You guys are all aware of the mistake Google made with their license agreement for Chrome. Everybody blogged about it and I’m no exception, I also wrote an article last week about it. So, it was a big mistake and kind of a stupid one for a big company such as Google. Some might argue it was done on purpose just for the thing to go viral, but I’m not sure Google would do such a thing. We all agree that from the legal team, just doing a plain copy paste from the traditional license agreement template was really dumb, but everybody still downloaded Chrome without asking too much questions, so I guess it didn’t turn out to be a big mistake for end users in the end. The real problem is with corporations and It’s a mistake that will take time to fix.

Google Chrome banned

I work for a quite big consulting/software company (7,000+ employees) and we are strictly forbidden to download and install Google Chrome on our computers to protect the company’s intellectual property. I know, Google isn’t claiming rights to what you do with Chrome, they fixed the EULA, so why ban the browser? Well, the day Chrome was released, you can imagine that in a software consulting company everybody went totally mad and downloaded the new browser from Google just to test it. Somebody noticed the quite disturbing EULA mentioning Google was getting the rights to almost anything done with the browser and forwarded this to the legal department. Of course, it’s a big problem for a company when you transfer confidential and copyrighted material over a browser that automatically gets the copyrights. The legal department answered within a couple of minutes and of course they advised not to install the browser to protect the company’s intellectual property. We then received a confirmation from higher management not to install Google Chrome.

Businesses are important

You see how easy companies are on the trigger. Even if Google changed the license agreement, we didn’t receive anything mentioning it was OK to install Google Chrome from now on. The company simply don’t care: the browser was a threat, that threat is eliminated, now let’s move on. It will take some time before things get fixed and we are allowed to download the browser. Now, why is it such a big mistake? Where Microsoft succeeded and where Firefox failed is in the business market. Almost every business use Internet Explorer as the standard and every intranet/company portal/web application within these businesses has to be compatible with Internet Explorer for that reason. Firefox is extremely popular with end users/computer geeks, but failed to establish itself as a business browser and this is a problem. For a browser to completely dominate the market, it has to be popular with end users and also with companies. A lot of users use Internet Explorer at home because that’s what they use at work, it’s as simple as that. This is one thing I noticed, I like to test new software and download new stuff, but for most users it’s a pain!

So that’s it, I’m pretty sure Google Chrome is forbidden in a lot of businesses because of that first day license agreement. This is kind of bad and will take some time to fix. Google Chrome had an OK start with techies, but already has a bad reputation within businesses and that might turn out to be a problem in the future.

It’s been two busy days in the blogosphere with the launch of Google Chrome. I’ve read it all: “Chrome is the best thing since sliced bread”, “Chrome is good, but doesn’t beat my Firefox”, “Crap, it’s not available for MAC/Linux”, “Another browser to support for us, web developer, what a pain!”, “Google wants rights to things I do online with Chrome”.

Delivering Breaking news

There’s no way I could deliver breaking news, I would feel like bringing potential lies to people. That’s what happened in the last two days with Google Chrome and that’s why I waited a before writing a little something about it. We’ll have a look at the common myths together.

Google want rights to things you do using Chrome

This little thing from the Google Chrome’s EULA was raised today:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

This is scary isn’t it? Google is getting the rights to everything I post through their browser. What a luck I’m writing this post in Firefox! Instead of believing it without double checking this information, I visited Matt Cutts’ blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/). Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team so he really knows what he’s talking about and here’s what he posted today:

I knew that Google didn’t want to assert rights on what people did using Google Chrome, so I asked the Chrome team and Google lawyers for their reaction or to clarify (probably several other people pinged them too). Here’s what I heard back from Rebecca Ward, the Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome:

“In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.”

Ok, and l checked the EULA tonight and it looks like this now:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

A lot less scary isn’t it? Issue resolved, next!

Another browser to support!

