It’s always fun and exciting to see what new products and serves people are coming out with. A new one that has caught my eye is called “Glass“, or “Write on Glass”, and the concept is the ability to write over existing web sites and share your secret messages or favorite sites with your friends, the whole world, or even keep them stored away for just yourself.

The concept behind Glass is quite amazing… think of blog commenting, instant messenger clients and social network sharing all in one. Now think about all three of those features I mentioned, but all in one in-browser extension, and without the need to continually open/change new windows. The best way to describe how Glass works, is to actually show you.

Now that you have a better understanding on what Glass is and how it works, let’s think about some cool ways we could use Glass to interact with others and expand on the ever changing world of social media.

• Create private or public conversations on any web site
• Integration of Glass through Facebook and Twitter
• Ability to integrate social networks and blog commenting
• Share web sites and content without using Twitter, Facebook or Email directly

Next, let’s go beyond the traditional ways of thinking, and look at ways Glass can be used from a marketing or teaching stand point.

• On site training/tutorials as you want the site visitors through a process
• Study and discussion of ad placement and site structures
• Create a mastermind community and share ideas
• As a site or blog owner, you can chat directly with people at your site

Start Writing on Web Sites with Glass

As mentioned earlier, Glass is a free in-browser extension that can easily be used with FireFox, Chrome or iOS. For anyone who is addict of Facebook and Twitter, I’m sure Glass will be right in your alley. I mentioned that Glass in an in-browser application, but that doesn’t mean you have to have it installed for use. Just like Facebook or Twitter, which is accessed through a web site, Glass also offers a full members area for storing, searching and connecting with other members on Glass.

I’ve been playing around with Glass for the past week or so and today they just went live with their new web site, which is much better to use and navigate. It’s a completely new concept, and quite impressive. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Starting a new website or blog can be very exciting and fulfilling. The only downside is waiting for your site to get a pagerank and waiting on those rankings to increase. For some people this is something that happens pretty quickly, while others anxiously and impatiently wait and wait and often end up with disappointing results. What gives? Well, unless you really have a good grasp of SEO, then you’ll end up frustrated and wanting to give up. Don’t give up though because we’re about to give you 10 tips to help improve your rankings more quickly and also boost your motivation.

Scope Out the Competition

It’s good to know as much as possible about your competition so that you can know who you’re up against and what you should strive for. For instance, you may want to start by finding out how many incoming links your competitors have. This way, you have a good idea of how many you need in order to pass them. Also take a look at where they rank in search engines, what keywords they’re using, and what’s in their meta tags. You can’t strive for the top spot unless you know what you’re competing for. So be sure to analyze your competition as an initial plan of action.

Research Your Keywords

It’s one thing to optimize your website for keywords, but if you’re using keywords that are not even being searched for then it’s a huge waste of your time. There are plenty of free tools available on the Internet that can help you find the best keywords that are being searched for consistently. These are the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. Also think about using long tail keywords, which are keyword phrases that have 3-5 words in them. These are great for drawing in targeted, quality traffic. Lastly, be sure to use evergreen keywords which have longevity and will be relevant for years to come. This way you can always count on them to bring you traffic.

Write Quality Content

If you’re not writing quality content, you really don’t stand a chance at ranking very high. Your content needs to be useful and original. When you create content, keep in mind that you want something that will make others want to link to it and share it. Try to focus on How To’s, tutorials, and lists because these tend to generate the most traffic. If you can, add numerous supportive facts and references. Also be sure to link keywords within your content to other useful and relevant web pages. When others see that you’ve linked to them, it will encourage them to link to you which will in turn help boost your rankings. Images and visual examples like charts, videos, images, and screenshots are also very useful and add to the quality of your content.

Deep Link to Other Pages

Deep linking involves linking to other pages within your site (other than the homepage) from within your content. It’s important to link to internal pages with anchor text that contain at least 3 of the keywords for that page. This will not only help with rankings, but it also helps to keep people on your site longer – thus reducing the bounce rate. We worked heavily on this at a neon signs store I advised to and it showed great results.

Optimize Your Meta Tags

Google hates duplicate content, so if you want your website to be indexed properly then you have to make sure to optimize your meta tags. The title tag and meta tags should be different on each page of your website or else you could risk penalties. One thing that you don’t have to worry about too much are the meta keywords, since Google has already stated that they do not use these in their ranking criteria anymore.

A few pointers to remember is to keep the title tag under 60 characters and the description under 160 characters. Both of these tags both should also be relevant to the content on the page. You want to stay away from spam-like methods such as keyword stuffing and falsification of what’s in your content. Remember that in order to get to the top of the rankings, your information (that is displayed in search results) has to be attention grabbing so that people will click on it within the search results.

Optimize Your Headings and Subheadings

Just like your meta tags, you also want to be sure to optimize your headings and subheadings. These are your H-tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) and they really play an important role in organizing the information on your web pages. You should have only one H1 tag (the largest header) on your page; this is usually the title of the page or the title of your article (i.e. if you have a blog). You can then break up sections in to H2 tags and even further into H3 if needed.

Each of these heading tags should contain a keywords that you want to rank for. Since search engines consider the headings to be more important than the actual content, it’s really important to get those keywords in there.

Optimize Your Title and ALT Tags in Images

Next we have the title and alt tags that are used within images to describe what they pertain to. Again, these can be optimized with keywords to help you rank higher. Remember that most search engines now have image search capabilities. When users search for specific images, the search engines use the keywords within your title and alt tags to help them display relevant images. This is why it’s so important to use them and include your keywords, so that people can also find your content through image searching.

Optimize File Names

When you save your images (before uploading them to your site), what kind of file names are you using? Are you using something like image 1, image 2, image 3, etc? If you are doing this or anything similar, it’s a very bad idea because they don’t say anything about what your image is. Your file names should be relevant to the image and, you’ve guessed it, should also include keywords. Doing this also helps you rank high within image searches because it shows that your content is relevant to the search term.

Really anywhere you use any kind of words is an opportunity to optimize your website, include keywords, and increase your rankings. So also be sure to use this same type of technique with web page names as well as the slugs for your blog posts. Add those keywords where you can because unless you’ve blocked robots from viewing a certain page, all of your words are visible by search engines and will be indexed.

Use An XML Site Map

Sitemaps not only help your visitors find content faster, but they also help search engines understand the structure and layout of your website. This is one of the easiest ways to increase your rankings because web crawlers can quickly find your content. Also, sitemaps are fairly easy to create, so why not take advantage of them?

Validate Your Source Code

Lastly you want to be sure to validate your code and fix and errors that are found. This helps to ensure that you don’t have any broken links, images, or invalid code that may cause issues for your visitors. The easiest way to do this to use the free W3C Markup Validation Service. Google does penalize for a large number of errors, so be sure to fix as much as you can if you have any errors.

If you’re up for another tip, you can even go as far as validating your search engine optimization. A great tool for this is the Website Grader by Hubspot. It lets you see how well your website is doing and whether it has any SEO problems. It also shows you how well you’re doing on Twitter. So once you’re done with these 10 tips, also be sure to find out the grade of your website and use the provide tips to boost your SEO even further.

This guest post was written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant who works for various online companies including a popular online to-do list app and a psd to html company.