Have you ever seen a grouping of Google gadgets available as tabs? It looks like the image to the right (click image to see what I am talking about).

This is the way iGoogle tabs are distributed. A page like this is shown to the user who can then decide which of the gadgets will be in the tab.

If a user presses the blue “Add to iGoogle” button, then they are taken to their iGoogle home page and there will now be a new tab of gadgets there…

By using tabs, you can spread more than one gadget at a time. The above example puts a virtual pets tab with six gadgets on a users iGoogle page with one click. This post will tell you how to do this, but first let’s see why we should use an iGoogle tab at all…

Reasons to use iGoogle tabs

• Ranking – If enough people are using your gadgets under a certain tab, there are ranking benefits. If your virtual pet gadget is included in a tab titled “virtual pets” then that is a great indication that your gadget is useful and has something to do with “virtual pets”.
• Distribution – Let’s say you have popular gadgets already in the gadget directory, but also have some new ones as well. You can mix and match your gadgets to help distribute the new ones off the popularity of your old gadgets. For this example I am doing exactly that. There are six gadgets in this virtual pets iGoogle tab. Three of them are very popular (the monkey, panda and the puppy), and three are new (the lion cub, fox, and turtle).
• Promotion – If you have a service you are promoting you can make a couple of themed gadgets around your subject, put them in a tab, and presto, you have something to promote.

How to create an iGoogle tab

To create a tab go to any of your existing tabs on your iGoogle homepage (most people only have the two default tabs – “home” and “chat”). Click the down arrow next to the tab name as shown in image.

Once you click that you will see an option to “add a tab”. Click that and a window will pop up that looks like this…

It will ask you to name the tab you are about to make. Do so wisely. Name your tab for what you would like your gadgets to rank for. If your gadgets are about cars, name it “cars”. Our example one is about virtual pets, so I named it “virtual pets”.

Keep the box checked that says “I am feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name.” This will fill your new tab with gadgets that already rank well for the word or phrase you are naming your tab. Seeing what gadgets Google will fill the tab with lets you know a couple of important things.

1. Who your competitors are – The gadgets that show up are doing well, learn from them and use this information to make better and more useful gadgets for your term.

2. If there are competitors – If Google doesn’t find gadgets for your tab then you have found a niche worth trying.

Okay so now we have an iGoogle tab, what next? I would suggest filling it with your own gadgets! Once you have added your gadgets (and perhaps removed your competitors) look at the tab and see if it offers a useful set of gadgets that are a good fit for the term you used to name the tab. Don’t be afraid to include other peoples gadgets as well. A good goal would be to offer a complete, and helpful set of gadgets. If you named your tab “cars” then make sure there are a good group of gadgets that covers what a user would want about cars (car news, car photos, car videos, etc.).

How to distribute an iGoogle tab

How do you let people know about your tab? The first step is finding out what the share link is so that you can link to the “add tab” page.
To do this go back to that little down arrow next to your new tab…

Click it and choose the “share this tab” option.When you do you will see a window like this…

Do not send this to any friends yet, just send the tab to yourself. Enter your email, and hit send (btw if you have a theme, or user preferences that you want the gadgets in the tab to retain check the “save my settings” box).

You will receive an email that links to the page where users can find your tab as in the image to the right. This page lets an user add the several gadgets within your tab with one click. Very nice.

Now that you are armed with the URL of the tab, go visit and make sure everything looks right and that it is working and displaying well. Make sure you have thumbnail images for all the gadgets in your tab so that the “add tab” page looks pleasing and nice (learn about thumbnail images in my moduleprefs tutorial).

Okay we now have an iGoogle tab full of gadgets, and a URL to share it, let’s promote this baby.

How to promote an iGoogle tab

• First thing I want to say about this is that these “add tab” pages actually can rank rather well so do not be afraid to link to this page lavishly. But how do we get people to go to this “add tab” page.
• If you have a website, feature your iGoogle tab somewhere.
• Using our example, I have a virtual pet Google gadgets page and what I did with this new tab was to make it into sorta an ad. It is in the side bar of that page.
• However and where ever you feature it or link to it from your website, make sure that it is somewhat prominent. You want people to go… “What’s an iGoogle tab?, let’s see….. [click]“
• If you have made a useful set of gadgets then your tab can be shared like any other link. I had a Stephen Colbert tab and it hit the front page of Digg.
• If you do submit to a social sharing / voting site then make sure that you enter the “add tab” page as the URL. Do not link to your own site where you are explaining about it. The reason for this is that Google is a trusted domain. If you are simply linking to a Google “add tab” page, then people who lke the subject will actually feel okay voting up, whereas a blog post about how gosh darn nifty your tab is will appear spammy.
• Link to it from within your gadgets. Add a small text link in your gadgets that takes users your “add tab” page.
• Get a little help from your friends. Tell them about it and have them install it.

