Damn Cool Pics |
| Turkey Has Uncovered These 2,000 Year Old Mosaics Posted: 26 Nov 2014 12:38 PM PST These mosaics in Turkey were buried because of flooding but they've finally been uncovered and they look incredible.               |
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What New SEOs Don't Know Unless You Tell Them: A Reminder from Outside the Echo Chamber |
| What New SEOs Don't Know Unless You Tell Them: A Reminder from Outside the Echo Chamber Posted: 25 Nov 2014 04:16 PM PST Posted by RuthBurrReedy SEO experts spend multiple hours a week reading blogs, social media and forums to stay abreast of the latest search engine developments; we spend even more time testing and measuring tactics to figure out what works best for our sites. When you spend so much of your time thinking, talking and learning about SEO, you can get lost in the echo chamber and take your eyes off the prize of growing your clients' businesses. It's easy to get excited about the new and shiny developments in search and to hang on Google's latest announcements, but there's no point in switching a site from HTTP to HTTPS if it doesn't even have appropriately keyword-rich title tags. There's no reason to run a button-color conversion rate optimization test on a site that's still using the manufacturer's default description on product pages. Sometimes your traffic is plummeting because you haven't checked for new 404 errors in 6 months, not because you've been hit with a penalty. Think horses, not zebras, and don't forget one important fact: Most people have no idea what we're talking about. What clients don't knowRunning a business, especially a small business, is way more than a full-time job. Most business owners these days understand that they need to be doing something for their business online, but once they get beyond "have a website" they're not sure of the next step. Photo via Pixabay Moving back into agency work after several years in-house, I was surprised by just how many businesses out there have never gone beyond that first step of having a website. The nitty-gritty of building a search-friendly website and driving traffic to it still aren't that widely known, and without the time or inclination to become experts in marketing their websites, most small business owners just aren't spending that much time thinking about it. Hanging out in the SEO echo chamber is a great way to stay on top of the latest trends in digital marketing. To win and keep our clients, however, we need to step out of that echo chamber and remember just how many website owners aren't thinking about SEO at all. The goodRelatively few people know or understand digital marketing, and that's the reason we all have jobs (and most of us are hiring). The strapped-for-time aspect of business ownership means that once someone decides it's time to get serious about marketing their business online, they're likely to call in an expert rather than doing it themselves. There are some really competitive industries and markets out there, but there are also plenty of niche and local markets in which almost nobody is focusing on SEO in a serious way. Take a look at who ranks for your target keywords in your local area, using an incognito window. If the key phrase isn't appearing consistently on the search results page, chances are nobody is targeting it very strongly. Combine that with an absence of heavy-hitting big brands like Amazon or Wikipedia, and you may have a market where some basic SEO improvements can make a huge difference. This includes things like:
It may not seem like much (or seem like kind of a no-brainer), but sometimes it's all you need. Of course, once the basics are in place, the smartest move is to keep improving your site and building authority; you can't rely on your competitors not knowing their stuff forever. Even in more competitive markets, a shocking number of larger brands are paying little to no attention to best practices in search. Many businesses get the traffic and rankings they do from the power of their brands, which comes from more traditional marketing techniques and PR. These activities result in a fair amount of traffic (not to mention links and authority) on their own, but if they're being done with no attention given to SEO, they're wasting a huge opportunity. In the coming years, look for SEO-savvy brands to start capitalizing on this opportunity, leaving their competitors to play catch-up. From inside the echo chamber, it's easy to forget just how well the fundamentals of SEO still really work. In addition to the basic items I listed above, a website should be:
So life is good and we are smart and there's a lot to do and everything is very special. Good deal, right? The badSEO being a very specialized skill set has some serious downsides. Most clients don't know much about SEO, but some SEOs don't know much about it either. There are a ton of great resources out there to learn SEO (Moz and Distilled U come to mind). That said, the web can be a ghost town of old, outdated and inaccurate information, and it can be difficult for people who don't have much experience in search marketing to know what info to trust. An article on how to make chocolate chip muffins from 2010 is still useful now; an article on PageRank sculpting from the same time period is much less so. Outdated techniques (especially around content creation and link building) can be really tempting for the novice digital marketer. There are a ton of "tricks" to quickly generate low-quality links and content that sound like great ideas when you're hearing them for the first time. Content spinning, directory spam, link farms – they're all still going on and there are gobs of information out there on how to do them. Why should we care?So why should we more experienced SEOs, who know what we're doing and what works, care about these brand new baby n00b SEOs mowing through all this bad intel? Photo by Petras Gagilas via Flickr The first reason is ideological – we should care because they're doing bad marketing. It contributes to everything that's spammy and terrible about the internet. It also makes us look bad. The "SEO is not spam" battle is still being fought. The second reason is practical. People billing themselves as SEOs without knowing enough about it is a problem because clients don't know enough about it either. It's easy for someone engaging in link farming and directory spam to compete on price with someone doing full-scale content marketing, because one is much, much more work than the other. Short-term, predictable results feel a lot more tangible than long-term strategies, which are harder to guarantee and forecast. Not to mention that "X dollars for Y links" guy isn't going to add "There is a risk that these tactics will result in a penalty, which would be difficult to recover from even if I did know how to do it, which I don't." How can we fix it?SEOs need to educate our clients and prospects on what we do and why we do it. That means giving them enough information to be able to weed out good tactics from bad even before we make the sale. It means saying "even if you don't hire me to do this, please don't hire someone who does X, Y or Z." It means taking the time to explain why we don't guarantee first-page rankings, and the risks inherent in link spam. Most of all, it means stepping out of the echo chamber and into the client's shoes, remembering that basic tenets of digital marketing that may seem obvious to us are completely foreign to most website owners. At the very least we need to educate our clients to please, please not change the website without talking to us about it first! Since terrible SEO gives us a bad rep (and is annoying to fix), we also need to actively educate within the SEO community. Stepping out of the echo chamber in this case means we need to spend some time talking to new SEOs at conferences, instead of just talking to each other. Point brand new SEOs to the right resources to learn what we do, so they don't ruin it for everybody – for heaven's sake, stop calling them n00bs and leaving them to learn it all from questionable sources. As SEO content creators, we should also take time on a regular basis to either update or take down any outdated content on our own sites. This can be as simple as posting a notification that the info is outdated or as complex as creating a brand new resource on the same topic. If you're getting organic search traffic to a page with outdated information, you're passively hurting the state of SEO education. A declared stance on providing up-to-date information and continually curating your existing content to make it the highest quality? Sounds like a pretty strong brand position to me, SEO bloggers! Some people are going to read this post and say "well, duh." If you read this post and thought it was basic (in every sense of the word), go out right now and fix some of your blog posts from 3 or 4 years ago to contain the latest info. I'll wait. The takeaways
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I got a note from Joni Mitchell yesterday.
Well, not just me. Everyone who got her new boxed set got the note.
The note takes responsibility for some of the tracks on the CD not matching the order of the liner notes. Apparently, the brilliant artist needed more time, and cared enough about her work to re-arrange it until the last minute, and was brave enough to speak up and take responsibility.
So, it's not just you. The last minute looms large.
The glitch is in how we define the last minute. We can't make the feeling go away, but we can be clear about when the last minute occurs. And for professionals, it must occur before the deadline. Because they call it a deadline for a reason.
Now, long before your next last minute, do an honest assessment of the cost of going beyond the time that's been allotted for your work. In almost every case, you'll see that the benefit of having the last minute not coincide with the deadline is huge.
The last minute is a feeling. The deadline is an event. When professionals are involved, they shouldn't happen at the same time.
