vineri, 13 ianuarie 2012

Seth's Blog : Your voice will give you away

Your voice will give you away

It's extremely difficult to read a speech and sound as if you mean it.

For most of us, when reading, posture changes, the throat tightens and people can tell. Reading is different from speaking, and a different sort of attention is paid.

Before you give a speech, then, you must do one of two things if your goal is to persuade:

Learn to read the same way you speak (unlikely)

or, learn to speak without reading. Learn your message well enough that you can communicate it without reading it. We want your humanity.

If you can't do that, don't bother giving a speech. Just send everyone a memo and save time and stress for all concerned.

• Email to a friend •

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Slovenia, Back in Recession, Scrambles to Avoid Economic Crash
Retail Sales Up Scant .1% in December, Core Retail Sales Decline; Chart of Retail Sales Adjusted for Population Growth and Inflation
Year-Over-Year Gasoline and Petroleum Usage Charts; Shares Decline as Chevron Warns of Weaker 4th Quarter Earnings

Slovenia, Back in Recession, Scrambles to Avoid Economic Crash

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 08:58 PM PST

Slovenia, like Hungary is on the brink of fiscal disaster. Unlike Hungary, Slovenia is in the Eurozone.

The Guardian reports Slovenia scrambles to avoid economic crash as Zoran Jankovic, leader of largest party, fails to form a government to deal with debt issues.

Slovenia was on Thursday scrambling to convince international lenders that it can avoid following Hungary's footsteps, after the leader of the country's largest party failed to form a government.

MPs rejected the centre-left Zoran Jankovic as new prime minister, despite calls for a new government to deal with the country's increasing debt and threats of a further cut to its sovereign debt rating.

Slovenia, which was the first post-communist country to join the euro in 2007, was downgraded A1 from Aa3 in December by ratings agency Moody's. Officials fear that political uncertainty and reliance on exports to the EU will trigger a further downgrade and a steep rise in borrowing costs. The country is already being forced to borrow at rates above 7%.

Jankovic, whose Positive Slovenia party gained the most votes at a snap election in December, needed the support of at least 46 out of 90 parliamentary members but only managed to gain the support of 42.

The president and members of parliament now have up to 14 days to nominate new candidates with Janez Jansa, head of the centre-right Slovenian Democratic Party, the second strongest party in parliament, the most likely to win.

In 2007, not long after it joined the euro, the European Central Bank warned Slovenia that a prolonged spending binge risked an economic crash.

The country, which has a population of 2 million, was badly hit by the global crisis and its economy shrank by 8% in 2009. After a mild recovery in 2010, recent data showed that another recession was possible, as the economy contracted by 0.5% in the third quarter of 2011.

Jansa, who was prime minister from 2004 to 2008, has pledged to cut the budget deficit, speed up privatisation and selectively raise the retirement age.

Slovenia's political crisis started in September, when parliament ousted the centre-left government of prime minister Borut Pahor over internal coalition squabbles and its inability to enforce reforms that would speed up economic growth.

All of the main credit agencies have cut Slovenia's ratings since September and put it on a negative watch. Fitch said last week that Slovenia needed to form a new government urgently and come up with a plan to narrow its budget deficit to maximise its chance of averting another rate cut.

There is absolutely no way to prevent a massive European recession nor is there any way to prevent various economies like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, and Hungary from outright economic crashes.

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

Retail Sales Up Scant .1% in December, Core Retail Sales Decline; Chart of Retail Sales Adjusted for Population Growth and Inflation

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 09:22 AM PST

Following all the glowing retail sales reports for Christmas, the actual numbers reported today show a mere .1% rise. Excluding autos which rose 1.5%, retail sales actually declined.

MarketWatch reports U.S. retail sales rise scant 0.1% in December

Sales at U.S. retailers increased 0.1% in December, the government said Thursday, in a report that bucked expectations of stronger sales during the holiday period.