You basically can use any technique to promote this as you do any other webpage. What makes iGoogle tabs so neat is that they simplify the process a user must go through in order to use your gadgets.

Instead of having six different campaigns for six different gadgets, why not concentrate on just one for all of your gadgets? In many situations this is wise, and associates your gadgets with their search terms.

When you promote your Google gadget, you may also be unintentionally promoting your competitors gadgets as well.

Google wants to provide suggestions to their users of other gadgets they might enjoy. The problem this may cause for you is that those “other” gadgets may just well be your competitors. Here is a way to keep Google from showing your competitors gadgets during promotion. Let’s look at one of the places that Google suggests other gadgets and see how to get around this problem.

1) Google gadget directory description:

In this example, the gadget description page for a Travelocity gadget is shown. On this page Google suggests other gadgets from Expedia, Kayak, etc. and therefore promotes Travelocity’s competitors.

To avoid this you can choose not to send people to the gadget description and instead use the “add to Google” option instead. If you do then you won’t be sending your customers to this page and they will therefore never see Googles suggested gadgets.

The “Add to Google” page shows only the gadget sceenshot and the description that you wrote of your gadget:

Here is the “add to Google” page for the Travelocity gadget, this page can be displayed for any gadget by adding the gadget xml file location to the end of a google url. Here is the url for the travelocity one:

“http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/travelocity/travelocity.xml”

Don’t let the length of the url scare you, just replace the location of your gadget.

If your gadget is at “http://www.example.com/gadget.xml” then the add to Google url would look like this:

http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://www.example.com/gadget.xml

By sending your customers to the add to Google page for your gadget rather than you gadget description page, you can easily avoid promoting your competitors.

My next article will show you how to avoid doing this in another place within iGoogle, the canvas page.

With mentions in Mashable and SearchEngineLand this Digg like gadget is off to a very good start. The What’s Popular gadget shows stories, videos and images that are popular. You can submit your own stuff to the gadget and these things can be voted on.

What’s Popular? How about What’s Probable?

There are some notable things about how this gadget is made. First off, this gadget is a URL gadget, meaning it is using type=”url”. This is very interesting to me since Google has not really used this type of gadget for any of it’s official gadgets. This type of Google gadget simply displays content from a url, which means the content behind this gadget is at a live web page…

http://www.google.com/labs/popgadget/world

This means that the about url is searchable, indexable, etc. Here it is in the Google results:

This is a full swing, functioning website and will likely serve as the home page of this service at a later date. In other words, expect this service to be a web based feature of Google. This is not a gadget only project by any means.

This service will become popular itself among iGoogle users. In fact, if history serves as a guide, I can almost assure you that this gadget will become a default gadget on new iGoogle pages.

Virtually all competitors to Digg lack one common thing, distribution.

Guess what? By making this a default Google gadget on iGoogle this gadget (and therefore this service) will have around 8 million users almost overnight. iGoogle is a distribution monster.

I am willing to bet three things about Google What’s Popular

• It will be a web based service soon
• It will be a default Google gadget on iGoogle
• It will definiately be a contender to other voting sites, even Digg.

This is how Google distributed the Gmail gadget and the YouTube gadget, I see no reason why the same won’t be true of the “What’s Popular” service as well.

This lesson will surely give you an upper hand in having your Google gadgets be seen by more people. 

It explores the best practices of how to effectively describe and spread your Google gadgets via the underused method of complete ModulePrefs.

Guide to ModulePrefs

What are ModulePrefs?

ModulePrefs are the “metadata” of a Google gadget.

On a web page you define the title of that webpage using meta data, with Google gadgets however, the title is defined using ModulePrefs. You also define things like the height and width of your gadget with them, if you have a Google gadget, you already have a ModulePref section in the code of your gadget as it is required (prefs stands for preferences).

Why are ModulePrefs important?

Without the ModulePrefs code, your gadget wouldn’t be defined in anyway and probably wouldn’t even work.

What can be done with ModulePrefs that I am not already doing?

Here is the important part, most people (as in the vast majority) are under utilizing what can be done with ModulePrefs and are absolutely missing out on the many SEO benefits and, just as importantly, the directory benefits available to them. To display the different possibilities we will use this gadget as an example…

If you use all the ModulePrefs availible to you, then Google will create four different pages (in addition to your gadget itself) where information about your gadget can be found and linked to.

1) the iGoogle gadget directory description page, 2) the gadget add page, 3) the author page and 4) the gadget syndication directory description page.

What is found on these pages is defined by what ModulePrefs you use in your gadget. These four places are the places where most of the things defined by your ModulePrefs will be displayed. By knowing where and how your preferences are displayed you can strategically optimize your gadget to be used by people and you can use some basic SEO strategies as well.

The good news is you already are using Moduleprefs in your gadget. The section of a gadget that is called “ModulePrefs” is a required element of your code. The trick is to use all of the ModulePrefs available to you. You are likely only using the minimum, required prefs. Most Google gadgets have the common ones defined like “title”, “height”, etc.

