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joi, 29 mai 2014

"America Must Always Lead"

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Yesterday, President Obama traveled to West Point to congratulate the newest officers in the U.S. Army and reflect on America's foreign policy agenda.

In his commencement address, the President outlined his vision for how the United States, and our military, should lead in the years to come -- and made clear that we "must always lead on the world stage."

Watch the President's full remarks at West Point.

The Illustrated SEO Competitive Analysis Workflow

Posted: 28 May 2014 05:14 PM PDT

Posted by Aleyda

One of the most important activities for any SEO process is the initial competitive analysis. This process should correctly identify your SEO targets and provide fundamental input to establish your overall strategy.

Depending on the type, industry, and scope of the SEO process, this analysis can become quite complex, as there are many factors to take into consideration—more now than ever before.

In order to facilitate this process (and make it easy to replicate, control, and document), I've created a step-by-step workflow with the different activities and factors to take into consideration, including identifying SEO competitors, gathering the potential keywords to target, assessing their level of difficulty, and selecting them based on defined criteria:

If you prefer, you can also grab a higher resolution version of the workflow from here.

The four analysis phases

As you can see, the SEO analysis workflow is divided into four phases:

1. Identify your potential SEO competitors

This initial phase is especially helpful if you're starting with an SEO process for a new client or industry that you don't know anything about, and you need to start from scratch to identify all of the potentially relevant competitors.

It's important to note that these are not necessarily limited to companies or websites that offer the same type of content, services, or products that you do, but can be any website that competes with you in the search results for your target keywords.

2. Validate your SEO competitors

Once you have the potential competitors that you have gathered from different relevant sources it's time to validate them, by analyzing and filtering which of those are really already ranking, and to which degree, for the same keywords that you're targeting.

Additionally, at this stage you'll also expand your list of potential target keywords by performing keyword research. This should use sources beyond the ones that you had already identified coming from your competitors and your current organic search data—sources for which your competitors or yourself are still not ranking, that might represent new opportunities.

3. Compare with your SEO competitors

Now that you have your SEO competitors and potential target keywords, you can gather, list, and compare your site to your competitors, using all of the relevant data to select and prioritize those keywords. This will likely include keyword relevance, current rankings, search volume, ranked pages, as well as domains' link popularity, content optimization, and page results characteristics, among others.

4. Select your target keywords

It's finally time to analyze the previously gathered data for your own site and your competitors, using the specified criteria to select the best keyword to target for your own situation in the short-, mid-, and long-term during your SEO process: Those with the highest relevance, search volume, and profitability. The best starting point is in rankings where you are competitive from a popularity and content standpoint.

Tools & data sources

The data sources and tools—besides the traditional ones from search engines, like their keyword or webmaster tools—that can help you to implement the process (some of them mentioned in the workflow) are:

To identify competitors: Alexa Top Sites, SimilarWeb Websites Ranking & Sites Profile.
To identify keywords: SEMRush for keyword data, SuggestMtrx (you can also use Ubersuggest or SEOchat Suggestion Keyword Finder) to gather Google suggestions for your keywords.
To identify rankings: Authority labs, Positionly, Advanced Web Ranking, among others.
To identify popularity: The Moz SEO Toolbar SERP overlay view, OpenSiteExplorer, CognitiveSEO Backlink Explorer and MajesticSEO for link related data and easy to develop popularity analysis.
To identify page optimization: Moz On-Page Grader, SEOchat's Page Comparison tool and Web page SEO analysis tool for a quick on page content optimization analysis.
To semi-automatize the process: There are tools that have already automatized some of the phases in the process that can help you to advance faster: Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERPs analysis tool, SERPIQ, SEMRush Keyword Difficulty Tool.

Hopefully with these resources you'll be able to develop more and better SEO competitive analysis!

What other aspects do you take into consideration and which other tools do you? I look forward to hear about them in the comments.

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Looking at local ranking tools

Posted: 29 May 2014 01:12 AM PDT

Following my review of Moz Analytics last year, this month I've moved on to looking at another new tool that's still in beta: SEMrush Position Tracking.
I've been playing with this tool for a couple of months now, and feel that it deserves a blog post of its own. I'll provide some pointers as to what is does and why I've found it useful in a day to day context.