"Apparently, all those reports of a robust holiday shopping season were made by people too much into the holiday spirits as retail sales did not surge in December," said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors, Inc.

Electronics were touted as one of the strongest sectors for holiday shopping. But the Commerce Department's data showed a 3.9% monthly decline at electronic stores.

Sales at online retailers, another supposed holiday hotspot, fell 0.4%.

Sales at the nation's malls were lower in December. Sales at general merchandise stores fell 0.8%, including a 0.2% decrease at department stores.

Excluding a 1.5% rise in motor vehicles sales, retail sales for the month fell 0.2% — much weaker than the 0.3% gain expected.

Sales at gasoline stores fell 1.6% in December. Excluding autos and gasoline, sales were flat on the month.

So-called "core" sales, which exclude autos, gasoline, and building materials, fell 0.2% in December. This was the one and only drop in core sales seen during 2011.

Some Retail Sales Components

Retail Sales +.1%
Core Retail Sales -.2%
Gasoline Store Sales -1.6%
Electronics -3.9%
General Merchandise -.8%
Autos +1.5%
Furniture +1.0%
Building Materials and Hardware +1.6%
Leisure, Sports, Hobbies, Reading -.4%
Health and Personal Care +.6%
Food and Beverage -.2%
Restaurants and Bars +.7%
Non-store outlets and online stores -.4%

Retail Sales Adjusted for Population Growth and Inflation

Doug Short has some interesting charts in his report Retail Sales: A Disappointing 0.1% in December

The Retail Sales Report released this morning shows that retail sales in December were up 0.1% month-over-month (but the Census Bureau notes that the statistical confidence range is ±0.5%). That was well below the Briefing.com consensus forecast of 0.4% and Briefing.com's own expectation of 0.5%.

The charts below give us a rather different view of the U.S. retail economy and the long-term behavior of the consumer. The sales numbers are adjusted for population growth and inflation. For the population data I've used the Bureau of Economic Analysis mid-month series available from the St. Louis FRED with a linear extrapolation for the latest month. Inflation is based on the latest Consumer Price Index. December retail sales adjusted accordingly rose 0.1% month-over-month but only 2.4% year-over-year, far less than the 6.5% nominal YoY increase.

Consider: During the past 20 years, the U.S. population has grown by 23% while the dollar has lost about 39% of its purchasing power to inflation. When we adjust accordingly, the rebound in retail sales from the bottom in April 2009 merely gets us back to the per capita spending of December 1999, over twelve years ago.

Retail sales have been recovering since the trough in 2009. But the "real" consumer economy, adjusted for population growth is still in recession territory — 7.0% below its all-time high in January 2006.

Considering the massive 50% off entire store sales that it took to clear merchandise in December, this may have been the last gasp of this economic "recovery".

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

Year-Over-Year Gasoline and Petroleum Usage Charts; Shares Decline as Chevron Warns of Weaker 4th Quarter Earnings

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 08:32 AM PST

Here is the latest chart from Tim Wallace on gasoline and petroleum usage.

click on chart for sharper image

Wallace writes...

Hello Mish

Chevron is reporting weaker than expected results.

As we discussed earlier I was expecting this one due to the obvious disconnect on gasoline prices and petroleum futures. Gasbuddy has a great site for seeing this one coming when you lay the gas prices on the petroleum graphs.

Tim

Chevron Warns of Weaker 4th Quarter Earnings

MarketWatch reports Chevron warns of weaker fourth-quarter results

Chevron Corp. CVX -2.52% said late Wednesday it expects fourth-quarter earnings to come in "significantly below" its third-quarter results. In its interim quarterly report, Chevron said earnings from its "upstream" exploration and production business will be comparable to its third-quarter results while earnings from its "downstream" refining and marketing operations are likely to fall from the previous quarter's results to break-even. The San Ramon, Calif.-based oil company blamed weak refining margins and refining volumes for the downbeat earnings outlook. The company is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter results on Jan. 27. Chevron shares fell as much as 2% to $105.61 in after hours trade.