ModulePrefs Defined

Moduleprefs are the part of the gadget code that lies between the <modulePrefs> and </ModulePrefs> tags. Let’s examine a common set from a Google gadget…

The above code represents a very common set of ModulePrefs – “title” “description” “screenshot” “thumbnail” and “height”. These are the minimal values you can set, their values are defined below.

title

title=”Ferret Virtual Pet”

This is self explanatory, the “title” field sets the title and is displayed within the Google gadget and also on the gadget description page. The title is important and should be accurate and descriptive of the gadget, but it is also important to consider what people are looking for when they search the directory. In this example I am using  “ferret virtual pet” for a title. By calling it this I am improving the odds that this gadget can be found not only to those searching for “ferret” and also those searching for “virtual pets”.

description

description=”A funny little ferret pet for you to play with. Feed it some eggs, and see what happens when you pet it (make sure to hold down your mouse button while you do so).”

The description is obviously a description of the the gadget. It is displayed in all four pages Google creates about your gadget and is also required to submit a gadget to the iGoogle gadget directory.

Descriptions should portray what your gadget is and why someone should use it.

height

height=”385″

This sets the height of the gadget and is not displayed anywhere but determines how your gadget will display. This value is defaulted to pixels.

screenshot

screenshot=http://www.gadzi.com/gadgets/images/ferret.png”

The screenshot is a larger image of your gadget. Gadget screenshots should be 280 pixels wide. The height of the screenshot should be the “natural” height of the gadget when it’s in use and can be .gif or .jpeg, but .png is preferred. It should be about this same size as your gadget is. The screenshot image is displayed in three of the four pages Google creates about your gadget. The iGoogle description page, the gadget syndication directory page, and the add to Google page. It is not displayed on the author page.

thumbnail

thumbnail=”http://www.gadzi.com/gadgets/images/ferret-tn.png”

The thumbnail image is displayed on the author page and in the iGoogle gadget directory results.

The thumbnail is a small image that previews your gadget pleasantly and descriptively. Gadget thumbnails should be 120×60 pixels and can be .gif or .jpeg, but .png is preferred.

Okay, we have defined the ModulePrefs that are commonly used. The ones defined above are already existing in most Google gadgets. Let’s get to the ones that are not used as often and discuss their usefulness for search and directory optimization…

title_url

title_url=”http://www.gadzi.com/animals/virtual-pets.html”

This ModulePref is one of the more important ones, particularly for spreading your gadgets. Using this ModulePref you can make your gadget title into a click-able link that points wherever you choose.

I can not stress enough that this is one of the most important ModulePrefs to use.

Using the “title_url” allows you to guide users of your gadget to another page. By planning out your gadgets well, this can create enormous traffic to your gadget page. The vitual pet gadgets I have all use this and link to a page where other virtual pet gadgets can be found. This page receives tens of thousands of visits a month, not through search engines, but from gadget traffic (people clicking the link in the gadget or the link in the title of the gadget).

This is particularly important if you or your business have multiple gadgets. Using “title_url” you can have your gadget link to your gadgets overview page and enjoy serious direct traffic. To learn more of this strategy, see my old post “3 Ways to get money and traffic from Google gadgets“.

Author related ModulePrefs:

The next few ones we will define are all author related. Simply put, these create a new Google page that displays information about the author of the gadget. The author page is very useful in many ways for both businesses and personal authors. See my example author page or let’s get to the ModulePrefs for authors…

author

author=”Gadzi”

In this example I used “Gadzi” which is the nickname I use for my example gadgets.

By properly utilizing the author and author related ModeulePrefs (more described below) I have an author page which lists and displays my example gadgets for this account. This author page carries pagerank and can be used as a very powerful SEO tool that allows your quality themed gadgets to rank better in the iGoogle gadget directory. You can use your name, a nickname, or if you have a business name I recommend using that for this field.

author_email

author_email=gadgets@gadzi.com

The author email is actually the field used to define your author page. This is an important one to keep universal across all your gadgets. If you use different author emails in different gadgets, you will have multiple author pages even if you keep the author name the same.

This also allows people to contact you about the gadget via your author page.

author_photo

author_photo=”http://example.com/images/profile.jpg”

The author_photo let’s you display an image on your author profile page. As can be said of any profile page, it is useful to have an image, whether it be a photo of you or your businesses logo.

The requirements of the author photo are a little bit geared towards photos because of the dimensions of the photo, which is basically a tall rectangle (see image on right). The image must be 70×100 , PNG format preferred, but JPG/GIF are also supported.

author_aboutme

author_aboutme=”My name is Patrick Sexton I am a consultant for gadget strategies for brand promotion. I discuss Google gadgets at SEOish.com”

The author_aboutme field defines the content for your author page. This can describe yourself  or your business. I keep mentioning businesses and the reason I do is because the author page is an excellent and useful business profile page that can link to your website.