Again, Matt Cutts the Google hero answered this:

Q: Another browser? Geez, I’m a webmaster/search engine optimizer/front-end programmer and I don’t want to worry about another browser.
A: Google did not add another rendering engine. Google Chrome uses WebKit for rendering, which is the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser, so if your site is compatible with Safari it should work great in Chrome. Personally, I do think creating clean code that validates and works on many different browsers will be an important skill for webmasters and web designers. These days a smart site owner thinks about how their web site looks to all browsers, from Internet Explorer to Safari to Opera to an iPhone.

So, just ensure your website looks fine on Safari and you should be fine!

Other general issues

For other general issues about Google Chrome, visit the following two posts on Matt’s blog:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/common-google-chrome-objections/

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/

My general appreciation of Chrome

I personally love it. OK, there’s a lack of features, but the thing is lightning fast. I’m a big fan of Opera and I’m pretty sure this little thing is faster. I hate the fact that there’s no status bar, no rss icon in the URL bar and no extension support, but that will come for sure. I will still continue to use Firefox because it offers so much to web developers: toolbars, firebug, etc, but I will also use Chrome because it feels lighter and is much faster.

An important step in the lifetime of every blog is to get its own domain. A lot of bloggers have blogspot or WordPress hosted blogs and there comes a point where it’s important, for credibility, to get a real domain. I personally think a good domain name is extremely important to establish your brand and we’ll have a look at common mistakes while picking a domain name.

Getting a domain name is hard

First of all, getting a domain name is hard. A couple of years ago, it used to be very easy as the number of available domain names was still under control. Now, it seems like every possible domain name is already taken and you can’t even consider getting one like internetmarketing.com. But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t want internetmarketing.com and you don’t want it either (well, I don’t know in fact). I don’t want onlinecasino.com, poker.com or whatever premium domain name. These are the type of domains you want if you’re making 20,000K a month and want to buy an established business. I personally prefer to start new projects and start things from scratch, but it’s really not the purpose of this post so we’ll get back on track: getting a domain name is hard. It’s hard, but not that much if you’re using a bit of creativity.

Don’t confuse website name and subject

One of the first mistake you can make is to confuse ‘website name’ with the subject/category of your website. Let’s say your website is about cats, your first reflex will be to get a domain like: cats.com, onlinecats.com, cutecats.com or something similar. Why? Why would you want your domain name to be the subject of your website? You can have a blog about cats and still have a domain name like ‘catzy.com’. It’s true we still have cat in ‘catzy’ but it’s not a problem, we now have a catchy name and you have better chances for ‘catzy.com’ to be available than ‘catsonline.com’. I personally find it easier to remind ‘catzy’ and it really sounds great to me, which would ensure people would go back to your website if they ever need information about cats.

Think about the big names

Let’s make a little comparison with some of the biggest websites out there. I will list a couple of .com domain names and what could have been their domain names if they used their niche instead of an original name.

• google.com: searchengine.com
• youtube.com: submitvideos.com
• facebook.com: socialnetwork.com
• twitter.com: microblogging.com
• shoemoney.com: makemoneyonline.com
• John Chow: makemoneyonline.com also
• techcrunch: blogabouttechnology.com
• digg: votewebsites.com
• delicious: socialbookmarking.com

You see how boring these names are? I mean, Google is much more appealing than searchengine.com and the same goes for all websites listed above. Take Facebook for instance, I’m pretty sure that at the time of registration, socialnetwork.com was probably taken, but what about facebook.com? facebook.com was probably available and it cost a little 9$ to register the domain name like any other domain.

You see how important being creative in your domain name is? Not only it ensure you can pick an available domain name, but it also ensure your domain name is a catchy one.

Establish a brand

When picking a domain name, you want a name that will be great to establish as a brand. I would personally enjoy putting seohorror.com on a t-shirt, but I don’t think something like onlineseo.com would look as good on the same t-shirt. This is one thing I consider when picking a domain: would my name look great on a t-shirt or mug?