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

joi, 12 ianuarie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Puppy Totally Pumped About Eating

Posted: 11 Jan 2012 08:39 PM PST

Who doesn't love a good meal? This adorable puppy is so excited to eat that he can't even stay on his own feet! That's just too cute.

Small Plastic Figures Hold Up The Floor

Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:05 PM PST

For this striking work, Korean artist Do-Ho Suh placed thousands of tiny human figures below a sheet of glass. They support the weight of visitors who is standing above. It's currently on view at the Lehmann Maupin pop-up gallery at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Via: mymodernmet

Let’s See Those Numbers

I could keep talking, or I could show you the numbers. The following graph shows Spearman correlations (r-values) for 13 variables with UPVs. Blue bars are social factors, green are community factors, and purple are content factors:

Correlations with Unique Pageviews

Most of the variables are self-explanatory, but a few that might need elaborating:

Words (Post) is the word count of the post’s content
Words (Title) is the word count of just the post’s title
Headers is the count of all header tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.)
Bold Tags is the count of all <b> and <strong> tags
Lists is the count of all <ol> and <ul> lists

We use Spearman rank-order correlations because many of these variables tend to be skewed (for example, some posts get a ton of Tweets, whereas many get very few). As always, correlation does not imply causation. I originally captured both Pageview (PV) and Unique Pageview (UPV) data, but the correlation between them was very high (r = 0.998), so I decided to just keep it simple. Every cited r-value is significant at p < 0.01. Many thanks to our resident stats guru, Dr. Matt Peters, for helping me pull the numbers together.

What Does It All Mean?

First off, I’d better explain the “Post Age” data (in red). That’s actually a negative correlation with UPVs. In other words, the older the post, the less traffic it got. That may sound counterintuitive, but remember that the traffic data was only from 2011, whereas the posts could be written at any time. Naturally, posts written in 2011 tended to get more traffic in 2011. In retrospect, that seems obvious. Interestingly, thumbs up was also negatively correlated with post age (r = -0.76) – the other reality is that the community has just grown over time.

Clearly, social factors had the strongest influence in this data set. Causality is a bit tough to pin down, as we do have a chicken-vs-egg problem. Likes, for example, may drive sharing and traffic, but posts with a lot of traffic will naturally get more clicks on the Like button. Which came first? Probably a little of both. As we saw in the smaller data set last year, there does seem to be “cross-talk” between the 3 social buttons. People that like a post will naturally +1 it. For reference, here are the inter-correlations between social factors:

Social Factor Inter-Correlations

As you can see, they’re pretty highly correlated with each other. It’s hard to separate why, at least from this data. It could be that (1) The best content attracts the most social signals and the most traffic, (2) People who regularly use social tend to use all 3 services, or (3) People use all 3 because the buttons are close to each other.

Community factors are similarly tricky – posts with more traffic get more thumbs, all else being equal. Still, it seems that our community metrics have some validity – posts that get a lot of thumbs up and comments tend to also get a lot of traffic.

The content factors are the weakest group, as a whole, but here the causality is at least clear. No post magically got longer or had more images in it because more people visited it. It does appear that longer posts tended to fare pretty well with our audience.

Where Do We Go From Here?

While we can’t predict the future of any given social network, and Google+ is still in its infancy (even by internet time), I think that 2011 was the year where social really made its mark. It’s clear that social is driving traffic, and the impact of social factors on SEO is growing fast.

I think both studies suggest that you shouldn’t be afraid to use all 3 of the major social buttons. I wouldn’t go crazy (if you have 50 social buttons, you weaken them all), but the inter-correlations strongly suggest that, at worst, the 3 big buttons don’t hurt each other. People who regularly use social probably send multiple signals.