The more author related ModulePrefs that you use the more content rich your author page can be. with the author_aboutme one, you can really create a meaty page. Resist the urge to just put a sentence and really describe yourself or your business. The more text that is used in this field, the more content rich your author page will be.

author_link

author_link=”http://www.seoish.com”

Yes!

You can link to your website from your author profile page. To do so include the author_link ModulePref .

This link does not pass much juice but it can result in much direct traffic, and if you are a business this link can bring in the users of your gadgets to the place you desire them to come. Consider making a page specifically designed for your Google gadget users.

author_location and author_quote

author_location=”Kauai, Hawaii”

author_quote=”Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. – Douglas Adams”

These are simply more details you can enter about where you are at and your favorite quote or tagline.

These are good to have if only to make the page more full and interesting.

There are even more ModulePrefs to use and more are coming out often with the new gadget documentation. Here are some of the places to look for more details:

Google gadget (legacy) ModulePrefs

Google gadget XML reference

One common question among businesses considering Google gadgets or other widgets is basically this…

“Why should I encourage people to use the functionality of my web site without actually visiting my website?”

This question makes sense if someone for example is monetizing their site via adsense. If they display their content elsewhere like iGoogle or Facebook they “lose” the money making part of their website.

The real questions that people should probably be thinking is “Why isn’t my content working for me where ever it is displayed?”

If your goal is branding for example, you can immediately jump into the gadget world and achieve your goals. If your goal is helping your customers then you can jump immediately into gadgets.

To make something available via gadgets, you should ensure that your portable content is accomplishing your goals. If you are not receiving value from your content when it is portable, you may want to start designing content that will.

To illustrate this, let’s look at the Getlisted Google gadget…

This gadget uses the canvas view of iGoogle to display all the information availible about your business, as though you were at the website itself. The entire functionality is there, including the ability to sign in and use your own personal dashboard.

Since the entire functionality is availible via this gadget, there may seem to be no reason whatsoever for a user to ever even visit the GetListed.org web site.

I am okay with that.

GetListed was designed as an absolutely portable being. Wherever and however this content is displayed is fine with me. If a user is using it on Facebook, iGoogle or other widget platforms, it still does it’s job and still provides value to the users and also provides value to to me, it’s creator.

In fact, the way your content is displayed is becoming less up to you and more up to what users want.

The GetListed functionality can be placed on any website by just using an iframe for example.

Here is the same functionality on another website via an iframe at feedthebot.com…

Content portability is fast becoming a web reality.

Is your content ready?

Getlisted Google gadget code is here

Iframe example on Feedthebot is here

Related post to portability is here

This post will describe the best practices of how to promote a Google gadget, but most of the things I mention are equally useful for any kind of widget promotion.

Google Gadget Promotion 101

Let’s get right to a couple of obvious things first so that we don’t waste any time…

Usefulness:

If your Google gadget is not useful to anyone, it will not do well no matter how well you promote it. It is better to begin again with a new useful gadget than to promote one that is not useful to anyone. What makes a Google gadget useful? It must somehow pleasure someone. It must make them laugh, make their day easier, provide information that is not available elsewhere, entertain them, or be fun to interact with. Ask anyone other than you to try it and tell you what they think. A useful gadget is amazingly easy to promote. The first step in Google gadget promotion is to determine honestly if your gadget is worth promoting.

Is it useful?

If yes start promoting.

If not, start over, make a new gadget. Promoting your gadget won’t help.

Know your audience:

The audience of a Google gadget is in large part iGoogle users. iGoogle is a personalized homepage. This means that only the owner of that page can see your gadget. I want to say that again. Only the owner of the iGoogle page can see that iGoogle page. It is not a public profile that others can see. Think about that when designing and creating your gadget. A great example of this would be the use of viral installers (those little buttons under gadgets that say “get this widget”).

If there is only one person at a time seeing your gadget, then there is no reason to have a “get this widget” button because they already have it.

These buttons or viral installers are not appropriate for Google gadgets the vast majority of time. It is not useful and it takes up space. Space is what you have the least of in your widget so use it wisely to be useful and pleasant to the users of the widget.

Does your Google gadget have a viral installer?

If yes, get rid of it and make a iGoogle gadget specific version of your widget that does not include the “get this widget” button.

If no, continue.

Simplicity:

The Google gadgets that are the most popular are also the Google gadgets that are the most simple. Bells and whistles are not often appropriate for a Google gadget. They can have bells and whistles by visiting your site if they want. Gadget users want the basic  functionality of your website on their homepage, they do not want your website on their homepage. A simple search box is virtually always more universally used than a fancier type of gadget. There are millions of users of the Wikipedia search gadget. This gadget is just a searchbox that redirects to Wikipedia… Notice the lack of any dancing elves or branding overkill? You should also notice that it is small and simple. The overall reason this widget is used by millions is that is provides a simple and useful interface to information that is used by alot of people. It doesn’t need flashy design elements. It does it’s job. It is useful.

