Central Perk

miercuri, 1 iunie 2011

Open for Questions: 30 Years of AIDS

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Open for Questions: 30 Years of AIDS

Today, June 1, 2011 at 3 p.m. EDT, Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin, Director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy Jeffrey Crowley and Director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, Dr. Carl Dieffenbach will be hosting a special live discussion on the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic.

Submit your questions in advance and tune in to WhiteHouse.gov/live to watch the discussion.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama talks with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and John Bryson in the Ground Floor Corridor of the Residence at the White House, May 31, 2011. The President nominated Bryson to replace Secretary Locke, who was nominated to serve as Ambassador to China. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Can Small Businesses Really Do Their Own SEO Graywolf's SEO Blog

Can Small Businesses Really Do Their Own SEO

Posted: 31 May 2011 10:41 AM PDT

Recently, during the Q&A part of a conference session I was attending, someone asked, “Can small businesses do their own SEO?” It’s not an easy question to answer but, in a post Panda Update world … I think the answer is no.

There are lots of things small businesses can do. I’ve mentioned some of them in ways to promote your small business for free and promote your small business for $888. But once we get past the basics, unless the small business owner has time to devote themselves to learning and implementing SEO, it’s almost a necessity to have someone on staff or to hire a consultant.

Probably the biggest hurdle for most small businesses is site design and site architecture. They will choose a web designer who is, at best, ignorant of SEO best practices or who, at worst, gives them bad or outdated SEO advice. I can’t tell you how many visually stunning small business websites I’ve seen over the years that are so image heavy, they are invisible to search engine spiders or, worse, are completely uncrawlable, And let’s not even bring up the subject of flash.

For small business owners with limited time resources and/or limited budgets who can’t hire a full time consultant to work directly on their project, my advice is to arrange a telephonic consultation with someone. Find a consultant who will have a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly call with you and your team (hopefully with someone who can make the changes needed). The arrangement should include an initial review or site audit. Every call should include a review of the last call, any changes to be made, and a review of any new development or changes in the SEO world. Lastly, the call should include discussion about plans for the future.

What types of future planning should your consultant talk with you about?

Content creation: Blogging, how-to articles, Linkbait, etc.
Link building: What are you doing to build links, how can you target higher quality links.
Social Media: Social media is filled with opportunies for small businesses.
Media,Press, and Public Relations: These are all part of your overall marketing strategy, and your SEO should give you recommendations about how to maximize the SEO value from it.
Technical Issues: Hopefully after the initial review these will be minimal, but things do crop up from time to time.

photo credit: Photospin

How Small and Local Businesses Can Use Facebook If there’s one aspect of social media that mainstream press...
How Businesses Should React to Negative Social Media & Reviews Social Media still scares many businesses both large and small....
WordPress SEO: How to Use RSS and Scrapers to Build Links When you run wordpress or any other blog for that...
Why SEO Can’t Be Your Only Value Add In my early days I played a bit more in...
WordPress SEO: WordPress Security Why it Matters to SEO In recent weeks wordpress security, or more correctly the lack...

Advertisers:

Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
Link Building- Backlink Build offers 45 PR5+ Backlinks for $295
Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
Links From PR9 Sites - - Get In Top 3 Google ASAP
TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Can Small Businesses Really Do Their Own SEO

SEOptimise

How to Get Links by Creating Content People Actually Want to Link To

Posted: 31 May 2011 07:11 AM PDT

Most of traditional SEO link building is still centered around the idea of actually building the links as if on a construction site. The idea or metaphor that links are like bricks and you can use them for building has been successfully contested recently by Ross Hudgens in his essay “Please exit the link building“.

It was an excellent write up, but in the end it failed to offer a solution that is not really about building links. The alternative to link building is of course getting links.

Getting links implies that you do not manually build the links like a house in the real world, but people from outside who you may not even know link to you.

This is of course the logical way to get links, and was the way the Internet worked even before link building was considered to be part of SEO.

In the early days it was assumed that search engine optimised sites are, by definition, keyword stuffed pages which no sane human would link to. Thus you had to artificially inflate their link popularity. Much of link building today is still marred by this absurd dogma, despite the Web being quite a different place in the second decade of the 21st century.

Today the work of the link builder is to a large extent about earning the links while not actually touching the pages that are linking.

So it’s actually the content creation part of link building that takes most of the time and effort these days. Whole teams work on infographics, widgets or other content-driven link baiting campaigns.