It’s also interesting to me that long posts seem to do pretty well on SEOmoz. When I wrote my duplicate content mega-post, it was a bit of an experiment. We had talked about doing another guide for e-commerce SEO and opted to try a long-form post on one sub-topic instead. I don’t think that every post needs to be that long, but there’s certainly room for mega-posts when the topic merits them. To give credit where credit’s due, Oli’s mega-post made that point before mine did.

Of course, every audience is different. I admit that I do these analyses as much for myself as anyone else – I’m really fascinated by trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Much like with SEO in general, though, “quality” is a complicated thing. If you write a long post just to fill up space, you’ll have a mountain of crap instead of a pile. Use the data wisely.

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Ring in the New Year with New Moz Features!

Posted: 11 Jan 2012 06:15 AM PST

Posted by Erica McGillivray

Holy smokes, I don't think our product and development teams have slept since Thanksgiving; they're probably really dreaming of figgy pudding with all the new features they've been creating. These four features: universal search, historical link metrics, custom reports, and branded keywords are definitely squee-worthy. Plus, there's a bonus that you might've not heard about yet.

I realize that for you die-hard Mozzers -- yes, those of you checking your RSS reader while everyone else watched shiny disco balls drop from the sky -- this may be a little bit of a repeat. This is more for those of you who are like me and spent most of your holiday break playing with your family's new puppy, eating pumpkin pie, and airing grievances at Festivus parties. (My cat swore he'd finally get a job in 2012, lazy bum.)

Onto the features...

Custom Automated Reports: Make the data talk for you.

"I need that report..." You know what follows. Or you know the reminders that pop up on your calendar every Monday or every 1st of the month telling you it's time for reports.

Boss Cat Doesnt Believes Ur Excuses

Take a deep breath. SEOmoz reports now are customized and automated! Instead of logging in every week or month just to pull numbers for your boss, client, or other person-in-need, you can concentrate on making the perfect swirl of cream in your coffee or working on improving your site's SEO while being assured your report's arriving on time.

Send up to 5 people .pdf reports of your keyword SERPs, crawl errors, and more. Make your boss happy and be a superhero. Learn how to set them up.

Branded Keywords: Separate and track them as a group

One of the most important segmentation you can do in your SEO analytics is to look at the differences in rankings and traffic between your branded and non-branded keywords. By setting up some simple rules, you'll be able to automatically label which keywords are branded. (You can also add other labels for other groups your business may need.) You'll be able to filter to clearly see improvements or declines.

Tip: Don't forget to set up your Google Analytics profile to your campaign so you can dive into traffic, in addition to your rankings.

Why is this important?

To really dive deeply into SEO, you need to recognize differences in keywords. Different groupings have different needs -- sometimes even different customers! -- and need to be optimized differently.

Your brand's name is generally a powerful signal. Typically, most companies find that branded keywords generate the majority of their organic traffic. But if your brand name's dropping that's a sign you need to work on some brand building and getting your name out there.

Instead of setting up crazy filters in Google Analytics, you can now see both your rankings and your traffic as they change without pain. And it's so easy to set up!

You want to gain insights into your groupings of keywords so you can give shape to your plans for SERP improvements. As I was filtering through my own analytics for this post, I found through this feature that my non-profit GeekGirlCon needs to spend some more time on non-branded keywords since 80%+ of our organic traffic's coming through via our brand! Group behavior helps you see keywords more clearly and come up with better actionable plans. More on this update.

Universal Search: Holy local search SERP!

Fresh out of the Moz laboratories, we just launched our first venue into Universal Search yesterday. Like you, we've been closely monitoring the rise of Universal Search results and seeing Google's results serving up more personalized results. There's local, video, shopping, images, news, and more. Traditional organic rankings are being pushed further and further down the page. How's an SEO to keep up?

search for "vegetarian food"

We're working on making it easier for you to track your SERPs and know exactly where you stand in Universal Search.

Why is this important?