[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]
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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
| Merkel Will Blink First, Not Putin Posted: 25 Nov 2014 03:00 PM PST The cold war took another twist last week when a Senior German Politician Endorsed Russian Takeover of Crimea. Former state premier Matthias Platzeck, chairman of the German-Russian Forum business lobby and erstwhile Social Democrat (SPD) chief, is the first high-ranking German to say the West should endorse the annexation as a way to help resolve the Ukraine crisis.Political Infighting Platzeck's statement shocked a lot of people including German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier who stated Germany will Never Accept Crimea Annexation. "We don't accept what has happened and we don't accept Europe's borders being changed again 70 years after the war," said Steinmeier. Cracks Form Der Spiegel reports Cracks Form in Berlin Over Russia Stance. A political solution is more distant than ever in the Russia conflict, with the German government and EU having exhausted their diplomatic options. A rift may now be growing between Chancellor Merkel and her foreign minister over Berlin's tough stance against Moscow.Dead End for Merkel Today, Reuters reports Merkel Hits Diplomatic Dead-End With Putin. Since February, when the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, fled Kiev amid violent protests on the Maidan square, Germany has taken the lead in trying to convince Putin to engage with the West.Explaining the Dead-End Perhaps things are at a dead end precisely because of statements like "Germany will Never Accept Crimea Annexation" by Foreign Minister Steinmeier. Does talking make any sense if that is the position of Germany? Putin Peels Away at Sanction Support Matthias Platzeck, a former leader of the SPD, broke ranks earlier this month and urged Germany to recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea.Slow Squeeze Against the backdrop of this fragile EU consensus, ratcheting up economic sanctions further is seen as a "no go" in Berlin for now.Merkel Will Blink First With support for sanctions eroding in several countries, with political infighting in Germany, and with German sentiment shifting more pro-Russia, the odds are that Merkel changes her tune first. After all, she is the political chameleon, not Putin. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
| Rents Heading Up? Will the CPI Follow? Posted: 25 Nov 2014 12:49 PM PST Rents are up 6.5% in San Francisco, and 4.5% in numerous other cities. Is this a leading indicator for a stronger inflation as measured by the CPI? Please consider the Variant Perception article Higher Rents in the US are a Strong Support for CPI. Despite the subdued nature of US CPI, some large components are turning up. Owners' equivalent rent and rent of primary residence, which together account almost of a third of the CPI basket, are turning up strongly. A low vacancy rate and a relatively resilient US economy is helping to drive rents higher, with San Francisco seeing the greatest rent increases, at 6.4% over the last year, and with many other cities, such as Nashville, Seattle, Denver and Houston, all seeing increases of over 4.5%Owners' Equivalent Rent  Owners Equivalent Rent vs. CPI Shifted 18 Months  The red line in the above chart is not the CPI, but rather a "leading indicator for US Shelter CPI, which includes apartment vacancy rates" I took the above chart, clipped out the red CPI line, made a layer out of it in Photoshop, and then shifted the line back 18 months with reduced opacity so you can see both lines. Here is my result. Owners Equivalent Rent vs. CPI Shifted 18 Months and Not Shifted  Straight up (no shift) caught most of the action correctly, except for years 2005-2006, right at the peak of the housing bubble. Also recall the energy spike in 2007. Perhaps a shift forward some smaller number of months other than 18 would fit better. Let's dive into the CPI data to see what if anything a bump in OER might mean. CPI Housing Component Here's the Housing Component of the CPI straight from the October 2014 BLS CPI Report.  The last column above is the year-over-year increase in various housing components. Numbers are national. On average, if the largest cities are up 4.5% or so (excluding San Francisco), the national average of 2.7% for OER and 3.3% for rent seems reasonable enough. CPI-U Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers is up 1.7% year-over-year even though housing is up 2.7%. So other things had to go down. Price for energy did just that. Nonetheless, CPI will tend to move with OER simply because OER is the single largest component. If rents continue to rise, CPI will likely go along for the ride, but I fail to see any leading direction in the OER itself (first chart) unless one can accurately project "planned rent hikes". With that thought in mind, let's return once again to the claim "Our leading indicator for US Shelter CPI, which includes apartment vacancy rates and the growth in the working-age population among its inputs, shows that the trend should continue." If vacancy rates are a leading indicator of planned rents hikes (a reasonable presumption), then the statement made by Variant Perception is likely an accurate one. Yet, the overall impact on the CPI will at best be subdued, especially if wages do not follow. If more money goes for rent and Obamacare, less money will go elsewhere. Consumers feeling the squeeze? You bet! Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
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