Countdown Clock offers just that. A countdown clock for your website where you can build your own customized timer and embed it on your website. Since New Years is coming up, I thought this would be a great time to run this test.

Google Adwords tool

It’s saying that google counts approx 201,000 searches for countdown clock per month with an average cost of $1 per CPC.

Here is an example of this flash countdown timer:

Currently the Google PageRank is 3

Google Result – Page 1

Yahoo has 251 inlinks:

Overtime, users will start relying on your site for a countdown clock and more people will support it. As that continues the Google backlinks and Yahoo! inlinks should grow as well as the pagerank.

So offer a way to promote your blog or website to your readers. Sharing links with friends and other website can help you with your pagerank for search engine results. Offer a free embed feature to a cool banner or a widget where they can support on their site. It’s like a personal badge that says “HI MY NAME IS” and preview of your site. Try it out!

Here’s my invite through my email. I have to click on the invitation and it takes me to the next page. This following page gives you the option of using an existing number or get a new number. I wanted a extra number so I picked the choice on the right.

After picking “Get a Google number”, the next step was for me to choose a new number. First step offers me to get a number from a location or have a word in the phone number. I tested out the new number with the word “SEO” and had the following results. This took me the longest time to pick one! I think it took me more than 30 minutes to pick one. haha.

Once I register a number, I get a welcome e-mail from Google. An easy instruction is included in the e-mail. The how to explains the basic features and links to the google voice blog, help center and forums.

If you want video tutorial you can check out their page which looks like below:

I purchased $10 worth of credits to call international by pressing the “Add Credit” button on the left. I then checked the “Rates” to see how much I’ll be paying for my call. Check International Rates: http://mockurl.com/?1dc8c

Also, It gives you the history of where you called and how much it cost for each call. I think this is cheaper than more carriers but it’s not as cheap as the Asian calling cards.

Here’s the setting area where you have a handful of features to control.

Here’s a cool widget feature where you can post a widget on a blog. The reader of your website of blog can call you by clicking on the widget. I don’t think I would put this on my blog but I’m sure there are ways people will try to use this feature for their business. You should read the terms of service carefully before you use it for profit use.

Use Example for business: A dentist has a website then has this call button. This would be a great way for someone to make an appointment without a hassle. Click the widget and Google Voice call you then connect you with the dentist office. Great for making appointments and asking questions in the future!

I played around with it for about 10 minutes and made my first call to my friend in Asia. It sounds clear and I loved the idea of a mobile phone being voip. Not only that, others can reach you at a different number than the one you have now. Maybe even a great idea to give out your Google Voice numbers to strangers and have them direct their messages through our automated answering machine.

With Google Voice you can call anywhere in the U.S for free. I personally have an unlimited plan for my mobile carrier so it seems a bit pointless. If your paying for a landline or have a carrier that doesn’t charge you for incoming calls this might be for you, but you would need the data plan so the Google Voice Mobile Application can read you account online.

Google Voice also offers a free SMS text messaging which I’ve been using to text international. I saved over $30-$50 a month just from having this feature. That comes out to at least $360 a year in saving.

Some other feature they offer
-Voicemail
-Your calling history
-Call Blocking
-Call ID if you have them on your phone list
-Voice Transcription (You can turn your voice message into text message)
-Call Transition (Migrating from one phone to another in the middle of a call)

Google Voice will definitely change the communication industry but is it useless? How soon will it be until the other voip catch on? From what I read Vonage already has an application which they will release for Blackberry and iPhones.

It’s great to see the VOIP and Wireless Communication to come together. I love when innovation is at it’s best, but what can this feature really offer? Is it here to stay? or will the major phone companies ban this idea from their phones? What do you think?

-Have a sample site which you want your site to look like. Get some kind of idea. Ask your friends or family about the themes your about to pick and how they feel about the user interface. Simplicity is the key to a successful website. I stress this to many of my clients who wants to have splash introduction flash pages and sites that mix crammed content with flashing ads in every pixelated space of the homepage.

-Next upload a bunch of WP Themes you like via FTP (I uploaded about 89 themes). For me I have this problem where I like all designs and I’m very indecisive so I just make choices when I test out the themes. I need to get a feel and have a personal experience instead of picking a theme that’s “cool” looking.

-Log into your wordpress then preview each one and try to see which would be Search Engine Friendly. There are some themes that come SEO ready so that options was available for people who have no idea on how to optimize for search engine, but I think you can basically turn any Wordpress theme friendly. They offer variety of SEO Plugins and to customize via CSS is not as hard for novice web designers.

-I’ll pick my top 5 favorite themes and do a double take preview to pick my final one. I’ll print screen, bring it into photoshop and try to customize it with my own logo, color and type face. Having a BOLD, clean type face with the right color combination can make an effective type logo for your site. I played around a bit and thought this was catchy:

I ask my art director friend Mitch (see his work) and the first thing he said was that the logo reminded him of HBO. He knew automatically what type face and ridiculous typeface detail since he eat, lives and breath graphic design. He gave me a thumbs up on the logo and I thought it was good enough for my version 1 of my site.

