miercuri, 30 martie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Twin baby boys conversation

Posted: 29 Mar 2011 09:58 PM PDT

They seems are having serious discussion :)


25 Thundercats Cosplay Wins And Fails

Posted: 29 Mar 2011 09:53 PM PDT

Everyone's excited for some reason, about the new Thundercats show that's on the way. These people are probably extra excited- looks like they need that kind of joy in their lives. Here are 25 Thundercats Cosplay Win. For full gallery.


Rare Pets

Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:22 PM PDT

One family from Russia has an unusual hobby. They keeps rare pets at home. Among them are foxes of several breeds, ferrets, bobcats, huskies and even bears! All the animals live in peace with each оther аnd with their owner tоо.




































































































































Street Fighter Graffiti Art

Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:18 PM PDT














Brilliant Dexter Kill Room Prank

Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:11 PM PDT

When their roommate left for a couple weeks, the group set out to transform his bedroom into a 'Kill Room' reminiscent of the ones found in Dexter.


























Charming Miniature Horse Koda

Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:09 PM PDT

Miniature animals like this horse Koda are very rare and really charming. It can even live in your house like a pet.




















Funny Fails From Peru

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 07:52 PM PDT

Collection of funny photos from Peru and some other South American countries.


















































































Morning Glory Pool

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 07:47 PM PDT

Morning Glory Pool is a hot spring in the Upper Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park in the United States.

The distinct color of the pool is due to bacteria which inhabit the water. On a few rare occasions the Morning Glory Pool has erupted as a geyser, usually following an earthquake or other nearby seismic activity.






















SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


Google +1 And The Rise of Social SEO

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 06:51 AM PDT

Posted by Tom_C

Today Google announced the release of a new social feature: +1

Read more about the launch from these in-depth blog posts:

Quick Summary

Rolling out across English Google over the next few days is a new "+1" feature that allows you to endorse URLs. If you're not yet seeing it in your search results enable it in Google experimental. Once enabled you see a little grey +1 next to all search results - including adwords listings:

Once you click a result you see something like this:

All of your +1 results appear on your Google Profile:

I'm a really big fan of this from Google - they seem to be doing a lot of things right with social at the moment and this seems to be universally received as positive by the twittersphere. It's a lot of fun and ridiculously intuitive to +1 something and I can really see this catching on.

The Impact of +1 on SEO

So what's the impact of this for SEOs? Well I'm struck by the opening paragraph from the Google +1 page (emphasis mine):

The +1 button is shorthand for "this is pretty cool" or "you should check this out."

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1's can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

Note how Google is emphasising right from the start that this is going to inlfuence search results. Another quote from the official Google Blog (again, emphasis mine):

Say, for example, you’re planning a winter trip to Tahoe, Calif. When you do a search, you may now see a +1 from your slalom-skiing aunt next to the result for a lodge in the area. Or if you’re looking for a new pasta recipe, we’ll show you +1’s from your culinary genius college roommate. And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop.

So the bottom line is that getting people to +1 your content is going to help you get more organic traffic from Google. Maybe even more/cheaper paid traffic too!

The Rise of Social SEO

Of course, for me this isn't so much a new direction as much as a continuation of the social circle work that Google has been doing recently. I'm a massive fan of results from your social circle - as I'm searching around these appear on a crazy high % of search results:

These social results pop up all the time and are immediately obvious and useful to me. The more that Google rolls out this integration the better imho.

Is this how Google are going to reduce the emphasis on links? Maybe.

Social Metrics Are Already Well Correlated With Rankings

I'm not going to go into too much detail here as we're still in the middle of gathering data and running analysis but here's a sneak peak from Rand's presentation that he's giving in SMX Munich next week. We've run a correlation analysis on a whole bunch of search results (~10,000) for a wide range of factors and there's some surprising results. Check out this graph:

It shows that Facebook shares are well correlated with rankings. In fact, comparing to other factors we see Facebook shares are similarly correlated to the number of linking root domains.

It's early days in the analysis and all we're showing here is correlation not causation but it's kind of surprising the correlation is so strong!

(Aside: I should point out a few things here - when we say Facebook shares we're talking about the aggregated number of Facebook interactions; comments, likes and shares as reported by the Facebook graph API. The full analysis will breakdown the different types of Facebook interactions in more detail. We should also say a big thankyou to Topsy as we have been using their totally awesome API to gather Twitter information)

In my opinion this is why inbound marketing is going to overtake SEO as the primary function of SEO professionals. Engaging across social channels to get links, shares, likes, comments and +1s is going to be the future for generating organic traffic to your site. Not just from Google but these channels are increasingly driving significant volumes of traffic in their own right.

