luni, 21 iulie 2014

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


The Crazy S**t People Are Searching For On Google [Infographic]

Posted: 21 Jul 2014 06:59 PM PDT

Do you sometimes go so much crazy that you search craziest things you can on Google? Whenever you do it, you always find people are crazier than you! They search even more crazy things on Google that you can see in Google auto-suggestions. Don't consider those weird Google suggestions random because they aren't.

Click on Image to Enlarge.



An Update on the Situation in Ukraine:

 
Here's what's going on at the White House today.
 
 
 
 
 
  Featured

An Update on the Situation in Ukraine:

This morning, President Obama made a statement on the current situation in Ukraine, in the wake of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 being shot down last week over territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. He insisted that "our immediate focus is on recovering those who were lost, investigating exactly what happened, and putting forward the facts."

The President also addressed the situation in Gaza, reiterating that our focus should be "to bring about a ceasefire that ends the fighting and that can stop the deaths of innocent civilians -- both in Gaza and in Israel."

Watch the President's full statement here:

President Barack Obama makes a statement to the press on the situation in Ukraine.


 
 
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President Obama Signs a New Executive Order to Protect LGBT Workers

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Weekly Address: Equipping Workers with Skills Employers Need Now and for the Future

In this week's address, the President discussed the importance of ensuring that the economic progress we've made is shared by all hardworking Americans. Through his opportunity agenda, the President is focused on creating more jobs, educating more kids, and working to make sure hard work pays off with higher wages and better benefits.

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The Top 5 Best Moments from the 2014 Kids' State Dinner

On Friday, the First Lady welcomed fifty-four young chefs from all over the country to the State Dining Room for the 2014 Kids' State Dinner. These 54 kids were selected from more than 1,500 recipes that were submitted for the Epicurious Healthy Lunchtime Challenge.

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  Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Time (ET)

9:30 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:15 AM: The President signs an Executive Order to protect LGBT employees from workplace discrimination

10:50 AM: The President delivers a statement on the situation in Ukraine

11:45 AM: The President participates in a town hall focusing on the importance of the My Brother's Keeper Initiative

12:00 PM: The Vice President delivers remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention

1:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Josh Earnest

3:05 PM: The President awards Ryan M. Pitts, U.S. Army, the Medal of Honor


 

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An Update on the Situation in Ukraine:

 
Here's what's going on at the White House today.
 
 
 
 
 
  Featured

An Update on the Situation in Ukraine:

This morning, President Obama made a statement on the current situation in Ukraine, in the wake of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 being shot down last week over territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. He insisted that "our immediate focus is on recovering those who were lost, investigating exactly what happened, and putting forward the facts."

The President also addressed the situation in Gaza, reiterating that our focus should be "to bring about a ceasefire that ends the fighting and that can stop the deaths of innocent civilians -- both in Gaza and in Israel."

Watch the President's full statement here:

President Barack Obama makes a statement to the press on the situation in Ukraine.


 
 
  Top Stories

President Obama Signs a New Executive Order to Protect LGBT Workers

In the East Room of the White House this morning, the President signed an Executive Order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

READ MORE

Weekly Address: Equipping Workers with Skills Employers Need Now and for the Future

In this week's address, the President discussed the importance of ensuring that the economic progress we've made is shared by all hardworking Americans. Through his opportunity agenda, the President is focused on creating more jobs, educating more kids, and working to make sure hard work pays off with higher wages and better benefits.

READ MORE

The Top 5 Best Moments from the 2014 Kids' State Dinner

On Friday, the First Lady welcomed fifty-four young chefs from all over the country to the State Dining Room for the 2014 Kids' State Dinner. These 54 kids were selected from more than 1,500 recipes that were submitted for the Epicurious Healthy Lunchtime Challenge.