A fair few tools will give you similar data formats so I've addressed the pros and cons of using them too, in an effort to be fair and provide an unbiased view. I've used the example of Custard Creams in these scenarios (other biscuits are available).

SEMrush positional tracking

This tool has been available, in beta form, for a few months now. Due to its limited keyword capacity (up to 1500 keywords with a Guru account) you're unlikely to be using this tool for large campaigns. However, this blog post is about local keyword tracking, so I'll address how I would use the tool to help me with smaller, local campaigns.

Setting up a campaign

The campaign set-up process in SEMrush is incredibly straight-forward. Click on the 'Create new project' (I know, crazy right?) and you'll get this screen:

You can choose to track either a specific URL, a subfolder, subdomain, or root domain. I'd be tempted to choose root domain every time, as that way you'll be able to see what page is ranking, even when it's not the page you would expect to rank.
It's best to use a custom title such as [keyword set] – [location] as this will help you to identify the campaign you're looking at with just a quick glance, such as from the main dashboard view (see image below – I can’t tell which local area these are targeting as I haven’t followed my own tip)

You can drill down by Country, Region (in the UK either England, Scotland, Wales etc, in the US, by State) or city. Currently there about 150 countries to choose from, but I haven't tried them all out so I can't guarantee how accurate they are.
SEMrush generates its own list of competitors based on shared keywords, and you can add your own to this auto-generated list if you feel there are some missing. The reason I like this tool is it's quite simple to group keywords and thus have a good overview of how you're performing in various local search climates.

What are the cons to using the SEMrush tool?

Well, there are a few things that hold you back when using this tool. For example, you can't track rankings in Bing and Yahoo, and you can't distinguish between local listings and organic rankings, meaning the rank you see for a keyword could be either, whichever is ranking higher.
If you click on a ranking, you will see the ranking page. It would be useful if this were visible as standard, as this is really useful information to have to hand. Additionally, I think the ability to duplicate campaigns should be added, as this would make tracking across multiple areas a lot easier.
There appear to be a few teething problems at the moment with it failing to update on various days and therefore making reports look like all your rankings dropped for that day. However, the tool is still in beta so I would expect a few issues to be present.

Conclusion

SEMrush's advantage is that it combines the key elements that help you to set up a campaign with no prior research – keyword analysis, competitor identification and tracking rankings. The best qualities of SEMrushes' tool are its simplicity and its great looking reports (see example below), which I wouldn’t hesitate to show to a client. They are neat, branded (if you want) and easy to use. My recommendation is for using this tool for local and small business clients, looking at local visibility, coverage, and changes in the local search ecosystem.

So what other tools can I use?

Linkdex

Linkdex has great technical power to generate as many keyword campaigns across localities as you want. Their tracking dashboards aren't as visual as SEMrush's and aren't as easy to understand at a glance. However, they do allow you the ability to add keyword volume data and generate forecasts based on calculations in that way. If you're working with small volume keywords or local keywords where data isn't available, this probably won't be of use to you.
Not only does Linkdex look at rankings in Google, but it includes rankings from Yahoo and Bing as well. The set-up is pretty simple; in the 'Rankings' tab, add your keywords to a project and then tick the ones you want to track locally. Then click on the spanner and screwdriver button and tick the 'Ranking Configurations' (search localities) that apply. You can add configurations to the list quite easily.

The reports are not as nice looking as those produced by other tools, but you can achieve the same data with a combination of its dashboard and reporting features. You can also create 'Market Share' reports specific to a certain search locality, which can be useful in demonstrating the value of progress to clients in specific localities. Again, this is only useful if you have keyword volume for your list, which you may not if you're working in smaller localities.

BrightLocal's SEO Tools

Brightlocal's tool is something I only discovered when researching this post and I've only used the free trial of this, so my comments on this are a little limited. As this is a package dedicated to tracking local, it's geared to all the features of local that you would want to track and enables you to get really granular with your tracking.