Okay, let’s get to the promotion guide…

Google Gadget Promotion

The most important part of gadget promotion is usefulness and functionality, but what is the next important thing?

Representation in the Google gadget directory:

The way that most users find gadgets is the Google gadget directory. The single largest mistake that I have seen people make is to not submit their gadget to the directory. If you are not in the Google gadget directory, users will not find you there. To be more clear, if you are not in the Google gadget directory then your gadget is not represented in the single most used place that users find gadgets. There is a hundred million or so users using the Google gadget directory. I can name dozens of Fortune 1000 companies who do not understand this. If somebody goes to the Google gadget directory and searches for your exact brand name they will not find you unless you have submitted your gadget to the directory. The reason so many people (and particularly large brands) are not represented in the Google gadget directory is because they trust their widget spread to media companies who use viral installers.

It is important to know that just because a user has the capacity to install your gadget on iGoogle does not mean that your gadget is represented in the Google gadget directory.

Search for your gadget or your brand name in the Google gadget directory

If it is there continue.

If it is not there, submit it to the directory

Presentation:

How your gadget or widget is presented to people is the number one factor in if they will even try it out. Let’s look in detail at what presentation options we have on the Google gadget platform.

Description: What you say about your gadget in your description is very important and should be concise and describe the gadget and it’s usefulness quickly and simply. But people won’t even read or bother to see your description unless they like the…

Thumbnail: Each Google gadget has a thumbnail. This is a small image that represents your gadget. This is one of the most important pieces of promotion you have. It has to get a point across and it has to stand out from the other thumbnails users are presented with. The first step to having an effective thumbnail is to actually have a thumbnail. Tens of thousands of gadget do not even have a thumbnail image! When a gadget does not have a thumbnail then Google displays a default thumbnail (image on left). If your gadget is based on a feed then it also shows a default image (shown on right). If there is no distinction between you and other gadgets, there is a less likelihood that a user will even click to your gadget description page. To illustrate this point, let’s search for “SEO” in the Google gadget directory… Of the first 5 results, only one has a thumbnail. See how the others just sort of blend together and seem sorta “blah”? When someone searches for anything in the Google gadget directory the only visual indication they will get of your gadget is the thumbnail.

They have to click again before they see the other visual indication of your gadget (the screen shot which will will speak of in a moment). This means that the first visual indication of your gadget a user receives is the thumbnail image. The thumbnail is important.

To have a thumbnail in your gadget requires only one line of code… thumbnail=”urlofyourimage”

The specs of what a thumbnail should be are provided by Google as…

Thumbnails are used in the content directory to give users a preview of a gadget. They should capture the main functionality of your gadget without showing it in its entirety. The value for this attribute is a string that gives the URL for a gadget thumbnail. This must be a well-formed URL, not a relative URL. This image must be on a public web site that is not blocked by robots.txt. PNG is the preferred format, though GIF and JPG are also acceptable. Thumbnails should be 120×60 pixels. They should not include title bars.

Does your gadget have a thumbnail?

If yes continue

If no, add a thumbnail. The directions of how to do so are provided by Google here.If that page seems confusing, you may want to start with my Google gadget tutorial.

Screen Shot: The screen shot of a Google gadget is displayed to a potential user when they are asked if they want to install a gadget and it is also displayed in the Google gadget directory description page for that gadget. The screenshot should show visually what the gadget will look like on the users homepage. Here is what Google says about the screenshot in their documentation….

This is a string that gives the URL for a gadget screenshot. This must be a well-formed URL, not a relative URL. This image must be on a public web site that is not blocked by robots.txt. PNG is the preferred format, though GIF and JPG are also acceptable. Gadget screenshots should be 280 pixels wide. The height of the screenshot should be the “natural” height of the gadget when it’s in use. This helps users understand how much space a gadget will consume on their screen before they add it to their page. The screenshot should not have any whitespace above the gadget’s blue header bar. Screenshots should show your full gadget, including its title bar, but nothing else. Alternatively, you can screenshot the gadget with the edit window open. Screenshots should not be resized or cropped. For quality and consistency, Google may take its own screenshots of a given gadget.

Let’s take a look at a screenshot on a Google gadget description page…

This is a Google gadget from Google itself. The image is the screenshot image. It shows a potential user what the gadget will look like on their homepage. It is always worth looking at official Google gadgets to see what they are doing. They are well aware of what works and what does not. Often by just looking at how a gadget built by Google is listed can tell you alot.

Does your gadget have a screenshot?

If yes, continue

If no, add a screenshot that follow the guidelines I quoted above.

Other directories that list Google gadgets:

Your gadget should be in as many directories as possible. Here is a list of places to submit your Google gadget.