Getting links does not require a whole team though; I do it myself all the time. It’s better to have a team, but one dedicated person can achieve quite a lot as well when it comes to creating linkable content.

Before you actually get links, or rather before you create the content to get links to, you have to ask yourself a few questions.

What links are you after?
Who will link to you, and from where?
Why will these people link to you?

If you can’t answer all three of them without flinching your linkbait article, your whole campaign to get links will probably fail. You may get the wrong links by the wrong people for instance, or you may get no links at all.

What kind of links are you after?

What do you mean, what kind of links? Aren’t links all the same? Well, there are:

Natural links and optimised links
UGC links and editorial links
Nofollow links and “dofollow” links
Site-wide links and page-level links
Footer links and in-content links
Low quality links and authority links
Static links and social media links
Likes, tweets or HTML links.

I always combined a contrasting pair to make the meaning of each a bit more clear.

Who will link to you and where from?

A clear goal would be to get high authority editorial in content links from a list of bloggers, to answer the first two questions. Then the third answer could be “because you write a flagship blog post for them as a guest blogger”.

Another typical goal, one that is easier to accomplish, could be to get natural UGC links with the nofollow attribute to get social ranking signals and a healthy backlink profile. In order to do that you have to target certain social media outlets, not necessarily Facebook and Twitter, as you do not go after likes/tweets as part of this goal.

In many cases, niches and countries you would try to contribute to forums and similar communities.

Why will these people link to you?

You still have one question left: why would forum users would want to link to you?

Real communities are always self conscious; that is, when you write about them you’ll get members to notice and get interested in you. Unless of course there is no real community or it is not web savvy enough to notice by itself. Then you have to actually tell them. An article “Why community x is the best place to go” is the easiest way to win hearts, unless of course you lie and it isn’t that great. People may notice and a backlash may even ensue.

A good way to approach a community is to do something that is specifically of use for them.

Some competitive niches require high quality authority links, while you dominate others with less effort.

Your link profile also needs all kinds of links, so it’s never a mistake to use simple ways to get more links even if these are low quality. By low quality I mean not spammy on purpose, but simply of lower quality than an editorial link at a well-known publication. For example, you can publish a blog with a full RSS feed and declare the content to be under a Creative Commons License. So people would copy it and redistribute your links along with it.

This works even without a CC license, as a lot of aggregators, social sites, scrapers and content thieves republish it elsewhere or at least snippets of it. Indeed, Google and Facebook are the biggest content thieves as they copy whole articles and reuse them on their sites.

The Link of Attraction

So in short you have to ensure that you attract the people who can bring you the links you need and give them a reason to link to you. That reason is your laser targeted content created especially for the audience that has to link to you. You attract the people you have chosen to attract and give them what they want.

* Image: abandoned building site by 2xtrouble

Seth's Blog : "Don't tell me what I can't have" (unraveling a paradox)

"Don't tell me what I can't have" (unraveling a paradox)

In the USA, it's quite alright for media to talk endlessly about all the things the typical person can't possibly afford. Cribs, jets, jewels, dinners with Jennifer Aniston.

At the same time, you're guaranteed to get negative feedback when you talk about things people have chosen not to have. If you tout a great product that only works on a Mac or a Kindle or on Android or in Norway, all the people who have chosen to use a different piece of tech or live in a different country get angry, that special kind of angry that belongs to the pampered. It's not that they don't want to buy it, it's that they don't even want to know that it's for sale.

The reason, I think, is that you're reminding people of a decision they made, a decision that might have felt right at the time, but when they made it, they didn't know about what you've got on offer. They actively decided to take themselves out of the running for this magic event, this extraordinary product, and marketing it to them belittles their choice.

The market tells us that there's a big difference between "don't tell me what I can't have," and "don't tell me what I've chosen not to be able to have."

Dreaming of winning the lottery is fine, apparently, while experiencing pangs of regret over a decision is not.

• Email to a friend •

marți, 31 mai 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

China's Manufacturing Slowest in 9 Months, New Orders Suggest Manufacturing May Have Already Peaked; Australia Biggest GDP Drop in 20 Years
"The Longer you Wait the Higher the Haircut. Greece is not Even in the EU's Hands. Let this be a Warning to the U.S."
TV Censorship in China; Reflections on the Yuan as a Global Reserve Currency; Hype Sells
Hooray! Greece "Saved" Again; Can it Possibly Matter?