Currently, the tool is limited to tracking rankings in the USA, Canada, UK & Australia (some features are limited to just one of these areas). However, like Linkdex, this tool tracks Bing and Yahoo too. Bright Local provides PDF, CSV and Online reports, as well as 'roll-up reports' that clients can log in externally to view. BrightLocal currently has a 30 day free trial, so you can try it out for yourself. brightlocal summary

Best For:

Simplicity

If you're new to keyword, competitors and the whole business, SEMrush is your best bet, as the positional tracking tool will do it all for you. Granted you could be missing out on some competitors or keywords, but if you just want an overview and feel that your website operates in a straight-forward sector, this tool could be the one for you. It is also good if you want to keep an eye on visibility across a range of countries. The focus is on 'visibility' across your keywords. $69.95 – $149.95/month.

Focusing on local and all that it involves

If that number one ranking in that specific area is the be all, end all for you, then Brightlocal's SEO Tools' is probably the one for you. Not only can you get granular with places and local rankings, this tool also tracks citations, reviews and local directory entries. $19.99 – $64.99/month.

For when rankings equal money and money equals happy CEOs

Linkdex is great for using your ranking data to generate reports that show the value of your rankings. Improved reporting is to come (it's currently in beta) but the data it provides can demonstrate the value of your work and progress. The set-up is not as straight forward as the others and you can't necessarily see the current situation side by side on your dashboard with pretty red and green arrows. (Price is based on how much data you need).

Image courtesy of Rafael Peñaloza

The post Looking at local ranking tools appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : What got you here...

What got you here...

Without a doubt, your hard work in test prep led to better SAT scores, which got you into college. It's not clear, though, that SAT prep skills are going to help you ever again.

I know that all those years of practicing (8 hours a day!) got you plenty of praise and allowed you to reach a high level on the bassoon. It's not clear, though, that practicing even more is going to be the thing that takes your career where you want it to go.

Of course you needed a very special set of skills to raise all that money for your company. But now, you've raised it. Those same skills aren't what you need to actually build your company into something that matters, though.

Successful people develop a winning strategy. It's the work and focus and tactics that they get rewarded for, the stuff they do that others often don't, and it works. Until it doesn't.

When times get confusing, it's easy to revert to the habits that got you here. More often than not, that's precisely the wrong approach. The very thing that got you here is the thing that everyone who's here is doing, and if that's what it took to get to the next level, no one would be stuck.

• Email to a friend •

miercuri, 28 mai 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

France Budget Forecast "Wildly Inaccurate" Leaving €14 Billion Black Hole; Sharp Rise in French Unemployment
Google Unveils Self-Driving Car, No Steering Wheel, No Accelerator, No Brake Pedal; Self-Driving Taxi Has Arrived
Employers Struggle to Find Qualified Graduates: Poorly Written Resumes to Blame?

France Budget Forecast "Wildly Inaccurate" Leaving €14 Billion Black Hole; Sharp Rise in French Unemployment

Posted: 28 May 2014 10:45 PM PDT

French President Francois Hollande hiked income taxes, VAT and corporation tax following his election two years ago. Hollande estimated those tax hikes would raise €30 Billion in revenue.

The BBC reports France Faces €14 Billion Budget Hole.

The French government faces a 14bn-euro black hole in its public finances after overestimating tax income for the last financial year.

French President Francois Hollande has raised income tax, VAT and corporation tax since he was elected two years ago.

The Court of Auditors said receipts from all three taxes amounted to an extra 16bn euros in 2013.

That was a little more than half the government's forecast of 30bn euros of extra tax income.

The Court of Auditors, which oversees the government's accounts, said the Elysee Palace's forecasts of tax revenue in 2013 were so wildly inaccurate that they cast doubt on its forecasts for this year.

It added the forecasts were overly optimistic and based on inaccurate projections.

Surprise, Surprise, Not

Surprise, Surprise, Not (at least in this corner). Nor was there any surprise in this corner regarding French Unemployment.

Sharp Rise in French Unemployment

Via translation from Les Echos please note a Sharp Rise in French Unemployment

The number of Class A job seekers reached 3,626,500 in April. At this rate, the threshold of half a million more unemployed since the election of François Hollande will be reached this summer.

The March respite in unemployment was short-lived. According to official statistics released Wednesday, the number of unemployed has regained most of the beautiful growth last month.

The balance was more negative in April when we also take into account the number of unemployed who worked in the month.

No age group was spared in April, but older were the most affected. Unemployment has increased among youth by 0.2%, by 0.4% in age group 25-49 years, and by 0.7% among those older. The number of long-term unemployed also continued to rise.