-I added this logo to the header.php of my picked theme. When you add the image on the site, you have options to have the image robot from search engines to collect data on your site. If you want this logo to be viewed on the image search engines then don’t forget to add the “ALT” information for the image and to name your image so the robots can read it clearly. Example: How_to_Seo_Logo.jpg is better than IMG_2829.jpg – This is with every image on the web.

-This is what I have now.

I think the red is a bit out of place and was going to change it to the dark forest green but I like how it’s a complimentary color to the green so it pops out. The logo is subtle compared to the small red fonts even thought the logo is the biggest thing on the page.

-Adding meta data in your header like keywords and description can help you be found on search engines. I usually leave the description blank for sites that are dynamic but keywords can help you find readers for your content.

Here’s my current keyword choices:

<meta name="keywords" content="how to seo, how to seo
a website, seo, search engine optimization, seo for
beginners, seo help, seo advice, seo tips" />

-I also added a readers subscription service (Example of a FREE Subscription Service: Feedburner), where I can have readers sign up to my site. Basically a free service to all my posts. Offering a free e-book or product could help bring many subscribers. I don’t have anything to offer except for my knowledge at this time and for some people that’s enough but I know for a fact that offering something by signing up works! What would you give away?

-I added a couple of plugins for wordpress such as the Add to Any Plugin which gives the power to share my posts on any of the popular social networking sites. I also used WP-reCAPTCHA which is an anti-spam for your comment box. I already had one SPAM after one day, so this is a must!

Overall, I made small changes to the theme but it will probably have big effects. I still haven’t done the other important things yet like a sitemap, but I’ll get to that eventually as I’m building this site. Subscribe to me if you don’t want to miss more of what I’ll talk about or if you want to follow what I’m writing about.

No one at the time was doing this so we thought it would be a great idea to create a cultural food website by sharing unique content which was not available on the web. The site has changed a bit since we stopped getting involved but is still able to hold on to the #1 title on two of the biggest search engines. I did a bit of research for this post and it seems like there is more duplicate content on the site and it’s not being updated frequently, which is important. There is no other site offering content like this one. I think we took the right step when we created this 2 years ago.

Our job was to look for a domain name which can be found easily on the web. During our domain search we can across “indianrecipe (.org)” which was available for $8 a year. We first hesitated because of the .org but after doing some research we all voted it was workable if put love into it.

If you haven’t read our post, then check it out here: Our Previous Post
Once you read the previous, you’ll understand more about what I’m writing about.

So today the results are as follow:

Google Adwords Tool Search Results

As you can see it is saying that Local September search was a little over 300k, while the global search volume was under a quarter million. Estimated CPC cost to be in the top 3 as Google’s Sponsor on Adwords is costing advertisers $0.47 cents. I remember when Google was paying much more in 2007 via adsense with higher search volumes.

Google Trends

I’d figure the most searches for Indian Recipe would be from India since it is there home country food, but it was also very interesting to see that it’s influence in food has traveled globally away from India to other countries such as Australia, Europe, Africa and North American Countries.

I changed the subregion to target only the United States of America and check out the results:

Maybe it’s not a bad idea to open up a Indian Food restaurants in those top 5 states.

Today’s Search Engine Results for our Indian Food Recipe website:
Yahoo! Result for “Indian Recipe” hits #1 – Thanks Yahoo!

#1 Result on Google for “Indian Recipe” – Thanks Google!

Almost #1? on Bing

Overall, we wanted to add an updated post to the previous one from Wordkit. I think the combination of having unique content with the power of users leaving reviews on StumbleUpon has helped mold the site for the users to become comfortable to cook Indian Food. We wanted to create a site where people can easily read recipes and make Indian Food with the simplicity of following directions. It’s entertaining to watch the videos and to view the delicious Indian food photos.

Congratulations to IndianRecipe (.org) – You guys finally did it!

Before I purchased it, I wanted to see if there was any history so I checked to see what search engines cached and if there were any backlinks to this domain name. Here’s what I found.

Google Site Search

Looks like 2 results from a previous site that used this domain name.
I also wanted to see if there was any backlinks or sites having the domain name posted on their sites.

Links on Google

Looks like there are several sites that are sending traffic to this domain name. As you can see this is a great way to get traffic by purchasing a domain name that was being used.

I also checked to Google adwords tool to see what the local and global searched amount was. Look here:

Adwords tool is another great program where you can see statistics on the amount of searches per keyword. I use to use the overture bid keyword tool for yahoo! before they disabled it to the public.

Let’s see what google search result suggestions give me:

Looks like I just found some ideas to write about in the future for this blog.

These are just simple ways to checking a domain before purchasing the perfect domain name for your site. It gives a higher chance in success and potential when it’s mixed with unique content. I went ahead and purchased the domain name and set it up to start this first post.

I look forward to sharing more idea on the way I do search engine optimization. Please share your thoughts below and let me know what you think.