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SEOptimise |
When SEO appears on The Archers… Posted: 29 Sep 2011 04:38 AM PDT …There can be no further doubt that it's mainstream. Yes, a discussion around search engine optimisation has featured on never-ending Radio 4 farming-community soap opera The Archers. You're probably wondering why I would know this. The answer is that, being prematurely middle aged enough to refer to the radio as "the wireless", I am also middle aged (and countrified) enough to tune into The Archers from time to time (I don't follow it religiously or anything, honest!). But the farmers now plan to rebuild their reputation and their business. The only problem is that anytime anyone searches for 'Bridge Farm', the top stories are all about e-coli – not exactly a message that's going to get people excited about your ice cream. So, they want to use an SEO agency to work some online reputation management magic and allow them to restore their brand. Here's what I would advise: Address the issues One option would be to fire the source of the outbreak – one of their dairy staff – and tell their customers what they've done. But Tony and Pat seem like nice people and don't want to make their employee a scapegoat. Instead, they should issue a press release highlighting the changes they've made that ensure greater hygiene standards are observed. Move the story on Each time they do that, they ruin their chances of moving the story on. Even a sympathetic journalist wanting to document how their business is recovering will be telling the story of how they put two children in hospital. Create new buzz Perhaps they could attempt some silly news story, like making a record-breaking sausage, or a serious but positive story such as launching an organic farming awareness day. They should probably steer clear of stories relating to any of their dairy business, as this simply invites mentions of the e-coli crisis. Push other products Rebuilding their dairy business is going to take time and the farm needs to maintain its income in the meantime. One way to do that is to ensure that the meat products are being strongly marketed. If you search for 'Bridge Farm' and a load of content on organic sausages and happy pedigree pigs ranks first then you have an initially positive experience of the brand. Drive their reputation socially Using these platforms, they can build customer loyalty and increase the amount of positive mentions of their brand on the web. These help drive new customers and maintain ties with their current ones. If all else fails, ditch the brand If none of the above methods work and the end seems near, it could well be time to rebrand, repackage and begin their promotional campaign from scratch. Then they can instigate some positive reputation management tactics and build a loved brand. Now, how to boost business at The Bull… © SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. When SEO appears on The Archers… Related posts: |
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How many Twitter followers will be enough?
How many Facebook fans does your company page need?
How much traffic to your blog?
In the digital age, for the first time ever, most of us come face to face with the opportunity for unlimited. No bakery can handle an infinite line, no orchestra could possibly have an infinite number of violins, no teacher in a classroom covets a classroom of infinite size...
But in the digital world, the pursuit of infinity isn't just possible, it's the norm.
The question: What price are you willing to pay for that pursuit?
Deciding that the only audience that is enough is everyone completely changes the way you measure your worth and your work. If pursuing a number you will never reach changes you or your approach or your beliefs, is it worth it?
(The corollary of infinity is zero. As in zero people disagreeing with you, questioning you or ignoring you).