+1 & Social Metrics Will Be Hard To Game

Previously the biggest objection I've heard from SEOs about user-generated signals is that they are easy to game. Well I'm not so sure. Think about how much information Google has on you and all the ways they can justify your profile is tied to a real human being account. For example - to show you're a real human being Google could look for the following signals:

  • Gmail
  • Google analytics
  • Google calendar
  • Adwords
  • Google voice
  • Google checkout
  • Chrome sync
  • Search history
  • Google docs
  • Google reader
  • Youtube
  • .... etc

Don't believe me? Why not head on over to your Google dashboard and see just how much information Google knows about you.

Still think it'll be easy to fake?

Combine this with some measure of author authority, which we know Google and Bing are looking at, and you have a pretty good picture of which accounts are influential and which are spammers.

Let's also not forget that Google are smart. I very much doubt that social signals will impact search results equally - some industries just don't have a strong social footprint. For these industries I think (hope) Google will normalise the impact and won't let the "fun" site outrank the "useful" site - they can easily tell which niches have a lot of social activity and those that don't. For the more mundane/commercial industries Google will fall back on the regular signals of links.

What's Next for Google +1?

Google are already talking about a new publishr button that you will be able to embed on your page to allow people to +1 content from your site - very similar to the Facebook like and tweet this buttons that already exist. Once you enable +1 you're also opted in to show this information on 3rd party sites in exactly the same was as Facebook buttons:

Here's a few other more speculative things to think about:

  1. Will Google create aggregated pages for the "hot" +1 content on the web?
  2. How will Google persuade regular people to create their Google profiile page and add their friends?
  3. It seems like this is a very direct threat to the Facebook like button - how will Facebook react?
  4. How will +1 results impact Adwords listings?
  5. What kind of dashboard/analytics information will be available to publishers to see who is +1'ing their content?

For now, why not do us a favour and go give SEOmoz a nice juicy +1 :-D


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Link Anatomy - Understanding The Value Of A Link

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 01:12 AM PDT

Posted by Dan Deceuster

Far too many of us in the SEO industry tend to think in absolute terms. You are either White Hat or Black Hat, this works or it doesn't, this link is amazing or it is worthless...you get the point.

This is dangerous thinking because if something isn't absolutely perfect or golden, we tend to evaluate it as useless. In nothing is this more obvious than in link building.

Link builders come from two schools of thinking. They either (a), pursue and take any link from anywhere or (b), research and scrutinize every potential link opportunity.

If you think like the first group, then this post is not for you. But if you are in the second group, this post should help you evaluate the value of a link.

Link Anatomy

The anatomy of a link can be thought of in five parts: anchor text, trust, relevance, placement and outbound links. Each one makes up a piece of the link pie.

I already know what you are thinking- what about authority? The five pieces of the pie mentioned above are what make the pie, but authority is what determines the size of the pie.

This means that if your link is on a high quality, authoritative website, search engines will pay a lot more attention to the metrics of that link that one on some spammy website.

Let's look at each individual metric then and see what they all mean.

1. Authority

As I just mentioned, authority is what determines the size of the pie. The more authority a domain has, the more weight search engines give to the metrics of their outbound links.

Tip: Any search in Google will bring up websites with domain authority at least in the thirties. If the website you are considering for a link opportunity does not have at least a 30 for domain authority, you won't get much value from it.

2. Anchor Text

For the better part of the last decade or so anchor text has been the most important metric of a link. Marketers understood this and it is precisely because of this metric we saw the rise of the Google Bomb.

Blog comment spam is another malady that is directly tied to the importance of anchor text. It's only because of this metric that I have to delete comments on my blog from readers like "cheap online cash advance overnight."

Exact match anchor text isn't the only way to be successful here. A website that sells mountain bikes and targets that keyword should not turn down a link with the anchor text "bicycles."

Tip: Try and get links with your keywords in the anchor text. Be sure to maintain some variety though; search engines can detect unnatural amounts of identical anchor text.

3. Trust

A lot of people struggle to understand the difference between authority and trust. SEOmoz has their own metrics called authority, mozRank and mozTrust. I would recommend reading up on them to get a better idea for the difference.

Building trust with search engines is key to achieving great rankings. There is only one way to build that trust and that is to get links from websites that have a lot of trust built up already.

Tip: Writing a press release is a great way to get some trustworthy links. Lots of news and media outlets have trust with the search engines.

4. Relevance

Relevance is a measure of how connected your content is to the page that is linking to you. It makes a lot more sense for an exercise blog to link to a website that sells treadmills and not one that sells telescopes.

It is difficult to determine how relevant another website is to you however. One handy way is to use the LDA tool from SEOmoz. Just plug in your keyword and the URL of the page you are looking at and see how relevant it is to that term.

Tip: Try to get links from websites that have similar content to yours.

