Google Makes Life Easier - A Thank You to Google

Google has made huge strides since their initial launch. What was once just another search engine is now an extremely successful company that provides a wide variety of highly useful on-line applications. Each day, Google makes people’s lives a little easier, productive, and even rewarding. In this post, I’m going to mention a few of the Google products I put to use on a daily basis, and why.

Google’s CPC (Cost Per Click) Program, Adsense

This product alone has produced hundreds, if not thousands of millionaires. Google’s Adsense provides approved webmasters an easy and effective way to display highly relevant ads. Once an ad is created, and the provided code is placed on a site, the Adsense bot will crawl the pages containing the special code. With a snapshot of the page’s content, the Adsense program will then display relevant ads.

To illustrate an example, consider a site providing information pertaining to car insurance. There’s an excellent chance visitors will see Adsense ads also pertaining to car insurance, assuming the car insurance site is taking advantage of Adsense. This method of advertising is know as contextual advertising. As a result of the relevant listings, visitors are far more likely to click Adsense ads as opposed to those flashy type banners demanding, “Punch The Monkey And Win a FREE PSP!!!” If you’re interested in getting started with Adsense, click the link below.

Google’s Web Site Statistics Program, Analytics

Analytics is another amazingly powerful, and free, Google service. One of the most valuable sets of information all webmasters should examine are stats. Stats indicate visitor trends, what’s popular, where traffic is originating, which pages visitors are leaving on, how long visitors are staying, and more. The possibilities Analytics provide sometimes seem endless.

The most beneficial feature Analytics offers (this is my opinion, of course) is the ability to see which key phrases visitors searched for to end up on your site. With this information, content creators can come up with new topics to write about, elaborate on popular (highly searched for) topics, and develop a better understanding of what people are looking for. Analytics offers so much that it’s worthy of its own post. Perhaps that’s something to expand on at a later date.

Webmaster Tools For The Win

Cursed are the days of submitting sites to a search engine for inclusion. As if Google’s bot isn’t smart enough, Webmaster Tools present webmasters with an opportunity to basically say, “Hay, these are all the pages on my site.” With the ability to associate a sitemap (or sitemaps) to verified sites, Google knows exactly which pages to look for, and how often. A lot of people claim this speeds up the process of getting a site indexed, and even though the claim is debatable, submitting a sitemap definitely doesn’t harm anything.

Webmaster Tools also informs webmaster’s of their pagerank, which keywords their site shows up for, backlinks from both internal and external pages, along with an additional truck load of helpful options and information. Get setup with Google’s Webmaster Tools now if you haven’t already.

GMail - Google’s Free E-Mail Service

The list keeps getting better and better. Just when you thought there wasn’t an alternative to hotmail or yahoo, in comes Google. One of the features that really sets GMail apart is the non-stop, continuously increasing amount of available mailbox storage. How awesome is that? GMail is still in beta at the time of writing, but don’t let that deter you from signing up. With the potential for unlimited storage space, integrated instant messaging functionality, IMAP, pop3, smtp capabilities, and not to mention the other ridiculously long list of features, GMail is damn near perfect. Well, that probably shouldn’t have been written, but how can anyone complain about a free service?

As if all that wasn’t enough, Google also allows domain owners to use GMail for domain names other than GMail. If you have the ability to edit your DNS’s MX records, the process is pretty painless. The end result is a GMail like interface (pop3, smtp, and imap all included, too), but for your own domain. This will also free up valuable resources on your server since Google is responsible for processing emails instead of sendmail, postifx, etc.

Ok, Enough Is Enough

By now, I’m sure you’ve got the point. Google offers more free and valuable services than any other on-line company that I’m aware of. If you’re interested in finding more, check out these links:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

http://labs.google.com/

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