Display your gadget on your website

The best way to introduce your gadget to the world is through your own website, or through already existing interactions between yourself and your customers or users. There are different ways to accomplish this.

One way is to simply have a page dedicated to different ways that a user can interact with your website.
A great example of this is the website Sphinn, where they have a specific page that highlights different ways users can interact with their site. It is important not only to have page like this, but to make that page prominent. Sphinn accomplishes this by listing this page in their top navigation.

This is smart for a couple of reasons, one so that people can find it, and two, because gadgets, like webpages are listed in relevance in the Google gadget directory. The same algorithm that also ranks gadgets (I will speak more on this later).

Another way is to use existing  interactions between your website and your users to promote your gadget.

An example of this would be a commerce website that takes payments. If you take payments, then you also give receipts. Consider mentioning your gadget on your receipts or “thank you for your purchase” page. Even better, give them a reason to use it. Consider saying something like “save 20 percent on items bought through our Google gadget”.

Yet another way to use your website is to actually display information through a Google gadget. Look at your sidebar, what are you showing?  Using Sphinn.com as an example again, they are displaying the “Top 10 most Sphunn in What’s New” which is an ever changing list of what stories have been voted on the most that are not yet promoted to the front page. That information could be shown in a gadget that people can grab.

The popular news site Digg is a great example of how to do this. They have the very same type of scenario. The have information to show their users in a sidebar. They are showing that information inside a widget.

This tactic is very successful.

Is your gadget mentioned on your website?

If yes continue

If no, put it on your website.

The best place to get information about Google is Google itself, here is what they have to say about promoting your gadget.

Here is another Google page about what users like to see in their gadgets.

1.) Widgetbox

Widgetbox has offered for over a year something called “blidgets”. These are widgets that take a feed and, well, turn them into a widget. It takes only a couple of minutes to do it. In fact, you don’t even need to tell it your feed address, just your blog address.

You just go to their feed widget page (shown above) and enter the url of your blog. After you hit the continue button, you will be presented with your new widget (pretty tough huh?) and you will be able to customize it.

Customize it then save it (you will have to make an account, which is simple and painless). Widgetbox has an extremely strong domain SEO value. Your description page for your blidget on Widgetbox will likely rank in the top 10 or 20 for whatever your blog name is within a couple of days.

2) Google Gadget

To make your feed into a Google gadget is also simple and easy to do. I once explained this over at SEOmoz but this time I will add a couple of details and suggestions. The steps are…

1) Go to the Google gadget directory

On the bottom of the left hand navigation there is a link that says “Add feed or gadget” Click that.

2) Enter your feed URL and click “Add”

It will think a second and then tell you it is

done. Go back to your iGoogle home and you will see a gadget displaying your latest posts…

You are done!

When you are looking at your feed gadget on your iGoogle home page, click the little down arrow on the upper right hand corner of the gadget and choose “about this gadget” you will be taken to a page that describes your new gadget.

You can also add just a button using Google’s button creator.

If you have dealt with some programming before, I highly suggest taking a look at another Google product that is just fabulous… the Google AJAX Feed API

3) Sprout

Sprout is an interface that allows you to create flash widgets without knowing flash. It is a very impressive tool that is used by some big players. For the purpose of this tutorial I am just going to describe how to make a feed, but you can add videos, pictures, twitter, just about anything really.

Let’s make a widget out of the SEOish feed…

Go to the Sprout Get Started page and click the enormous button that says “Start building now”. If you are in IE it may take awhile to load. Whe it does it will present you with some choices. Choose “Blank Slate”…

Once you click that you will asked to enter a title and description of your project. I put as a title “SEOish” and as a description “A fabulously wonderful resource on widgets and SEO”.

Next you will come to the canvas. The white square in the middle of the page is your widget canvas…

In the upper left hand corner, click “general”. Once you do that the menu will expand and now you have to choose “News Feed”…

When you choose news feed it will then think a minute and then present you with a square in your canvas you can adjust this square to cover the whole canvas.

Next we must tell the widget builder what feed to put in there. Over on the right hand side of the page you will see bunches of choices, but let’s look at the one that says “Feed URL”.

This is where you enter your feed url and once you do you will see your latest posts show up in the widget.

In the upper right hand corner look for the “preview” button. Click it and it will show you a preview of your widget…

Now you can do whatever you want, add pictures, format it or just leave it as it is.

When you like how it looks just click “save” it is in the upper right hand corner near “preview”.

To see it and get the code you will have to hit “publish”. You will be asked to make an account (again, simple and easy). Congrats! you now have a flash widget.

4) Dapper.net

Dapper.net is a very strong a robust tool. You get alot of choices of how to display your feed as a widget (flash, Google gadget, Netvibes gadget, etc.).

To get started on dapper go to the create Dapp page.