Ministry of Labor Disses Pessimism

Rue de Grenelle at the Ministry of Labour, said in a statement "We refuse to sink into pessimism. These figures reflect the situation observed in early 2014 year and they should be interpreted with caution because of the high volatility of monthly data, not the trend in the second quarter."

Another month or two will likely prove that optimism seriously misplaced.

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

Google Unveils Self-Driving Car, No Steering Wheel, No Accelerator, No Brake Pedal; Self-Driving Taxi Has Arrived

Posted: 28 May 2014 12:22 PM PDT

In yet another step towards self-driving vehicles, Google Unveils Steering Wheel-Less Car Prototype.

Ever since we started the Google self-driving car project, we've been working toward the goal of vehicles that can shoulder the entire burden of driving. Just imagine: You can take a trip downtown at lunchtime without a 20-minute buffer to find parking. Seniors can keep their freedom even if they can't keep their car keys. And drunk and distracted driving? History.

We're now exploring what fully self-driving vehicles would look like by building some prototypes; they'll be designed to operate safely and autonomously without requiring human intervention. They won't have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal… because they don't need them. Our software and sensors do all the work.

We started with the most important thing: safety. They have sensors that remove blind spots, and they can detect objects out to a distance of more than two football fields in all directions, which is especially helpful on busy streets with lots of intersections. And we've capped the speed of these first vehicles at 25 mph. On the inside, we've designed for learning, not luxury, so we're light on creature comforts, but we'll have two seats (with seatbelts), a space for passengers' belongings, buttons to start and stop, and a screen that shows the route—and that's about it.

First Drive

Not a Car, It's The Future

David Pierce on The Verge writes Google's Self-Driving Car Isn't a Car, It's the Future

On Tuesday night, onstage at the Code Conference in California, Brin revealed an entirely new take on a self-driving car, one decidedly more ambitious than anything we've seen before.

Nothing about this car is traditional: it has a front made of compressible foam, a flexible plastic windshield, and a dual-motor system that keeps the car running even if part of its engine fails. It's easy to imagine executives at GM balking at quite literally reinventing the wheel to help Google X with its latest moonshot.

Self-driving cars are coming. That's essentially a given: the technology already mostly works, and nearly all automakers believe autonomous vehicles are both a good and feasible idea. They disagree only on the timing, though "by 2020" has become an increasingly popular refrain. The biggest remaining challenges appear to be regulatory rather than technological, as governments start to answer questions like who's responsible when a self-driving car gets in an accident.

In classic Google fashion, though, Brin talked less about what the Google car could mean for Google and more about how it might change the world. What if we all sold our cars? What if every time we needed a car, we unlocked our smartphones and called for one with a single tap, and as soon as it dropped us off it went off to its next job? We'd need fewer parking lots, reduce our emissions, stop driving drunk, and get in fewer accidents. Those who couldn't or shouldn't drive – the blind, the elderly — could still get around. This is the future Brin imagines, one with huge ramifications on everything from the environment to the economy. And the cute little car he's been developing at Google X is the closest thing we've ever seen to making that idea real.

Eventually it's going to work, though, even if by the time autonomous vehicles hit the mainstream they'll more likely have a Ford or Nissan logo than a Google Doodle. Google doesn't have the scale, the infrastructure, or likely the desire to enter the car market in a real way.

Google's car will force lawmakers to finally figure out what happens when cars stop helping us drive and starts truly driving us. It will force automakers to think two steps further down the self-driven road than they had before. It will force customers to get used to the idea of not owning a car, and the notion that it's actually more convenient doing things the Uber and Zipcar way. It'll teach us to think of cars as public transportation, a service provided for us. Even if we're years away from the wide availability of the technology it's now clearer than ever that's what a "self-driving car" really means.

Toyota On Wrong Track

Last year Toyota made a big splash with wheel-less vehicles, however,Toyota is totally on the wrong track.

The steering wheel-less Toyota prototype detects the driver's movements, leaning this way or that to control turns.

Applications of that nature are fine for artificial limbs, but that is precisely what one would not want from a drunk or tired driver.

What's It All About?

Google is not interested in manufacturing cars. It is interested in software licenses and patents on tens-of-millions of driver-less vehicles worldwide.