China's Manufacturing Slowest in 9 Months, New Orders Suggest Manufacturing May Have Already Peaked; Australia Biggest GDP Drop in 20 Years

Posted: 31 May 2011 10:11 PM PDT

Weak economic reports in the US, Europe, Australia, and China tell the same story: The global economy continues to cool.

MarketWatch reports China manufacturing growth slows further

The official China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing Managers' Index eased to 52.0 from 52.9 in April, marking the slowest pace of growth in nine months.

The result was below the median forecast of 52.2 in a Reuters survey of economists.

Meanwhile, a separate PMI published by HSBC and compiled by U.K. group Markit, showed headline activity at 51.6, easing from 51.8 in April, the slowest pace of growth in 10 months.

Analysts at Credit Suisse said that the Federation's PMI showed new orders declining at a faster pace than the slowdown in the overall reading, a sign that manufacturing activity may have already peaked in the current economic cycle.

"Actual economic activity may have cooled down faster than the headline suggests," said Credit Suisse analysts.

Australia Reports Biggest GDP Drop in 20 Years

The BBC reports Australian economy reports biggest fall in twenty years

Its economy contracted by 1.2% in the first three months of the year, compared with the previous quarter, the latest government figures showed.

The government said flooding and cyclones in resource rich states of Queensland and Western Australia had a significant impact on growth.

Australia's economy is heavily reliant on its resources sector.

"The economy has hit a temporary pothole courtesy of the natural disasters this year," said Besa Deda of St George Bank.

That temporary pothole is about to become a Grand Canyon led by declines in housing and retail spending.

Chicago Region Manufacturing Gauge Biggest Drop in 2.5 Years

Please consider Chicago manufacturing gauge nosedives

A Chicago-area manufacturing gauge dropped by the largest amount in nearly two-and-half years in May, in a further sign that the rise in oil prices and the Japanese earthquake have affected activity.

The Chicago PMI fell to a reading of 56.6% in May, the lowest reading since Nov. 2009, from 67.6% in April.

While that reading is still significantly above the 50-line indicating growth, the eleven-point drop is the biggest one-month deceleration since Oct. 2008 and was worst than the 60% reading that economists polled by MarketWatch anticipated.

Indexes for production, new orders and order backlogs each dropped by double digits. Inventories jumped, which in this case is more likely an indication of unplanned gains due to a lack of sales than stocking up in anticipation of better times ahead.

US Consumer Confidence Declines

Rounding out a torrent of bad news for the day, U.S. consumer confidence declines in May

The nonprofit Conference Board said its consumer-confidence index fell to 60.8 in May — the lowest reading in six months — from a revised 66 in April. Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast an increase to 67.5.

Most economists were surprised by the decline. Some attributed the drop to the cost of gas, a downward spiral in housing prices, recent weakness in the economy, and even to a series of tornados and floods wracking parts of the U.S.

The expectations index, which measures the view of consumers six months out, fell to 75.2 from 83.2 last month. It's the lowest reading since last October.

The percentage of consumers who say jobs are plentiful increased to 5.6% from 5.1% in April, although the percentage who say they are hard to get also rose slightly to 43.9%.

The consumer-confidence index remains low by historical standards. In a healthy economy, the index averages about 95 points.

In a healthy economy the index averages 95. Currently it sits at 60.8.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

"The Longer you Wait the Higher the Haircut. Greece is not Even in the EU's Hands. Let this be a Warning to the U.S."

Posted: 31 May 2011 06:19 PM PDT

In the video below, Terrence Keeley at Sovereign Trends LLC discusses Greek restructuring, why Germany backed down on restructuring, and what it ultimately means. The video is outstanding, please play it.

If the video does not play here is the Bloomberg link Sovereign Trends' Keeley Interview

Terrence Keeley, senior managing principal at Sovereign Trends LLC and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor, discusses the outlook for additional aid to Greece from the European Union. EU officials will decide on more aid by the end of June and have ruled out a "total restructuring" of the nation's debt, said Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the group of euro-area finance ministers. Keeley speaks with Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg Television's "InsideTrack."

Key Quotes

The Longer you wait the higher the haircut.
Germany backed off over bank threats, Europe is ill-prepared for restructuring.
A lot of people talk about getting Greece back on its feet. The truth of the matter is Greece has not been on its feet for several millennium
40% of Greek GDP is government workers. Until that problem is fixed there is no solution for Greece's economy.
The reality is Greece is a goner, Ireland is very, very tough and Portugal is the same. We could have more.
Keeping the Brady Plan in your back pocket is a very good idea.
Everyone is clapping their hands this morning but Greek CDS imply a 70% chance of default. The market expects Greece to default, and the market is right
This is not even in the EU's hands.
Let this be a warning to the United states. The US can still control its situation, Greece cannot.

