Central Perk

joi, 10 februarie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Animals Stealing Food
He’ll Never Have A Girlfriend
Valentines Day Hopes Dashed
Swimming with Polar Bears
A Breakdown of Birth in the USA (Infographic)

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 06:30 PM PST

Animals are cute but they get even cuter when caught red-handed as they swipe food left unattended. These pictures show scheming animals caught with their paws and mouths stuck in bowls and cans as they give in to the tempting aromas of delicious food.

He’ll Never Have A Girlfriend

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 06:20 PM PST

Even if you are cereal guy, it doesn't mean you can predict future heartthrobs!

Valentines Day Hopes Dashed

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 06:10 PM PST

Valentine's day is a day of surprises – preferably good ones but every once in a while an occasional nasty surprise springs up ruining the day and leaving us scarred for life. Want to know what I'm talking about? Check out this sweet trail of hearts that had an ending you would never predict.

Swimming with Polar Bears

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 06:01 PM PST

This is not Photoshop as you might have thought at first.

Children can swim with polar bears in Canada. The Polar Bear Habitat is a water zoo in northern Ontario that allows kids experiencing an outdoor swim with these beasts since 2004. Of course, humans and bears are in two different pools that are separated by a layer of bullet proof glass that is about 9-10 cm thick. Still it is a real shock for those people who see such a scene for the first time in their life.

A Breakdown of Birth in the USA (Infographic)

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 05:55 PM PST

With an ever rising population, the USA spends approximately $50 million per year on childbirth services, which is the most money spent on this out of any country in the world. 1% of these births are to mothers aged 10-19. Yes, 10 year olds are having children. Our friends at Ultrasound Technician have crunched the numbers and put the visual data together in this nice infographic aptly titled "A Breakdown of Birth in the USA."

More Infographics.

Click to Enlarge.

Source: ultrasoundtechnician

Eclipse Link Cloaker Review Graywolf's SEO Blog

Eclipse Link Cloaker Review

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 07:49 AM PST

In the past I’ve written about Why I think Affiliates should Cloak Their Links from search engines. I’ve even spoken a few times about how to do it and recommended plugins like GoCodes to help you get from here to there. GoCodes is fine if you aren’t running through a ton of links, or if you use the same links frequently. However if you are working with a datafeed, spreadsheet, or other single use affiliate links, GoCodes just isn’t the right tool for the job … the Eclipse Link Cloaker is …

The Eclipse Link Cloaker isn’t really a cloaking tool, it’s a redirection tool, so it won’t get you in any trouble with the search engines. But, if you use it properly, it’s actually a technique Google recommends. To be clear the Eclipse Link Cloaker is a paid plugin for WordPress, but for $57 it’s a pretty minimal investment if you are serious about affiliate marketing. Here are some of the features of the plugin:

You can set it up to automatically cloak all outbound links. I’ll admit this isn’t something most people should use but there are some situations where it makes sense. I recommend setting it to manual.
You can change the redirection folder. This is something I highly recommend doing. I also highly recommend blocking the directory from being crawled using your robots file. Using a redirect through an intermediate page/directory that is blocked using robots is a technique Google is OK with. Really. Go look.
You can set it up to work with Google analytics to track your conversions. I’m no analytics guru so I can’t give you a walk through, but I grasp the concept and why it’s important.
You can use named redirects if you want to. It makes things easier to work with for links you’ll reuse often.

OK but how do you use a plugin like this to generate income? Here are some ideas …

Thinking of publishing a list of suggested gift items for an upcoming holiday like Valentines Day? Pick your 10 best stores from CJ, Linkshare, ShareaSale or any other affiliate program. Hire someone on oDesk to pick out 10 gifts for men, women, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, mistresses, and kids and populate a spreadsheet with titles, descriptions, links, and so on. Write a quick formula to convert the spreadsheet data to HTML with the manual cloak activation code and–voila!–instantly masked affiliate links.
Do any of your affiliate merchants publish monthly/weekly/daily specials or deals? Write yourself a macro to handle the file and create the HTML automagically. If you do it right, the first time may take a while, but after that it’s a button push. This plugin is especially useful if you need to create a lot of masked links on the fly that will have a limited lifespan.

Is this plugin for you? That really depends on the volume of affiliate links you are going to be pushing out. On this particular blog it’s overkill. In all the years I’ve had this blog there have been less than 50 affiliate links total. However, I’m running this plugin on three other blogs where I push out 50 affiliate links week, so it makes perfect sense there. In my opinion the Eclipse Link Cloaker plugin saved me $57 worth of time in the first week I used it, so I can absolutely justify the purchase. If you’re looking to generate high volume of links quickly and easily, with a minimum of effort I definitely recommend getting Eclipse.
photo credit: Instant Vantage

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Eclipse Link Cloaker Review

Let's Move! One Year Later

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011

Let's Move!