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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
Posted: 29 Sep 2011 04:23 PM PDT I have been waiting for and expecting news headlines just like this one: Seton Hall will lower tuition rate by $21K to match Rutgers for some incoming freshmen Getting good grades and high SAT scores could save some Seton Hall University freshmen more than $21,000 a year in tuition costs under an unusual new program that could pit the Catholic school against Rutgers University for some of the state's top students.Expect Plans to Spread Drew University in Madison rejected the plan as a publicity stunt. However, I expect such plans to spread. I also expect more competition from online classes. If Congress really wants to do something about the high cost of education, it would:
Cost of College Education will Crash Within a Decade The cost of college education would sink like a rock with those four structural improvements. Interestingly, even with piss poor government policies, places like Seton Hal, prices have collapsed for some students. Right now the opening toss applies to 10% of the students. Next year it may be 25% of students and offered at more universities. For those who have kids in grade school, I would not advise programs that lock in today's rates if paid in advance. The cost of college education will crash within a decade, simply because it has to. Moreover, the free market would lower costs sooner and far more dramatically, if only given the chance. Wages are not supportive of current education costs. Addendum: I wrote the above quoting the New Jersey Start Ledger article written yesterday. I received two emails just now pointing to additional articles in the Wall Street Journal and New York Daily News. Please consider the Journal Article Seton Hall Cuts Cost For High Achievers Seton Hall University will radically restructure its tuition for next year, slashing costs by more than 60% for all incoming students who have achieved a set of academic standards in high school, officials announced on Wednesday.Failure of Subsidies One of the reasons college education is so high is because union activists and socialists want to send everyone to college whether they are qualified or not. When that drove up costs, government "aid" programs were invented, not for the benefit of students, but rather for the benefit of educators. Students became debt slaves in the process. The education mess has gotten bigger and more costly ever since programs were put in place to subsidize students, many of whom did not belong in college in the first place, but rather a trade school or apprentice program. Moronic Thinking of Jerome Sullivan Note the moronic thinking of Jerome Sullivan. He is actually complaining about costs of education dropping, complaining price wars will hurt low-income families. The fact of the matter is the more prices drop, the more people can afford to go to college. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Peter Oborne 'Idiot' Comments Prompts EU Spokesman To Storm Off Newsnight Posted: 29 Sep 2011 11:22 AM PDT link if above video does not play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNq9MOc5CBY Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Posted: 29 Sep 2011 09:30 AM PDT Here is an interesting email from reader "Kevin" regarding the crashing loan-shark market in China. Hello MishLoan Shark Credit Crisis Brewing Courtesy of Google Translate please consider Gray Chinese-style financial credit crisis brewing area "Economic Information Daily" correspondent from the multi-confirmed the day before and then there were two causes of Wenzhou City, inability to repay loan sharks and jumping events. According to informed sources, the two business owners are the local shoe factory owner, debt of millions.Financial Earthquake Triggered by Loan Shark Business Also courtesy of Google Translate, please consider loan-sharking business owners who jumped to escape September 22, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Jiang Xintai largest optical company chairman Hu Fulin liabilities 2 billion fled, triggering a major earthquake Wenzhou business. Wenzhou Zhou German SME Development Association president, said Hu Fulin liabilities involving nearly ten thousand people, dozens of companies, including upstream and downstream Nobuyasu and creditors, the incident is still fermenting, the impact will be further expanded.The translations are choppy, but the ideas very easy to spot. $SSEC - Shanghai Exchange -Daily Chart click on chart for sharper image China is down another 1% (not reflected in the above chart), to 2368 as of 2:00 AM Thursday. It closed at 2365. click on chart for sharper image The Shanghai stock market depicts a credit bubble that collapsed in 2008, partially rebounded, and is sinking once again. China did not decouple from the global economy, nor is there any reason to believe it will, or should. China's debt bubble, housing bubble, and copper Ponzi financing schemes are collapsing. Copper Ponzi Scheme: See Ponzi Financing Involving Copper Trade Gone Wild In China for details of a copper financing scheme now gone bust. Shark Loans: See Ponzi "Shark Loans" Fuel China's Housing Bubble; Home Sales Plunge 44% in Xiamen; Bubble Busts in Tianjin for details on how loan shark operations fueled China's real estate bubble. Ghost Cities: I have done many stories on China's ghost cities, most recently World's Biggest Property Bubble: China's Ghost Cities Revisited; 64 Million Vacant Properties Property Loans Halted: Property Loans Halted in China's 2nd and 3rd-Tier Cities; Is China's Spectacular Real Estate Bubble About to Pop? All of these schemes are starting to unravel in a major way. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Enron-i-sation of Europe; Is the Euro "Beyond Rescue"? Posted: 29 Sep 2011 01:21 AM PDT Steen Steen Jakobsen, chief economist for Saxo bank in Denmark discusses the Enron-i-sation of Europe in an Email "Macro Brief" The Enron-i-sation of Europe: Finding solutions through SPV's speak for themselves. Apart from the inability to being implemented (if German constitutional court is heard) it's also a slippery road towards permanent aid. Hiding debt in more and more obscure vehicles is similar to Enron having 1000s of SPV hiding the "real issue". Debt is debt. It needs to be paid back or someone needs to take a loss!Notes on SPVs Investopedia describes the Special Purpose Vehicle/Entity - SPV/SPE What Does Special Purpose Vehicle/Entity - SPV/SPE Mean?Euro is "Practically Dead, Beyond Rescue" Bloomberg reports Euro Is Beyond Rescue in Debt Crisis, Szalay-Berzeviczy Says The euro is "practically dead" and Europe faces a financial earthquake from a Greek default, according to Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, global head of securities services at Italy's biggest lender UniCredit SpA. (UCG)"Beyond Rescue" and "This can still be averted" are logical opposites. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see such blunt comments from high places at major lenders, even if those comments "do not reflect the position of the company". For more on the twisted mess in Europe, please consider these recent posts
I struggle to see how the Eurozone can survive intact. No currency union without a fiscal union has ever survived and the German court ruled out a fiscal union without a new constitution and popular referendum. Good luck with that given 75% of Germans oppose more bailouts. See the above articles for details. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
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Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand |
Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand Posted: 28 Sep 2011 01:42 PM PDT Posted by iPullRank Before I even start saying anything about keyword research I want to take my hat off to Richard Baxter because the tools and methodologies he shared at MozCon make me feel silly for even thinking about bringing something to the Keyword Research table. Now with that said, I have a few ideas about using data sources outside of those that the Search Engines provide to get a sense of what needs people are looking to fulfill right now. Consider this the first in a series. Correlation Between Social Media & Search Volume The biggest problem with the Search Engine-provided keyword research tools is the lag time in data. The web is inherently a real-time channel and in order to capitalize upon that you need to be able to leverage any advantage you can in order to get ahead of the search demand. Although Google Trends will give you data when there are huge breakouts on keywords around current events there is a three-day delay with Google Insights and AdWords only gives you monthly numbers! However there is often a very strong correlation between the number of people talking about a given subject or keyword in Social Media and the amount of search volume for that topic. Compare the trend of tweets posted containing the keyword “Michael Jackson” with search volume for the last 90 days.
The graphs are pretty close to identical with a huge spike on August 29th which is Michael Jackson’s (and my) birthday. The problem is that given the limitations of tools like Google Trends and Google Insights you may not be able to find this out until September 1st for many keywords and beyond that you may not be able to find complementary long tail terms with search volume. The insight here is that subjects people are tweeting about are ultimately keywords that people are searching for. The added benefit of using social listening for keyword research that you can also get a good sense of the searcher’s intent to better fulfill their needs. Due to this correlation social Listening allows you to uncover what topics and keywords will have search demand and what topics are going have a spike in search demand –in real-time. N-grams Before we get to the methodology for doing this I have to explain one basic concept –N-grams. An N-gram is a subset of a sequence of length N. In the case of search engines the N is the number of words in a search query. For example (I'm so terrible with gradients): is a 5-gram. The majority of search queries fall between 2 and 5-grams anything beyond a 5-gram is most likely a long tail keyword that doesn’t have a large enough search volume to warrant content creation. If this is still unclear check out the Google Books Ngram viewer ; it’s a pretty cool way to get a good idea of what Ngrams are. Also you should check out John Doherty’s Google Analytics Advanced Segments post where talks about how to segment N-grams using RegEx. Real-Time Keyword Research Methodology Now that we’ve got the small vocabulary update out of the way let’s talk about how you can do keyword research in real-time. The following