Google ical calender service is the easiest and most flexible free shared ical calendar service that I’ve found, but it used to be a little confusing to set up on a mac.

The great news is now in Snow Leopard syncing with a gmail calendar is built into ical and it’s dead easy. (See this post on what a mess it used to be and this post for Google’s old work-around and here for how to do it in Leopard).

1. START A GOOGLE CALENDAR.
Go to google.com, login with your gmail account, and select MORE – CALENDAR to start your own google calendar.

2. PUT YOUR GOOGLE CALNEDAR INTO ICAL
Go into ical and select ical – preferences.

Now select the ‘Accounts’ Tab, then click the + button to add an account.

Now select ‘Google’ under Account type, and then enter your gmail address and password.

That’s it. Press the create button and your gmail calendar will show up in ical. You can edit it, make changes, and it will automatically sync from google to ical.

To submit your site to google go to:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Add your web address, then wait a couple of days.

do the same for yahoo, msn etc

To see if google already knows about your site type site:http://www.yoursitename in google search

If you want your page to go up in the search results, you need to have other people link to your site from their site.

To see how many sites link to your site type link:http://www.yoursitename in google search.

The more entries here, the higher you will be in the search result, basically that’s a simplified version of how it works.