Wave of the Future - Self-Driving Taxis

The wave of the future is self-driving taxis, which is really what a steering wheel-less car is. The concept will end the debate over taxi licenses, and taxi vs. limo pickup restrictions and other such nonsense, once and for all.

But driver-less cars will not happen overnight. Perhaps not even by 2020. Yet, within a decade, there will be monstrous changes in the ways we currently think about transportation.

What About Drones?

Driver-less cars can now get licenses (see Driverless Cars Legally Hit Roads as California Issues Licenses; The Last Mile).

So why not licenses for drones?

That is coming too. For discussion of an Amazon pizza delivery drone prototype, please see How Will Pizzas Be Delivered? Do You Tip a Drone?

Eventually it will not take a car of any kind to deliver your pizza, but rather a mini-drone that will deliver your pizza faster, fresher, and hotter than any road vehicle can.

Looking ahead, if drones can deliver pizza, why not stuff much larger? Well, that will take more time, but not that much more time. Once drones are licensed, the sky is the limit.

Implications

Millions of people have jobs that will vanish and skills that are totally useless.

Technology makes things better and improves standards of living. As such, technological improvements are hugely price-deflationary.

And contrary to what many think, there is no downside. Would we be better off with horses than cars? Better off with no cell phones or artificial limbs?

The downside is not vanishing jobs, per se. Rather, the downside is a Fed hell-bent on creating inflation in an inherently deflationary world.

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

Employers Struggle to Find Qualified Graduates: Poorly Written Resumes to Blame?

Posted: 28 May 2014 09:32 AM PDT

Graduates looking for jobs struggle to find them. Employers cannot find qualified graduates. Are poor resumes to blame? An article in The Independent suggests that is part of the problem.

Please consider Graduate Employers Struggling to Fill Vacancies.

The class of 2014 who graduate from university this summer still have a choice of hundreds of jobs that they could snap up, says a poll out today.

Nine out of 10 companies surveyed by the Association of Graduate Recruiters are struggling to fill all their vacancies, it concludes.

The reasons are twofold, according to the AGR – more vacancies being on offer after years of austerity and too many applications of insufficient quality.

The AGR surveyed 68 top companies – with 87 per cent reporting unfilled vacancies. These covered a range of occupations – IT, electrical and electronic engineering and general managements jobs.

In all, 55 per cent of the companies said they had increased the number of jobs on offer this year – but two thirds (67 per cent) said applications were of insufficient quality.

Mr Isherwood added: "sometimes they have not paid drafting the application the attention it deserves. It's like a spray-and-pray approach and then bang the application out.

"As an employer if you've got someone who has put a lot of thought into their application, then that clear the first hurdle."

Assume for a second, every application was perfectly written. There would still be too many people seeking jobs, than jobs exist.

Other than a possible internship, most of these graduates have no real world experience. Moreover, some of those with internships did not do meaningful work.

What's left is those who get hired.

The problem is lack of relevant experience vs. expectations, and there is no way to hide that problem, no matter how creative the application.

At the margin, someone who writes a better application has a better chance than someone who doesn't, but that will not increase the number of jobs available or the skills required for those jobs.

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

Damn Cool Pics

Actors Posing With Their Body Doubles
This Harry Potter Theme Wedding Is Magical
Find Out How Famous Companies Got Their Names

Actors Posing With Their Body Doubles

Posted: 28 May 2014 12:20 PM PDT

Gerard Butler

The Rock

Shailene Woodley

Taylor Lautner

Andrew Garfield

Chris Evans

Brad Pitt

Daniel Radcliffe

Rupert Grint

Emma Watson

John Travolta

Zooey Deschanel

Shia LaBeouf

Johnny Depp

Kate Beckinsale

Tom Cruise

Patrick Dempsey

Daniel Craig

Robert Pattinson

Chris Hemsworth

Will Arnett and Amy Poehler

Kevin Bacon

Megan Fox

Ginnifer Goodwin

Angelina Jolie

Christian Slater

Kate Winslet

Abbie Cornish

Mark Ruffalo

Liam Neeson

And all the Bruces

This Harry Potter Theme Wedding Is Magical

Posted: 28 May 2014 10:39 AM PDT

You can tell these two people are making a good call by marrying each other. They're obviously both Harry Potter geeks so judging by these pictures they're perfect for each other.