Optimize, Promote Your Website & Blog

1. Analyze the Performance of Your Website

Analyzing the performance of your websites and optimizing them for better speed and performance is important for all webmasters. Google offers two tools that can analyze the performance and provides you suggestions on improvement. One is Page Speed for Google Chrome (extension), and the other is Page Speed Online.

Page Speed for Chrome: This extension enables users to measure few performance metrics and also get suggestions to optimize the page to cut down on load times.

To install the extension, you need to enable Experimental Extension API in Chrome. For this, open a new tab, type “about:flags” and press Enter. Now click on “Experimental Extension APIs”. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Restart button. After that, go to http://bit.ly/ihqv2S to install Page Speed.

Now go to tools in Chrome settings, click on Tools-> Developer tools. In the developer tools, you can see a Page speed tab at the extreme right. Click on the Run Page Speed button and wait for the results.

Page Speed Online: This tool can analyze the performance of a web page and offer measures for making it faster. This does not require any installation and you can access it from a browser.

Also, the tool has the ability to get Page Speed suggestions customized for the mobile version of a page. See the screenshot.

2. Create Google+ Page for your Website or Blog

Creating Google+ page is very simply and is very much similar to Facebook pages where users can add your blog or website page and they get all the updates you upload and publish. Apart from the fact that you can touch base with users of Google+ having million users, the integration of Google+ with other Google products like Google search is very important. Google+ posts are now getting added into Google searches.

To create your Google+ page for your blog or website, go to this page https://plus.google.com/pages/create, select the right category and start creating the page. All you need is a Google ID.

3. Depersonalize Your Search Results

While search engines like Google are intelligent enough to fetch you results that are relevant, personalized and location-based, how do you find your real rankings? There are instances when you need depersonalized search results. For instance, if you want to see a more objective representation of how your websites ranks. There are several ways of doing it including manual ways of permanently depersonalizing your search results.

The easiest way to depersonalize your search results is to use private browsing. You can use Incognito browsing in Google Chrome, Private Browsing in Firefox or InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer.

There are depersonalization add-ons for Chrome and Firefox. For instance Google Global, Rank Checker, etc. You can install such tool to get results from different countries agnostic to your location and preferences.

If you want to permanently depersonalize your search results, here is a solution. Go to the setting in your Chrome browser, select Option and select Manage Search Engines. At the bottom of all search engines listed, there is an option called Add a new Search Engine. Name the search engine and add 'http://bit.ly/sj7Vdz' in the last box that says, “URL with % in place of query”. Use this only if you want the search results to be depersonalized permanently. Alternatively, you can use add "&pws=0" to the end of Google URL after after you perform a standard Google Image search to get depersonalized results. This is a manual trick you can use to depersonalize search results for a particular search.

4. Face Recognition in Image Results

What do you do online when you're looking for an image behind a product or a company? Do you know Google Image Search enables you to restrict the search results to only images of people. This feature of Google search is very useful when you search images of persons behind popular companies, products or locations. All you need to do is add this code “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL after you do a standard Google Image search.

5. Store Data in the Cloud for Free & Share Them Instantly

In today's context, sharing data online is as much important as storing them. Here is a service called Pogoplug Cloud that offers you free storage of upto 5GB and allows you to share them with your friends through Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can store personal content, instantly share and stream them from your mobile device. Sign up at www.pogoplug.com/ from any smartphone, tablet or a web browser to upload photos and videos from your smart device to your Pogoplug Cloud, no sync required. Also, you can create shared folders and collaborate with friends and colleagues.

Pogoplug's iOS and Android apps are free and available for download both both in AppStore and Android Marketplace.