Google Advertising Professionals are not Google employees, but rather are online marketing professionals, agencies, and other individuals such as search engine marketers (SEMs), search engine optimizers (SEOs), and marketing consultants. They have been certified by Google to manage AdWords accounts. To become qualified, professionals must demonstrate an in-depth understanding of AdWords by passing exams, and they must meet all our qualification guidelines
You may not have a need for an Internet marketing agency now, but it’s a handy resource to bookmark. Then again, since you’re here at Big Thinking for Small Business, save some time and bookmark our Google Advertising Professionals listing.
Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric. It’s certainly good usability practice.
Google launched another tool hot on the heels of last week’s release of Speed Tracer, a tool developers can use to determine what elements on a particular web page are slowing down its display in a browser. And last month, we told you that a new SEO frontier for 2010 would be speed, as in how fast the site renders.
Now comes Google again with a tool that shows how much of a web site is visible for a particular monitor and video card. Browser Size is not a plugin or standalone problem. Instead, a simple Google page allows anyone to type a web address and see how much of that page is visible to web users based on Google’s data about browser resolutions without scrolling.
Tools like this have existed for a long time, but not with built in Google metrics. Refinements will come. Some sites will receive more visitors from people with smaller or larger screen resolutions. Imagine the site designed for a certain width that receives a larger percentage of visitors with smaller resolutions? Might Google someday begin penalizing such sites or demoting their ranking when the search engine knows the browser resolution as it displays the search engine results?
Geeks old enough to remember using MS-DOS will undoubtedly remember the feeling of automating their bootup programs using a batch file. Around the same time that Bill Gates muttering that 640K ought to be enough memory for anyone, those same geeks looked at each other and begin whittling down their batch files so there was more memory. After all, Gates’ developers were working hard on Windows and the Office suite which would suck the memory out of anyone’s system. Along the way, we learned to be judicious with all of our new toys when we stretched them to the breaking point. One more phone app? Okay, okay, but that’s a pretty clunky menu.
Google’s Chrome extension page
And then Chrome, the uber-fast browser expected to be at the heart of Google’s operating system launching in 2010, went down the Firefox path and started adding extensions and themes. There are some under-the-hood differences that won’t slow down Chrome’s sleek browsing as much, but everything — even wicked cool plugins — in moderation is a good axiom.
I think I’ve installed darn near everything I could lay my hands on up until now. One reason that is so much easier is because you don’t have to reboot Chrome for changes to take effect. As of today, here are 10 Chrome Extensions I still like and have kept installed:
1. Feedly. I may have kept Firefox as active as I did simply to use this amazing UI for Google Reader. Feedly is my favorite extension.
2. Lorem Ipsum Generator. We do a lot of mockups. This easy dummy text generator ends the need for copy and paste.
10. DotSpots. There are only 17,000 users so far, but this is my darkhorse pick for annotating web pages and sharing across the world. I’ve tried to give you a good mix of ports, new stuff and old favorites. As of this writing, only the Wave notifier, Cooliris and Xmarks are in the top 10 downloaded Chrome extensions so hopefully you got some great ideas here. Just please don’t install AdThwart and AdBlock on that list. We all have to make a living, right?