I agree with everything Terrence Keeley said in the interview.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

TV Censorship in China; Reflections on the Yuan as a Global Reserve Currency; Hype Sells

Posted: 31 May 2011 09:14 AM PDT

An interesting article in the Financial Times got me thinking once again about the popular notion that the Yuan is about to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Please consider a couple brief snips from Beijing in fresh TV censorship move

The Chinese government has stepped up censorship of local television in a sign of the broadening of a political crackdown that has landed many dissidents in jail.

China has severely clamped down on activists since February when an anonymous online appeal called for demonstrations along the lines of the "jasmine revolution" sweeping north Africa and the Middle East.

Authorities have detained scores of human rights lawyers, activists, and writers. They have also arrested Ai Weiwei, the contemporary artist.

Reserve Currency Requirements

So what does this political crackdown say about the likelihood that the Yuan will soon replace the US dollar as the world's reserve currency? First consider what it takes to be the world's reserve currency.

Deep, liquid, open bond markets
Floating currency
Property rights, civil rights
Political stability
Political freedom

China flunks on at least 4 of 5 points, and arguably all 5. It may be a decade before China even floats the Yuan. How long before China has a deep, liquid, bond market? You tell me, because I don't know, but I assure you it is not in the next three years.

For further discussion please see Bogus Threats to US Reserve Currency Status: No Country Really Wants It!

Yet somehow hyperinflationists persist in spreading nonsense that the Yuan is somehow on the verge of replacing the dollar as a global reserve currency and that may cause hyperinflation.

There certainly may be more local trading in the Yuan. In fact, it is likely. That does not imply the death of the dollar or the loss of reserve currency status and it certainly does not portend hyperinflation.

Hyperinflation is the complete loss of faith in a currency. Should that happen to the US, the entire global banking system blows up. Global trade blows ups. If China refuses US dollars, then China's exports to the US stop, overnight. So do Japan's.

So what does that do to the economies of Japan and China? What would that do to the economies of Canada and Australia? Think about Chinese and Japanese exports and the demand for commodities.

Whether they realize it or not, that is the story hyperinflationists peddle. It simply is not a credible story as noted in Hyperinflation Nonsense.

Hype Sells

No Virginia, the US Dollar is Not Headed to Zero any time soon. Might the dollar slowly decay over decades? Sure why not? It already has. However, that is not hyperinflation.

Yes, the US has problems, so does Japan, so does China, so does the Euro-Zone, and so does the UK. Indeed global currency problems and insolvent banks are everywhere one looks.

However, myopic eyes are primarily focused on the US. Here's the deal. The US dollar is not suddenly going to zero vs. the Pound, the Yen, the Yuan, or the Euro, yet that is what hyperinflation implies.

Why is the "hyperinflation is imminent" scare everywhere you look? The answer is simple: Hype Sells.

The bigger the hype, the sexier the story, and the more people are attracted by it.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Hooray! Greece "Saved" Again; Can it Possibly Matter?

Posted: 31 May 2011 08:19 AM PDT

The overnight markets were all giddy about the notion that Greece will be saved for the umpteenth time. I have a set of questions: How can it possibly matter?

What about Ireland?
What about Portugal?
What happens when Spain needs a bailout?
What happens if the markets lose confidence in Italian debt?

Further problems in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy are all highly likely, and the first three are a given. So does, it matter that Greece is saved?

By the way, IS Greece saved? How many times can a country be saved?

In case you missed it on this long holiday weekend, please consider Europe at the Abyss; US Housing in the Abyss; Who is to Blame? for a look at structural problems facing Europe and the US and who is to blame for them.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

miercuri, 1 iunie 2011

Open for Questions: 30 Years of AIDS

Can Small Businesses Really Do Their Own SEO Graywolf's SEO Blog

Can Small Businesses Really Do Their Own SEO Graywolf's SEO Blog

Related posts:

Advertisers:

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : "Don't tell me what I can't have" (unraveling a paradox)

"Don't tell me what I can't have" (unraveling a paradox)

More Recent Articles

marți, 31 mai 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

miercuri, 1 iunie 2011

Related posts:

Advertisers:

More Recent Articles

marți, 31 mai 2011

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

Subscribe to