Choose the tab that says “In an existing RSS Feed”…

Enter your feed url. After you enter your url look at the choices you have (in the pic to right the choices are to the left of the RSS button).

Choose if you want a Google gadget, Netvibes Module, or just an RSS feed. If you choose the Google gadget or the Netvibes module, that is what you will get. Pretty simple.

If you choose RSS feed however, you get some more interesting choices…

Let’s choose the RSS feed option for SEOish.com. I entered http://www.seoish.com and then I choose RSS feed, then I hit the “Next step” button. Here is what the next page looks like…

This page is a preview of what is possible to display from your feed. If you have titles, descriptions, and dates then you are doing good. You can make some changes on this page like remove the publication date (by unchecking it in the upper right hand corner) but for the purposes of what we are doing right now let’s just go to the next step. The next page will give you a host of choices of how to display your content. Play around with them all. You will have to make an account to do this (simple, free, easy).

One underutilized method of gadget spread is Internationalization.

Google gadgets that are only listed in the English language are missing tens of millions of potential users.

The Google gadget directory, when seen in Italy, prefers to show Italian language descriptions and titles. They are more useful to Italian users. Also consider that when an Italian user is searching for a “cat” gadget they are actually typing the word “gatto”. They are looking for things in their own language. This is naturally true of all languages.

Consider this – There are currently no “gatto” (cat) gadgets in the entire Google gadget directory. If you do actually have a cat gadget, I highly suggest you internationalize it to get those Italians

Many gadgets are not language specific, for example a gadget displaying cute, adorable cat photos need not be limited to English or any other language. Clocks are another example of a non-language specific gadget.

If you have a Google gadget and want it to display in different languages when it is displayed in different countries, here is how you do so…

The best place to get information about Google is from Google itself. The process I am describing is documented at Google under their Gadgets and Internationalization Spec (i18n). This walkthru of the process is just a simplification of that spec.

Click the image below to see up close what the same gadget looks like when described in different languages.

There are basically three steps to gadget internationalization…

1. Decide which countries and languages you wish to cover and then acquire the translation of your gadget description and title.

2. Make small text files called “message bundles”

3. Edit your gadget code to include the language support.

Ready? Let’s go international.

First you need the translations. For most gadgets you need only translate two things, the title and the description, but you also can translate user preferences as well.

Translating your Google gadget title and description

Copy and paste your gadget description. Using the Panda gadget as an example the English description is…

“Adorable Panda bear for your homepage. Interact and feed your panda some bamboo.”

Go to Google’s translation tool and paste your description into the text field…

Choose the language you description is in and then choose the language you want it translated into, in this case I am translated my English description into Korean. Click the translate button….

Now copy and paste your translation and save into a text file. Repeat this process for your gadget title.

Congrats! You now have a Korean description and title of your gadget. Now let’s set up our gadget to display the Korean description when someone in Korea is looking at it…

Message Bundles

A message bundle is a small simple xml file that contains callable information. For example, when Google detects that someone in Korea is looking at your gadget it will look for a Korean “message bundle” if you have instructed it to do so in the gadget code (we will discuss that part in a minute). This message bundle is just a small text file which the gadget calls to display the Korean text. The below image shows the code…

The above file is called for the Panda gadget when it is being displayed in Korea. The above shown code is the entire message bundle. It may look a bit scary in Korean, but if you look closer you are only defining three things…

Title, description, and Directory_title (which is for almost all purposes the same thing as the title).

To make your own message bundle follow this link to go to the above code. Important! When you go to that file make sure to left click and choose “view source”. Copy and paste the code into a text editor and save it as “ko_ALL.xml” (I will explain why is a second). Take the title and description translation you created in the first step and paste them in the appropriate parts of the code.

Paste the title you translated and paste inbetween the <msg name=”title”> and the </msg> tags. Also place the title translation in the “directory_title” part too. <msg name=”Directory_title”></msg> Now do the same for your description.

For each language you need a separate message bundle file. These files must be hosted somewhere, they will be called from your Google gadget code, as described below.

Altering Google gadget code for internationalization

In order to take advantage of Google’s impressive geo location abilities, we must first add some code to our gadget.

In order to display the information contained in the message bundles (the translations) you must first call for them. Google will figure out where the user is coming from, but you must tell Google what to do with that information.

The way to do this is by changing some information in the ModulePrefs of your existing gadget. If you do not know what moduleprefs are you may want to see my Google gadget tutorial.

ModulePrefs (Module Preferences) is the first part of a Google gadget code and it’s function is to tell Google certain things that are specific to that gadget. Things like the title, the author, etc. If you already have a Google gadget, you already have a ModulePref section.

In the image below I have circled the parts of the ModulePref that I have altered in the Panda gadget to make it international…

Notice that the title and the descriptions are now calling a variable instead of just using text.

title=”__MSG_title__”

description=”__MSG_description__”

I also changed the directory title pref…

directory_title=”__MSG_Directory_title__”

By changing these values I have now made them variable which means that Google can decide what to put in those fields depending on what language Google detects is being used.