You also want people to remember your name so they can talk to their friends about it. If you have something too generic, people won’t remember it. If your name is something really unique, then it’s easy to remember. What’s also important for people to remember your domain name? Make it short! You don’t want a 100 words domain name: below 15 characters and two words is good. Again, it’s not an exact science as there are always special situations where a longer domain would be suitable, but in most cases, 15 characters and two words is OK.

Get that domain name!

It’s now time to get that domain name. Start your search on websites like Go Daddy for available domain names and remember not to confuse category/subject with name!

As bloggers, our main concern is to write good content so we can drive some traffic to our blog, but also build backlinks. One thing you’ve probably noticed is how hard it is to get backlinks from articles. Unless you have a good users base or write an extremely unique and valuable article, people won’t talk about your posts. We all know it’s impossible to write everyday the best post ever and nobody starts a blog with an instant 20,000 readers. So, what can you do?

Think outside articles

If you can’t initially drive thousands of visitors with your posts, you have to think about an alternative way of doing it. Even if you have thousands of visitors, it’s always interesting to increase your traffic and alternatives to articles are still of interest for you.

I know you’re asking “what alternatives can we use?”. Well, there’s nothing specific I can say here but there are a couple of concepts you can learn from. Being a developper, I always think of tools/plugins I could develop to help the community. This can be a WP plugin, a Google gadget or whatever web-based tool. How can you drive traffic with that? Well, if you host the tool on the same domain as your website, people will visit your website and subscribe to it if they like what you do. Many bloggers are doing it and it’s usually working great.

How is that different from an article? Well, it’s really unique and it’s something people can’t copy so they have to link to you. Let’s say you develop a great WordPress plugin, other bloggers will surely talk about it, use it and link to your website to actually download the plugin because it’s not available elsewhere.

One example I can give is a Google gadget I developed for one of my website. The website isn’t a blog, but the concept remains the same: not rely on Google ranking to get traffic. I’m a big fan of the well known Rubik’s Cube, so a couple of months ago I built an online Rubik’s cube timer with statistics so that people could record their best times. I had to find a way to be really different and not only rely on Google search to get some traffic, so I built a Google gadget people could put on their Google home page. I had to do this because at first, I wasn’t ranked very well for the keyword “Rubik’s Cube Timer” (Now I’m #2). While very useful, the gadget is a simple version of the timer and it’s lacking a lot of features so people still have to visit the website. The gadget is on Google directory, has a user base of 380+ users, help me drive additional traffic and is a free advertisement for my website on Google!

The gadget looks like that:

And see how it’s giving me free exposure on Google:

People searching for a timer or something similar for their Google home page ended up using my little timer. Whenever they needed additional features, they ended up on the main website. This was a great way at first to drive some important visitors and get people to talk about the website.

I’m not a developer

Ok, this was just an example to show you how can something you usually wouldn’t think about could drive traffic to your website. I’m a developer so that kind of tools is quite easy to do for me, but not everybody is a developer. There are a lot of other ways to drive traffic and backlinks to your website. Contests are particularly popular among bloggers. Having a contest on your blog will help you drive additional traffic and there are good chances other bloggers will talk about your contest if it’s any good. I’ve seen some contests like 25$ by Paypal for the top commentator of the month and stuff like that. Why not have t-shirts with your website logo and give that away once a week/month? Things like that work and you really just have to be creative.

I’m working on a couple of things outside articles only for SEO Horror and these should be live in the next couple of months. It’s OK if it takes time to develop or to get online because you’re not in short term blogging…Are you?

Be creative

I’ve said it a couple of times in this article: be creative. There aren’t any exact techniques but it’s just important to think about what else outside your articles you can use to drive traffic. One of the most successful blogger John Chow isn’t even ranked in Google for “John Chow” because of aggressive SEO techniques. How does he drives traffic then? Well, he has found numerous ways over the years to do so and he still has one of the most successful blog on the Internet with 27,000+ subscribers, whithout Google. You want to drive traffic from Google, but it’s just to show that Google isn’t everything, you can use alternative ways.