READ MORE


 
 
  Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Time (ET)

9:30 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:15 AM: The President signs an Executive Order to protect LGBT employees from workplace discrimination

10:50 AM: The President delivers a statement on the situation in Ukraine

11:45 AM: The President participates in a town hall focusing on the importance of the My Brother's Keeper Initiative

12:00 PM: The Vice President delivers remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention

1:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Josh Earnest

3:05 PM: The President awards Ryan M. Pitts, U.S. Army, the Medal of Honor


 

Did Someone Forward This to You? Sign Up for Email Updates

This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com

Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy
Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111


Calculating Estimated ROI for a Specific Site & Body of Keywords

Calculating Estimated ROI for a Specific Site & Body of Keywords


Calculating Estimated ROI for a Specific Site & Body of Keywords

Posted: 20 Jul 2014 05:15 PM PDT

Posted by shannonskinner

One of the biggest challenges for SEO is proving its worth. We all know it's valuable, but it's important to convey its value in terms that key stakeholders (up to and including CEOs) understand. To do that, I put together a process to calculate an estimate of ROI for implementing changes to keyword targeting.

In this post, I will walk through that process, so hopefully you can do the same for your clients (or as an in-house SEO to get buy-in), too!

Overview

  1. Gather your data
    1. Keyword Data
    2. Strength of your Preferred URLs
    3. Competition URLs by Keyword
    4. Strength of Competition URLs
  2. Analyze the Data by Keyword
  3. Calculate your potential opportunity

What you need

There are quite a few parts to this recipe, and while the calculation part is pretty easy, gathering the data to throw in the mix is the challenging part. I'll list each section here, including the components of each, and then we can go through how to retrieve each of them. 

  • Keyword data
    • list of keywords
    • search volumes for each keyword
    • preferred URLs on the site you're estimating ROI
    • current rank
    • current ranking URL
  • Strength of your preferred URLs
    • De-duplicated list of preferred URLs
    • Page Authorities for each preferred URL
    • BONUS: External & Internal Links for each URL. You can include any measure you like here, as long as it's something that can be compared (i.e. a number).
  • Where the competition sits
    • For each keyword, the sites that are ranking 1-10 in search currently
  • Strength of the competition
    • De-duplicated list of competing URLs
    • Page Authorities, Domain Authorities, 
    • BONUS: External & Internal Links, for each competing URL. Include any measure you've included on the Strength of Your Preferred URLs list.

How to get what you need

There has been quite a lot written about keyword research, so I won't go into too much detail here. For the Keyword data list, the important thing is to get whatever keywords you'd like to assess into a spreadsheet, and include all the information listed above. You'll have to select the preferred URLs based on what you think the strongest-competing and most appropriate URL would be for each keyword. 

For the Preferred URLs list, you'll want to use the data that's in your keyword data under the preferred URL.

  1. Copy the preferred URL data from your Keyword Data into a new tab. 
  2. Use the Remove Duplicates tool (Data>Data Tools in Excel) to remove any duplicated URLs

Once you have the list of de-duplicated preferred URLs, you'll need to pull the data from Open Site Explorer for these URLs. I prefer using the Moz API with SEOTools. You'll have to install it to use it for Excel, or if you'd like to take a stab at using it in Google Docs, there are some resources available for that. Unfortunately, with the most recent update to Google Spreadsheets, I've had some difficulty with this method, so I've gone with Excel for now. 

Once you've got SEOTools installed, you can make the call "=MOZ_URLMetrics_toFit([enter your cells])". This should give you a list of URL titles, canonical URLs, External & Internal links, as well as a few other metrics and DA/PA. 

For the Where the competition sits list, you'll first need to perform a search for each of your keywords. Obviously, you could do this manually, or if you have exportable data from a keyword ranking tool and you've been ranking the keywords you'd like to look at, you could use either of these methods. If you don't have those, you can use the hacky method that I did--basically, use the ImportXML command in Google Spreadsheets to grab the top ranking URLs for each query. 

I've put a sample version of this together, which you can access here. A few caveats: you should be able to run MANY searches in a row--I had about 850 for my data, and they ran fine. Google will block your IP address, though, if you run too many, and what I found is that I needed to copy out my results as values into a different spreadsheet once I'd gotten them, because they timed out relatively quickly, but you can just put them into the Excel spreadsheet you're building to make the ROI calculations (you'll need them there anyway!).