Now the big chunk of code I have entered is the Locale part. Let’s look closer at what it is doing in there…

The first line tells Google where to find your default message bundle. The default one is named “ALL_ALL.xml.

The info in the ALL_ALL.xml message bundle is the default info that should be displayed in case thing go kooky or something does not work, so this is an important one. This should be a message bundle in the default language of the gadget. In the case of our Panda example it is in English. See the ALL_ALL.xml file for the panda gadget here.

Each message bundle is exactly the same code, just different content for different languages. Each message bundle is named something different depending on what language is contained within it. For each language you choose to cover with your gadget, you must tell Google. this is what the remaining code in the image above is doing. For example let’s look at the Korean message bundle we made above and how it is listed in the gadget code:

<Locale lang=”ko” messages=”http://www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda/ko_ALL.xml>

This line says to Google “If someone using Korean is looking at this gadget – use the information contained in the message bundle ko_ALL.xml”

Each of the lines you see in the code image above are just repeats of this same message for different languages.

So to change the gadget code we had to make the title, description, and the directory_title variables.

We then had to add a line telling Google where to find the default information for those variables.

We then had to provide a line of code telling Google which message bundle to use for each language we want to cover.

To learn more go to Google’s documentation: Gadgets and Internationalization Spec (i18n)

To see the panda gadget example code go to: Panda Gadget Example code

To see how the Google gadget directory displays languages go to: Google Gadget International Usage

The same Google gadget can be displayed in different languages depending on who is looking at it and what country thay are looking at it from.

Gadget usage is reported differently depending on where you are looking at it and what language is specified. You may have a million people using your widget in another language or country and you would not see that represented in the gadget usage numbers displayed by Google. Unless you look for it the right way.

This post will show you how to see how many people are using your gadget in different countries and languages.

How to look at your Google gadget usage numbers in other countries…

We will use my Panda Virtual Pet as an example. First go to your gadget description page on Google, here is a screenshot of the panda one in english…

The number of users displayed by Google is entirely dependent on where you are looking at the gadget from and what language you are using. The above screenshot is from USA with a default language of English.

Lets change the url we are looking at a little to see how many people are using this gadget in the United Kingdom…

The panda description page url is…

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

The url can be changed in two ways to get more info about how many people are using our gadgets. The first way is to change the country. Let’s change the part of the url where it says “google.com” to read “google.co.uk” (United Kingdom)

http://www.google.co.uk/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

Notice the change? Now Google is telling us that there are 5,572 users of this gadget. This means that in the UK among english speakers, there are 5,572 users of this gadget.

tip: If you have many gadgets, you can do this from your Google gadget author page and still see usage numbers.

Try other English speaking countries like google.ie (Ireland) or google.com.au (Australia) or google.co.nz (New Zealand) and watch the numbers change. This also works with any country so try some others too google.fr (France) google.it (Italy) etc.

tip: To see a full list of countries Google is being used in go to their language tools page and scroll down to the bottom where they have the flags and urls of each country.

What about language?…

How to look at your Google gadget usage numbers in other languages…

Okay, we just changed the country by changing the url, let’s change the language by examining the url again. Here is the original url of the panda virtual pet in the USA with a language of English…

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

To change this to another language we must change the variable of “hl=en”. This variable is saying “hl (language) = en (English)”

We can change this variable to read “hl=it” and we will now see the gadget usage numbers of Italian language (it) users within the USA (.com) ….

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=it&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

By changing the countries and languages you can get a much better picture of who is using your gadget and where it is popular. Just remember that the country variable is king. In the above example the usage number only displays the amount of Italian language users within the USA. To see how many Italian language users there are in Italy, we would need to change the country url to “google.it”…

http://www.google.it/ig/directory?hl=it&type=gadgets&url=www.gadzi.com/gadgets/panda.xml

There are 8,783 Italian language users of this gadget in Italy, compared to the earlier number of 364 Italian language users of this gadget in the USA.

In the above examples you may have noticed that the title and descriptions of the Panda gadget changed when we changed the language. This is because I have used the Google gadgets and Internationalization spec called i18n. This is a great place to start learning about how Google uses countries and languages.

To learn how to make your gadget appear in all the different languages that iGoogle offers try my tutorial on how to internationalize you Google gadget.

Or just have some fun seeing where your users are

What are gadget enabled objects? They are objects that can be placed in rooms that have functions, like video or clocks that actually work.

To see some gadget objects from the catalog go here….

To make these, you have to be a content developer (but it will open up to everyone eventually).

The Object Editor

The object editor is the interface that allows you to create gadgets in objects…

Here is a complete walkthru for this process.

How to place gadget objects into a room

To learn how to place gadget enabled objects in a room go here