Rankings are more than just 10 SERPs these days, especially if people are looking for your business locally or a certain product you sell. The more relevant information -- whether it's location, hours, phone number, catalog, pictures of the outside of your shop -- that they can find the better.

Plus, if you show up multiple times on the first page, you look like the authority over your competitors. Clearly, she who has the most SERPs wins. (Someone please make me that t-shirt.)

Now when you start tracking keywords with local results too, we'll let you know where you are. And you'll also be able to figure out where you aren't if that keyword has local rankings, but just not for you.

Local SERP hover

Looking at how Google personalizes everyone's searches based on local gives you a different way of looking at your page optimization. You may realize that some terms are extremely important locally and other's not so much. You may find new competitors or that known competitors don't rank well for local.

The more relevant you can be for Google's Universal Search, the more relevant you're going to be for your customers in the long-run. Which just translates into customer happiness. How-to dig into your local SERP rankings in PRO.

Historical Link Metrics: Rock your data

We now keep track of your historical link metrics. That's right, access information from your numbers going back to October 2011 or when you first set up your campaign, whichever came first.

Instead of digging back through spreadsheets that you downloaded, you can access this information right in SEOmoz's PRO app in your campaign. See your improvements in link building just jump right out at you. Or see where the competition is leaving you in the dust.

Don't run around collecting old numbers when you can start investigating your site's link metrics' strengths and weaknesses today. Read more on accessing this invaluable resource.

Mystery Solved!

Bonus...New Link Directory

Yes, we updated the Link Directory and rolled it in glitter just for you! Directory listings can still help your link juice a little bit. But you want to make sure those sites are quality ones, so the signal doesn't go the wrong way. Filter directories by category, DA, and MozRank and add your voice by thumbing them up or down. Start evaluating quality directories today.

*beep beep* --> That's Roger Mozbot sharing in the excitement.

Hope you enjoy all the New Year's gifts from us at SEOmoz and that they enhance your SEO reporting, planning, and execution. Like you, we have big goals for 2012, and our number one goal is to help you achieve your inbound marketing goals with the best analytics we can provide.

Want more info? Join tomorrow's webinar!

For more insights into these new features, tune into tomorrow's webinar at 10:30am PST (6:30pm GMT) for Upgrade Your SEO Reporting with Local Rankings, Historical Link Metrics, Branded Keywords, and Custom Reports. Join Mozzers Adam Feldstein, Karen Semyan, Samantha Britney, Miranda Rensch, and me as we walk you through SEOmoz latest PRO tool updates -- universal rank tracking for local search, historical link metrics, branded keywords, and custom reports -- and give you tips and tricks on how to make them work for your SEO and greater inbound marketing efforts. Bring your questions! Register today; it's free.

Please let us know how you're enjoying these new features and how you're using them to make your site(s) even more awesome. If there's something you want to see added to these features or they make you think of another feature you'd love to have, don't be shy and leave us a feature request.

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vineri, 13 ianuarie 2012

Seth's Blog : Your voice will give you away

Your voice will give you away

More Recent Articles

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

joi, 12 ianuarie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

Top 2011 Moz Posts of 2011

Top 2011 Moz Posts of 2011

Let’s See Those Numbers

What Does It All Mean?

Where Do We Go From Here?

Branded Keywords: Separate and track them as a group

Why is this important?

Universal Search: Holy local search SERP!

Why is this important?

Historical Link Metrics: Rock your data

Bonus...New Link Directory

Want more info? Join tomorrow's webinar!

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

vineri, 13 ianuarie 2012

More Recent Articles

joi, 12 ianuarie 2012

Let’s See Those Numbers

What Does It All Mean?

Where Do We Go From Here?

Branded Keywords: Separate and track them as a group

Why is this important?

Universal Search: Holy local search SERP!

Why is this important?

Historical Link Metrics: Rock your data

Bonus...New Link Directory

Want more info? Join tomorrow's webinar!

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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