From this list, you can pull each URL into a single list, and de-duplicate as explained for the preferred URLs list to generate the Strength of the Competition list, and then run the analysis you did with the preferred URLs to generate the same data for these URLs as you did for the preferred URLs with SEOTools for Excel. 

Making your data work for you

Once you've got these lists, you can use some VLOOKUP magic to pull in the information you need. I used the Where the competition sits list as the foundation of my work. 

From there, I pulled in the corresponding preferred URL and its Page Authority, as well as the PAs and DAs for each URL currently ranking 1-10. I then was able to calculate an average PA & DA for each query, and could compare the page I want to rank to this. I estimated the chances that the page I wanted to rank (given that I'd already determined these were relevant pages) could rank with better keyword targeting.

Here's where things get interesting. You can be rather conservative, and only sum search volumes of keywords you're fairly confident your site can rank, which is my preferred method. That's because I use this method primarily to determine if I'm on the right track--whether making these recommendations are really worth the time to get implemented. So I'm going to move forward assuming I'm counting only the search volumes of terms I think I'm quite competitive for, AND that I'm not yet ranking for on page 1. 

Now, you want to move to your analytics data in order to calculate a few things: 

  • Conversion Rate
  • Average order value
  • Previous year's revenue (for the section you're looking at)

I've set up my sample data in this spreadsheet that you can refer to or use to make your own calculations. 

Each of the assumptions can be adjusted depending on the actual site data, or using estimates. I'm using very very generic overall CTR estimates, but you can select which you'd like and get as granular as you want! The main point for me is really getting to two numbers that I can stand by as pretty good estimates: 

  • Annual Impact (Revenue $$)
  • Increase in Revenue ($$) from last year

This is because, for higher-up folks, money talks. Obviously, this won't be something you can promise, but it gives them a metric that they understand to really wrap their head around the value that you're potentially brining to the table if the changes you're recommending can be made. 

There are some great tools for estimating this kind of stuff on a smaller scale, but for a massive body of keyword data, hopefully you will find this process useful as well. Let me know what you think, and I'd love to see what parts anyone else can streamline or make even more efficient. 


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Seth's Blog : Finding your peer group

 

Finding your peer group

Your peer group are people with similar dreams, goals and worldviews. They are people who will push you in exchange for being pushed, who will raise the bar and tell you the truth.

They're not in your business, but they're in your shoes.

Finding a peer group and working with them, intentionally and on a regular schedule, might be the single biggest boost your career can experience.

       

 

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duminică, 20 iulie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Video of Rebel Buk Launchers Headed Back to Russia? No - Images From Ukraine-Held Territory Since May

Posted: 20 Jul 2014 07:58 PM PDT

Update: The video clip I displayed earlier today was likely the downing of an An-30 last month not Malaysian flight MH17. Once again it is very difficult to sort through all the propaganda. Both sides are involved.

Jacob Dreizin, a US citizen who speaks Russian and reads Ukrainian provided this update three hours ago.
Hello Mish,

On Friday, the Daily Mail, one of the major UK tabloids carried photos and video of what was alleged to be a rebel "Buk" launcher heading back to Russia.  The article carried a claim from some Ukrainian source that the launcher was missing several missiles after having shot them at the Malaysian 777.  The article was prominently linked to the Drudge Report, and so was probably viewed by several million people.

Today, this meme made it into Uncle Sam's official narrative, as per the following New York Times excerpt:

On the CBS program "Face the Nation," Mr. Kerry referred to a video that the Ukrainians have made public showing an SA-11 unit heading back to Russia after the downing of the plane with "a missing missile or so."

The video referenced by the New York Times was, in fact, posted on the Facebook account of the Ukrainian Interior Minister. The allegation was that the launcher was crossing the border with Russia.

However, going by the billboard and other features of the scenery, Russian bloggers and news sources claim to have identified the road in the video as having been taken in or near the town of Krasnoarmeisk ("Krasnoarmiysk" in Ukrainian), which has been under Kiev's control since May.