5. Placement

The original PageRank formula by Google treated all links on a web page the same. Each one would pass an equal amount of PageRank. This was called the Random Surfer Model.

Google and other search engines are a bit more advanced now. Bill Slawski explains how Google could be using a Reasonable Surfer Model in their current algorithm.

This means that having your link in the footer of a web page isn't going to help you out a whole lot. A contextual link right at the top of the page in the middle of the content is more likely to be clicked, and thus, likely to pass more PageRank.

The same is true of lists. People are a lot more likely to click links at the top of the list, so those links could pass more link juice.

Tip: Get links that have a higher chance of actually being clicked.

6. Outbound Links

If all links on a page passed an equal amount of PageRank, then more outbound links on a page meant less PageRank per link. Every outbound link on a page devalues your link ever so slightly.

This is why some directories seem pretty useless these days. With hundreds of links on a page, what value is there in adding just one more?

Tip: Don't post links on link farms or other pages with lots and lots of links already on them.

Conclusion

Back to my original point: in the SEO industry we tend to think all or nothing. It's not uncommon to see people turn down a link opportunity with great anchor text and great placement on a relevant page because it didn't have much trust or authority.

This seems flawed to me. Just because you can't get every piece of the pie you don't want any of it? Why turn down a little just because you can't have a lot?

The same goes for partial pieces. A partial anchor text match is not as good as an exact anchor text match, but it's better than nothing.

I'm not saying you have to settle for any link from anywhere, but if you can get even two pieces of the pie, I would take it, even if you don't get the other three.


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An Introductory Guide to SEO for Real Estate Websites Graywolf's SEO Blog

An Introductory Guide to SEO for Real Estate Websites Graywolf's SEO Blog


An Introductory Guide to SEO for Real Estate Websites

Posted: 30 Mar 2011 07:41 AM PDT

Post image for An Introductory Guide to SEO for Real Estate Websites

3 Steps to Better Rankings and More Traffic

It’s no secret that when it comes to SEO, a lot of real estate websites are in bad shape. If you are a broker or a service provider, there’s a great deal of potential in your online presence. For the vast majority of people – 90% according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Realtors - the search for real estate begins online, and as such, if you can tailor your site to your customers search patterns, you can dominate the search engine results and generate high quality, relevant traffic for your site. Whether you’ve already got a website or if you want to create one, following these three steps will help you get a leg up on the competition.

Step 1: Research - What Keywords Do Your Customers Use?

The first step is critical, and fortunately, it’s also relatively simple. What words do search engine users enter, when they’re looking for real estate in your area? Most likely it’ll be a combination of the geographic area and words like “real estate” or “realty.” The appropriate keywords will depend on the services you offer. Essentially you’re looking for the most searched phrase relevant to your business. There are a number of tools that will hep you find this information, keying in “orange county real estate” with Google’s Insights for Search reveals that “orange county property” is searched more frequently than “orange county homes” or “orange county realty.” Depending on the competition surrounding a particular keyword you might be better off picking a phrase lower on the list. Depending on your area there might not be enough information regarding search queries, but you can use your analytics data from your website. Sometimes the Google AdWords keyword tool has better suggestions or more complete data. But once you know what your focus is, what phrase or keywords you would like to optimize for, it’s time to get to work.

Step 2: Optimization – Tailoring Your Site

Optimizing in this case means tailoring your site to your chosen search queries. If you haven’t got your own domain name yet or if you starting from scratch you can book the search query as your domain name, if it’s not already taken. This can give your site an extra relevancy boost. Although it’s not as aesthetically pleasing, booking a domain name with hyphens, like www.thousand-islands-real-estate.com will have the desired effect as well.

In most cases your home page will be the focus of the high traffic keywords you picked, so it’s important that the keywords appear in the title, and early. That being said, it’s important that the titles make sense, if it’s just a jumble of keywords it won’t be clicked as often, you need to write something catchy that will win the click when your title competes with others on the SERP page. Sticking with the Orange County example, you could use a title like “Orange County’s Largest Property Website.” The title is coherent, the relevant keywords appear first, and it’s clear what the site offers.

Similarly the meta description for your home page should contain the keywords as well. Depending on the user’s query, Google and other search engines will display the meta description, or content from the page. So it’s important to have relevant keywords in both. Don’t worry about the density of the keywords, just focus on writing a coherent text.

Side note: You can tailor different pages to different search queries, for instance, “orange county” together with “homes” isn’t searched as often as with “property” but you can write a sub-page targeted for this search phrase as well. Don’t forget to use URLs with the search terms as well, this URL is written for someone looking for waterfront real estate in the Thousand Islands: www.thousand-islands-real-estate.com/waterfront-island-property.

