prepared earlier using webthumb for our ghd homepage

Suspect I can make good use of website thumbnails.

thumbnails Websnapr WebThumb

domjax.com

I came across domjax.com today and I rather like it. It’s a whois domain checker, developed in ajax with a bit speed thrown in for good measure. As well as TLD checking there are links to various tools that SEMs might find useful.

Actually, sometimes it can be a little too eager and can burst in to life before you finish typing in your domain name.

There is a facility to add to a list of domains that you’re interested in and you can enter your email address to have the list immediately emailed to you. You can buy available domains from the small list of providers listed.

In summary, a fast whois checker that I’ll be using regularly.

domains – SEM – domjax

Useful SEO tools

I’m a recent reader of the very informative seomoz blog - it appears to contain posts of a high quality relating to various aspects of SEO and website marketing. Recently they posted about a new SEO tool on the block, seo-browser. It’s a useful tool with a mix of in site and external tools. The simple view offers a spider view of the URL whilst the advanced view offers the mix of internal/external tools. Having used it on a couple of my URLs it’s highlighted a few issues that required some attention. I’ll be using this tool frequently.

The second tool, page strength, is an seomoz in-house production. It collates information for a given URL from a number of sources in order to return a page rank out of 10. It’s very interesting with some useful information.

Looks like I need to improve my site promotion !

seomoz seo tools