In fact, the billboard is supposedly advertising a Krasnoarmeisk car dealership.  Also, one of the structures in the background is said to be a construction materials store on Gorkii Street, Krasnoarmeisk.

Please note that this town is (very roughly) 120 kilometers from the Russian border and 80 kilometers from where the Malaysian 777 went down.  And again, it has been under Kiev's control since May.

At least one other clip of the "Russian Buk" that has been made available also suggests that the Ukrainians are showing their own equipment. I'm still working on researching that one for you.

Jacob
Video in Question



It is beyond incredibly sloppy for Ukraine to release such a video with a clear billboard of something in Ukraine-held territory, purportedly showing a Buk missile launcher headed back to Russia.

And we are supposed to believe Kiev? Kerry?

Please be serious. If you are really interested in the truth, you do not resort to such easily disproved and sloppy bullsheet.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Update From Jacob Dreizin; Black Box Thoughts

Posted: 20 Jul 2014 09:21 AM PDT

Reader David sent an email and accompanying video that purportedly shows the Malaysian Flight 17 being hit by missile. Let's take a look.



David Writes ...

It appears as if the right engine and wing area took the hit. The camera operator is able to record the moment of impact in the first 2 seconds of this clip. Note the smoke burst left behind on impact with the #2 engine area. There is a 18 second delay (speed of sound delay) due to the distance and altitude of the explosion. Question: How did this video operator know to have his camera running just prior to the missile explosion? How many people run their camera in the sky looking for an airplane cruising at altitude so high that most are not visible to the human eye? Note that the pilots are maintaining wings level, the airplane and burning wing still intact, in what appears to be an uncontrolled descent from 33,000 feet when the video ends at 1 minute 19 seconds.

Mish comment. I am not sure if I can make out everything David says, or if it is indeed flight 17, but it is an interesting clip.

See Update Below - Video is likely an earlier  downing, not flight 17.

Update From Jacob Dreizin

Jacob Dreizin, a US citizen who speaks Russian and reads Ukrainian provided this update a few hours ago.

Hello Mish

This whole thing is a mystery of no lesser magnitude than that other Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared in March. The true picture is even foggier than most people realize, with many questions unanswered.

Main Questions

  1. For unknown reasons, the flight diverted or was diverted from its usual course to fly smack over a tiny patch of land---of roughly 5000 square miles, or the size of Connecticut---controlled by pro-Russian rebels.  (In fact, the 777 went down a few miles from the geographic bottleneck where three desperate Ukrainian brigades are trapped between the rebels and the Russian border.)  Why?  And if this airspace had been closed by Ukraine (on July 8th), why was that closure never registered with international aviation authorities or coordinating bodies? 
  2. Russian media has quoted multiple Russian defense experts as saying that "Buk" missiles are designed to explode within several hundred meters of a target, sending between 50,000 and 100,000 pieces of shrapnel in all directions at supersonic (maybe hypersonic) speeds.  According to these experts, an aircraft met by a "Buk" would be instantly riddled with holes, and the wreckage would evince that type of damage pattern.  However, the few large pieces of Malaysia 777 wreckage that we have seen so far don't seem to fit the bill.  In that case, was it really a "Buk", or some other missile system?  (And if the latter, is it even worth arguing over whether the rebels have a "Buk"?)  Or was the plane not destroyed from the ground at all?
  3. Related to number (2), why were the Ukrainians so quick to say it was a "Buk"?  How would they know, within just minutes or an hour of the event?  Especially if both the alleged missile launch and the 777's coming down to earth occurred on territory not under their control?  And, why did they immediately (and wrongly) claim that 23 Americans were on board the plane?  Did they just make that up?
  4. On Friday, the Ukrainians claimed to have arrested two Russian officers who had helped with targeting to bring down the 777.  However, Kiev did not announce their names, nor the location of their arrest, nor did it provide any photographic or video evidence.  So who are these people?  Do they even exist?
  5. 23 minutes before the plane was first reported lost, the press secretary for Ukraine's national security council announced that the rebels had acquired a more potent air defense capability.  Later that same day or the next morning, Ukraine's chief prosecutor is reported to have said that the rebels don't have any "Buks."  What was all that about?
  6. The Russians claim that Ukraine recently moved an entire unit of "Buks" into the Donetsk region.  Ukraine has not denied that.  Given the fluidity of the front line, which is changing almost every day, how can Uncle Sam be sure that the launch he claims to have observed did not come from the Ukrainian side?  Moreover, if our spooks have the capacity to track such an event from the sky, why can't they produce any satellite pics of all the Russian military equipment coming over the border?  Do they really have a good eye on this area or not?  And last but not least, within a few hours of the plane being lost, there was already a claim in the media (I think it was CNN) that U.S. spy assets saw evidence of a missile being fired.  How can information like that move so quickly through the government and out to the press?
  7. Finally, on the purely domestic side, why has the U.S. media been referencing airliner shoot-downs in 1983 and 1988, but maintaining total silence about Siberian Airlines Flight 1812, which was downed by Ukraine in 2001?  Wouldn't Flight 1812 be at least somewhat relevant to the discussion?  It's very strange that it hasn't come up.