methodology was developed by my friend Ron Sansone with some small revisions from me in order to port it into code. 1. Pull all the tweets containing your keyword from Twitter Search within the last hour. This part is pretty straightforward; you want to pull down the most recent portion of the conversation right now in order to extract patterns. Use Topsy for this. If you’re not using Topsy, pulling the last 200 tweets via Twitter is also a good sized data set to use. 2. Identify the top 10 most repeated N-grams ignoring stop words. Here you identify the keywords with the highest (ugh) density. In other words the keywords that are tweeted the most are the ones you are considering for optimization. Be sure to keep this between 2 and 5 N-grams beyond that you most likely not dealing with a large enough search volume to make your efforts worthwhile. Also be sure to exclude stop words so you don’t end up with n-grams like “jackson the” or “has Michael.” Here’s a list of English stop words and Textalyser has an adequate tool for breaking a block of text into N-grams. 3. Check to see if there is already search volume in the Adwords Keyword tool or Google Insights. This process is not just about identifying breakout keywords that aren’t being shown yet in Google Insights but it’s also about identifying keywords with existing search volume that are about to get boost. Therefore you’ll want to check the Search Engine tools to see if any search volume exists in order to prioritize opportunities. 4. Pull the Klout scores of all the users tweeting them. Yeah, yeah I know Klout is a completely arbitrary calculation but you want to know that the people tweeting the keywords have some sort of influence. If you find that a given N-gram has been used many times by a bunch of spammy Twitter profiles then that N-gram is absolutely not useful. Also if you create content around the given term, you’ll know exactly who to send it to. Methodology Expanded I expanded on Ron’s methodology by introducing another data source. If you were at SMX East you might have heard me express the love that low budget hustlers (such as myself) have for SocialMention. Using SocialMention allows you pull data from up to 100+ social media properties and news sources. Unlike Topsy or Twitter there is an easy CSV/Excel File export and they give you the top 1-grams being used in posts related to that topic. Be sure to exclude images, audio and video from your search results as they are not useful. "Michael Jackson" Social Mention One quick note: The CSV export will only give you a list of URLs, sources, page titles and main ideas. You will still have to extract the data manually or with some of the ImportXML magic that Tom Critchlow debuted earlier this year. So What's the Point? So what does all of this get me? Well today it got me "michael jackson trial," "jackson trial," "south park" and "heard today." So if I was looking to do some content around Michael Jackson I'd find out what news came to light in court, illustrate the trial and the news in a blog post using South Park characters and fire it off to all the influencers that tweeted about it. Need I say more? You can now easily figure out what type of content would make viral link bait in real-time. GoFish So this sounds like a lot of work to get the jump on a few keywords, doesn’t it? Well I can definitely relate and especially since I am a programmer it’s quite painful for me to do any repetitive task. Seriously am I really going to sit in Excel and remove stop words? No I’m not and neither should you. Whenever a methodology like this pops up the first thing I think is how to automate it. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to the legendary GoFish real-time keyword research tool. I built this from Ron’s methodology and it uses the Topsy, Repustate and SEMRush APIs. When I get some extra time I will include the SocialMention API and hopefully Google will cut the lights back on for my Adwords API as well. I seriously doubt it will handle the load that comes with being on the front page of SEOmoz as it is only built on 10 proxies and each of these APIs has substantial rate limitations (Topsy – 33k/day, Repustate 50k/month, SEMRush-I’m still not sure) but here it is nonetheless. If anyone wants to donate some AWS instances or a bigger proxy network to me I’ll gladly make this weapons grade. Shout out to John Murch for letting me borrow some of his secret stash of proxies and shout out to Pete Sena at Digital Surgeons for making me all-purpose GUI for my tools. Anyway all you have to is put in your keyword, press the button, wait for a time and voila you get output that looks like this: The output is the top 10 N-grams, the combined Klout scores of the all users that tweeted the given N-gram vs the highest combined Klout score possible, all of the users in the data set that tweeted them and the search volume if available. So that's GoFish. Think of it as a work in progress but let me know what features will help you get more out of it. Until Next Time… That’s all I’ve got for this week folks. I’ll be back soon with another real-time keyword research tactic and tool. if you haven’t checked out my keyword-level demographics post yet, please do! In the meantime look for me in the chatroom for Richard Baxter's Actionable Keyword Research for Motivated Marketers Webinar. |
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