The most common mistake, or the least used potential is the internal linking of one’s own site. The words you use to set links for the navigation of your site can also a deciding factor in your ranking for certain search terms. For instance, the link to your home page is often something like “home.” It would be better to use something like “Orange County Property (Home Page)” or if you have your logo as an image linking to the home page, then use an appropriate alt-tag. The former link might not be the prettiest in your design, but it’s important to remember that only the first link counts, so you could put this at the very top of your page and still have a navigation bar in your design – again, it’s important that the text for the first link as it appears in the source code is the one that counts.

Step 3: Socializing – Optimize Existing Links, Get More Links

For those who already have a site, you hopefully already have a number of other websites linking to yours optimizing existing links can be effective. Contact the original publishers, probably friends or business connections, and ask them to change the text with which they link to your site. You should keep track of who is linking to you but you can use Yahoo! Site Explorer if you want to find out (or double check). It’s important to note that you don’t do this en masse, and get penalized for manipulation, but it stands to reason that content changes and the links do as well. It’s likely you’ll only be able to change a few anyways, but pick the good ones and ensure that the wording is beneficial, not just “click here.” It’s important to mention that variation is also important – if all your links have the exact same text in appears somewhat suspect.

Side note: In step 2 I mentioned the benefits of hyphenated domain names matching search phrases, the implicit benefit is anyone linking to your site with the URL is also linking to you with the desired text anyways!

You can pay money or find free directories to list your site, but I would only dig into my wallet if the directory was well indexed and a major hub with lots of traffic. You might have heard that commenting on blogs is also beneficial, it can be, but links in the comment section are almost always no-follow, which means they lose their SEO-benefit – some argue to what degree this is true but the fact is posting comments on blogs is not a strategy that will have a great effect. Rather see it as an opportunity to take part in a discussion and make users aware of your site. Link building these days is inherently social – not in the twitter and facebook sense – rather, having meaningful dialogue with other like-minded individuals who are also looking to improve their websites. This strategy is likely to take you farther, and be more rewarding. If you’re a frequent visitor to a site and regularly post comments you’re more likely to be successful when you ask for a link as opposed to cold e-mailing. In the same way regularly posting and sharing on forums is also a great way to build a reputation and get links on good pages. Similarly, writing guest posts on other blogs or writing articles for other information hubs will establish you as an authority and get you good links. The key is finding out what other websites play a major role in your industry and establishing yourself there. Finding like-minded people will bring the largest benefit, you can also check the link-profile of other successful sites, already ranking well for the real estate terms in question.

Summation

The first two steps are relatively easy, there’s a lot you can learn with regards to site architecture, crawlability, etc. but as long as your site is well structured and easy to navigate, the deciding factors will be the optimization, the orientation of your site and its content towards a few, specific key phrases, and finally building a strong link profile. Depending on your region or niche you might be one of the few search-savvy operators on the market, and you’ll be able to capitalize and turn that traffic into business.

Feel free to contact Adam Vradenburg with any questions or comments.

tla starter kit

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An Introductory Guide to SEO for Real Estate Websites

Securing Our Energy Future

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, March 30,  2011
 

Securing our Energy Future

Today at 11:20 a.m. EDT, President Obama will deliver a speech at Georgetown University where he will outline his plan for securing America’s energy future. You can watch the speech live at WhiteHouse.gov/live.

Photo of Day

Vice President Joe Biden talks with staff during a meeting on the budget in the Vice President's West Wing Office at the White House, March 29, 2011. Talking with the Vice President, from left, are: Bruce Reed, Chief of Staff to the Vice President; Sudafi Henry, Assistant to the Vice President for Legislative Affairs; and Rob Nabors, Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Watch Live at 5:05 EDT: Answering Your Questions on Women in the Workplace, Education and Work-Life Balance
Today at 5:05 EDT, White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and Preeta Bansal, General Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, will join Shine for a discussion about women in the workplace, education and work-life balance.

America's Next Top Energy Innovator
The Department of Energy is launching a competitive process for recognizing entrepreneurs who are at the cutting edge of clean energy technology. Submissions will be accepted starting in May.

America’s Future Leaders
Eduardo Ochoa, Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education at the Department of Education, talks about community colleges, where a majority of Latinos and other minorities who are traditionally underserved by higher education are now reaching for a college degree in ever-greater numbers.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

10:00 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

11:20 AM: The President delivers a speech on his plan for America’s energy security WhiteHouse.gov/live

12:30 PM: The President and the Vice President meet for lunch

1:00 PM: White House briefing with the Information Technology Industry Council WhiteHouse.gov/live

1:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

4:25 PM: The President meets with senior advisors

5:05 PM: Open for Questions: Women in America WhiteHouse.gov/live

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates events that will be live streamed on White House.com/Live.

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