Ukraine Confiscated Air Traffic Control Recordings 

Yesterday, The BBC reported at 15:29: "Ukraine's SBU security service has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner, a source in Kiev has told Interfax news agency."

Black Box Thoughts

Don't you think Ukraine ought to release those tapes? Regardless, the recordings should be in the black boxes.

And speaking of black boxes, I am reading conflicting information as to how many have been recovered, who has control of them, and where they are now.

The way to get the most information is if three separate parties have them: Ukraine, Russia, and an independent Agency.

Ron Paul Chimes In

Finally, please consider this reasonable message from Ron Paul: Don't Blame Putin For Malaysian Jet Shoot Down
The Texas Republican said that the fact that Russians may have provided the weapons to the Ukrainian rebels is not enough to put the blame on the Russian president.

"That may well be true, but guess what, ISIS has a lot of American weapons," he said. "We sent weapons into Syria to help the rebels and al-Qaida ends up getting it — it doesn't mean that our American government and Obama deliberately wanted ISIS to get American weapons."

"So who gets the weapons is a big difference between how they got them and what happened and what the motivations were," Paul added. "So even if it was a Russian weapon — doesn't mean a lot."

"It's pretty evident that the whole problem in Ukraine started approximately a year ago when the Europeans, along with the United States, overthrew an elected government and overthrew [former Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych — insisting that there'd be civil strife over there," he explained.

The United States instituted sanctions against Russia Tuesday aimed at Russia's financial institutions and defense sector, which Paul considers "acts of war."

"They want to put on these sanctions, which are actually acts of war and the consequence is usually economic blowback," he said.

Paul says that we should approach the situation with the downed Malaysian jet "cautiously."

"Under these circumstances, it's very difficult to get the real information so everybody's angling to propagandize and make their position known," he said.

"It'd be unwise to say, well, the Russians did it, or the Ukrainian government did it, or the rebels did it."

We may not know for years the full story, or it may come out next week. Even if the rebels did it, why did Kiev direct that plane over a war zone?

Personal Update

I am in Glacier National Park, Montana (to be more precise, just outside the park). There is no phone or internet in the park. It can take 1 hour to do an email on the park satellite Wi-Fi. On this monitor I cannot tell exposures correctly.

St. Mary Falls



By the way, waterfalls and river gorges photograph best on cloudy days - bright overcast is best. Heading back to Chicago today.

Addendum: The video clip above is likely the downing of an An-30 last month not Malaysian flight MH17. Once again it is very difficult to sort through all the propaganda. Both sides are involved.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Go first

 

Go first

Before you're asked.

Before she asks for the memo, before the customer asks for a refund, before your co-worker asks for help.

Volunteer.

Offer.

Imagine what the other person needs, an exercise in empathy that might become a habit.

       

 

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