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of Let's Move!, First Lady Michelle Obama's initiative to solve the problem of childhood obesity within a generation. You can learn more about the Let's Move! at LetsMove.gov.

Photo of the Day

First Lady Michelle Obama visits a second grade class at the Burgess-Peterson Academy in Atlanta, Ga., Feb. 9, 201. Mrs. Obama, who marked the first anniversary of the 'Let's Move!' initiative, praised the school for their efforts to promote healthy living. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

SEOptimise

36 Must-Read Local SEO/Google Places Resources from 2010/2011

Posted: 09 Feb 2011 05:54 AM PST

At the end of 2010, Google propelled local SEO to new heights by not only showing local results for search queries with a local modifier (e.g. [seo london]) but letting local results dominate such queries. Additionally, Google shows local results from Google Places by default, without users even adding a geographic signifier. So when you search for for [hotel] from London, you will be directed to hotels in London. This means that

there is a lot of opportunity, commotion and confusion in the SEO industry

and the webmaster community right now. Google seems to experiment a lot with these new local search results and it’s difficult to see a pattern sometimes.

Local SEO differs significantly from conventional organic SEO. First of all you have to register with Google by adding a Google Places profile, and then you have to get reviews aka citations from a set of trusted sites Google uses to rank local results. This is an almost completely new game and most people aren’t good at it yet. Furthermore, Google currently struggles to provide relevant results due to local business owners not yet wholly grasping what’s going on.

While I am not specialized in local SEO like others are, I try to keep up with the changes and read a lot about Google Places and local SEO, the result of which is that I have collected quite an impressive number of related bookmarks. Today I want to share these 36 must-read local SEO/Google Places resources from 2010/2011 with you. Take note that they are in most cases no older than one year, and that I have provided mobile and local SEO resources lists in the past as well. Consider this post to be a follow up.

Tools

While there are plenty of SEO tools out there local SEO are still rare. Nonetheless new tools have already appeared in 2011. At the same time, established services can be used for local SEO as well.

Google Places

Google Places is the new brand of Google’s Local Business Center and Google Maps combined. It’s far more prominent in Google’s search results, either based on the query or on clicks on the menu.

Analytics

Sadly Google Analytics and other web analytics tools can’t by default determine which visitors came via Google Places results. There are ways to tag your local SEO campaigns though, and to track them in Google Analytics. You can also follow the Google Places stats itself.

Citations

Citations are the new links but, unlike links, they are really hard to get and very exclusive. Only a select few websites are used by Google for the Google Places ranking and thus you have to first identify them and then make sure real users go there and actually review your brick and mortar business. These citation-providing sites differ from country to country, so there are UK specific lists of citation sites.

Ranking factors

Within the embedding of local results right inside the organic search results, a strange mix of ranking signals has been taken into account. To rank in Google Places you have to combine the conventional SEO techniques with almost completely different methods of optimization.

‘How To’ articles

Understanding local SEO and Google Places results is one thing, but the actual steps to be undertaken, the websites where you can get citations and how to improve your Google Places listing have to be known as well in order to optimise your local business listing.

Miscellaneous must-read resources

The recent changes in both display and reach of local results on Google have sparked a number of reactions in the SEO blogosphere. Most people agree that the new Google Places integration is a game changer. These postings explain the changes, show the ramifications and attempt to predict the future of local SEO.

* Image by Sean McGrath.

Seth's Blog : What's the use case?

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

What's the use case?

Visit an architect. On the first visit, right after shaking your hand, she unrolls plans for a house. "Here are some sketches..."

Wait. That's backward.

Sketches for what? How do you know if I want a house or an office building? How am I to judge these plans? Is it a mind reading exercise?

The most effective way to sell the execution of an idea is to describe the use case first. And before you can do that, you need to have both the trust of your client and enough information to figure out what would delight them.

Then, describe what a great solution would do. "If we could use 10,000 square feet of space to profitably service 100 customers an hour..." or "If we built a website that could convert x percent of ..." or "If we could blend a wine that would appeal to this type of diner..."

After the use case is agreed on, then feel free to share your sketches, brainstorms and mockups. At that point, the only question is, "does this execution support the use case we agreed on?"

Don't show me a project, a website, an ad buy or an essay without first telling me what it's supposed to do when it works properly. First, because I might not want that result. And second, how else am I supposed to judge if it's good or not without knowing what you're trying to do...

Too often, we're in such a hurry to show off what we'd like to build we forget to sell the notion of what we built it for.