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Put your blog feeds into a Google gadget

Have you been Googled yet?

Despite concerns that Google is about to take over the world, you’ve got to hand it to them, they’re doing so well because they’re giving us what we all want.

Who doesn’t use at least one of GoogleMail, Google search engine, Google Docs, iGoogle, Google images etc etc etc?

One of the things they’re giving me that I definitely want at the moment is Google Gadgets.

I’m a big user of iGoogle and I use it as my homepage, pulling in my 5 key email accounts from home, my Google docs as well as gadgets for spelling, a clock and calendar, a birthday/special events countdown and so on.

More than just an International giant!

Another reason I like Google is that it lets me put cool stuff on my websites which I would probably  struggle to do without their help.

Take this blog for instance … I wanted to create an RSS feed of new articles which I could customise and feed into my various websites.

Google has just the gadget … and it’s called Custom RSS.

This device will let you put a widget on your websites, taking in feeds from your blog, your CMS website, your Flickr account … whatever you have an RSS feed from.

I’ve now added my own custom RSS feed of this blog to my own iGoogle page and to all the ‘How this website was made’ pages on my commercial websites.

RSS and SEO too

From an SEO point of view, I’m trying to move people fluidly through my websites, creating links trails whilst I do so.

As I’ve said before, every SEO book and article you read tells you to get blogging, so I have and now I’m trying to move it around a bit.

Here are a few examples of how I’ve used it on my sites:

1) On the front page of my webcumbria.co.uk website

2) In the ‘How this site was made’ section of all of my websites

3) In the ‘web wall’, a link to which I add on all my email auto-signatures

Here’s one I prepared earlier …

Here’s what my gadget looks like on a page:

I’ve also used another Google gadget on my castle-visits.co.uk website (see bottom of page), and will also attach it to my trips4kids.com website when I start to work seriously on it.

It’s called Google Translate and it’s one of many cool things you can add to your site.

Google doesn’t overdo it with adverts, pop-ups or gimmicks, so their tools fit quite nicely onto websites without dominating them.

If you’ve spotted any other cool gadgets for websites, Google or otherwise, please leave a comment on this article.