Starting today (Monday, May 17th, 2010) we will be running 2 digital billboards featuring AdvertiseWisconsin.com.  Get your Wisconsin ads posted for free at AdvertiseWisconsin.com now and benefit from the billboard traffic the site will be receiving all month!

The billboards will be running in Oshkosh, WI and Fond du Lac, WI at the following locations:

Highway 41 near Highway 45 North of Oshkosh

Highway 41 near Winnebago St. in Fond du Lac

If you are a registered user who lives in the area and you manage to get me a picture for the site, I will give you a free ad upgrade of your choice on any 1 of your posted ads.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of what the billboard is going to look like:

New AdvertiseWisconsin.com Billboard

50StatesClassifieds.com

This post is regarding our free classifieds website, 50 States Classifieds.  We thought it was worth cross-posting, since so many Green Web Design blog readers also use the site.

Some users may not be aware that there is an easier way to reach their ads.  This is just a quick note to let you know about some of the other ways you can find us.

We use these different website addresses when advertising, so that shoppers can easily find local ads in their state without remembering a  long, complicated URL.

For example: Telling people to go to AdvertiseWisconsin.com is so much easier than telling them to go to “http://www.50statesclassifieds.com/category.php?cid=87”   and expecting them to remember it!

50 States Free Classifieds

Use this easy reference list to find our free classifieds site quickly and easily according to which state you’re in:

Do you have a website? Do you have a Google Webmasters account? If not, you need one!  This document outlines how to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and explains a few of the basics.

Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters and sign up for an account.

You will see the Home page.  Scroll down and click the “Add a site” button, and add your website address.  Then, under “sites” click on the domain you just created.

You will now see the dashboard.  It is an overview of several tools:  Top search queries, Crawl errors, links to your site, keywords, sitemaps – you can click “More” under any section to see more information.

When you are done exploring the dashboard, look to the left.  There are 4 main navigation sections: Site Configuration, Your site on the Web, Diagnostics, and Labs.

First, click the + sign next to Site Configuration and go to  Settings.  You can see the current crawl settings and change them here.

Now, click the + sign next to Diagnostics.  Here, you will find HTML Suggestions.  Here, you can get a good look at how many pages that are indexed have duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, etc. It’s a good idea to look at this section often and see what can be fixed when you notice new items have appeared.

Last, click the + sign next to Labs.  When you use the “Fetch as Googlebot” tool, and enter any page from your site, Googlebot will show you exactly how it sees that page.  Click on the word “Success” next to any fetched page to see the results.

Under Site Performance, you will see a performance overview of your site.  It takes several days for this page to update after it takes a reading, you may have to give it a week in between updates.  Scroll down and you will see it offers page speed suggestions for improving your website load time.

If you have any questions about the other sections in Google Webmasters that I did not discuss, submit them here!

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Jessica Franke is the owner of Green Web Design, a full service Website Design, Web Hosting, Domain Registrar, and Online Marketing firm.  She is also the owner of 50 States Classifieds, and has been providing Free Classifieds online since 2002.  For more articles written by Jessica Franke, visit her blog.

Google announced today at the Computer History Museum that it will be rolling out real-time search in the next several days, as well as the ability to search by voice, location, and sight from a mobile device.  They also announced that they are extending their voice search capabilities on Android devices to recognize Japanese, as well as allowing you to search for “what’s nearby”. Also demonstrated was Google Goggles, a visual search application that lets you search for objects using images rather than words, using your camera phone.  Via Google’s Blog:

First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited!  I can’t wait to try some of these features out. For more information on the mobile features, visit the Google Mobile Blog.

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