Central Perk

marți, 26 aprilie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Funny Animal Demotivational Posters
Shanghai Auto Show on This Weekend
Uluru, Ayers Rock, Australia
Razy Gogonea's 'Matrix' Dance on Britain's Got Talent
Einstein - The World's Smallest Horse
Geeky Easter Eggs

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:38 PM PDT

It's not everyday that you see a funny animal in real life, much less one worthy of a demotivational poster. Thanks to the internet, getting uninspired just became a lot easier.

Shanghai Auto Show on This Weekend

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:01 PM PDT

Auto Shanghai is a biennial international automobile show that alternates with the Beijing Auto Show and dates to its inception in 1985. Auto Shanghai became the first UFI approved Chinese auto show in June 2004.

Held every two years in the neighborhood of Pudong in Shanghai, China, since the 9th show in 2001, the exhibition has taken place at the Shanghai New International Expo Center.

According to the sponsor some 283,000 people visited the auto show this weekend.

Image Source: imaginechina

Uluru, Ayers Rock, Australia

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 11:40 AM PDT

Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, is a large sandstone rock formation in the southern part of the Northern Territory, central Australia. It lies 335 km (208 mi) south west of the nearest large town, Alice Springs; 450 km (280 mi) by road. Kata Tjuta and Uluru are the two major features of the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Uluru is sacred to the Aṉangu, the Aboriginal people of the area. It has many springs, waterholes, rock caves and ancient paintings. Uluru is listed as a World Heritage Site. (Wikipedia)

Razy Gogonea's 'Matrix' Dance on Britain's Got Talent

Posted: 25 Apr 2011 10:53 PM PDT

Britain's Got Talent: 28-year-old dancer Razy, originally from Romania, is trying out for Britain's Got Talent with quite a unique act, taking queues from the film The Matrix. With breakdancers being notorious on this show – from Tobias Mead and Aiden Davis to winner George Sampson – has Razy got something special that makes him different?

Einstein - The World's Smallest Horse

Posted: 25 Apr 2011 10:05 PM PDT

Weighing 6-pounds and standing just 14-inches tall, Einstein is touted as the world's smallest horse, who was born April 22, 2010 in Barnstead, New Hampshire.

Einstein's physical proportions are similar to those of a normal-sized foal, and as Rachel Wagner, one of Einstein's co-owners, who features in the YouTube video at the end of the page, remarks: "He is very perfect looking little boy and not dwarfy looking at all."

Geeky Easter Eggs

Posted: 25 Apr 2011 09:43 PM PDT

The best part of Easter, apart from all the chocolate, is decorating the eggs. Easter eggs or spring eggs are special eggs given to celebrate the Easter holiday or springtime. The egg was a symbol of the rebirth of the earth in celebrations of spring and was adopted by early Christians as a symbol of the resurrection of Jesus. The oldest tradition is to use dyed or painted chicken eggs, but a modern custom is to substitute chocolate eggs, or plastic eggs filled with confectionery such as jelly beans. These eggs are often hidden, allegedly by the Easter Bunny, for children to find on Easter morning. Otherwise, they are generally put in a basket filled with real or artificial straw to resemble a bird's nest.

Here's a collection of shots of great eggs.

Zombie Eggs

Nintendo Eggs

Futurama Eggs

Pokemon Eggs

Nightmare Before Christmas Eggs

Superhero Eggs

Adult Swim Eggs

Harry Potter Eggs

Battlestar Galactica Eggs

Dr. Who Eggs

Star Wars Eggs

Angry Birds Eggs

Lego Eggs

Tech Support Egg

Stargate: Atlantis Egg

Source: buzzfeed

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Great Content for SEO: Simpler than You Ever Imagined

Posted: 25 Apr 2011 04:16 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Today I want to share an incredibly simple yet massively powerful process for building search-optimized, "great content." There's no fancy tricks and nothing propetiary about the approach, but it is rare indeed to find an organization that follows these steps and hence, it's a way to potentially differentiate and build a competitive advantage.

Step 1: Build a Survey

No one knows what searchers want better than the searchers themselves, so let's hear what they have to say. To find out, we'll start with a short series of questions asking the survey taker to imagine they've just performed the desired query. Here's an example:

Content Experiment Form
See the full form in action here

The basic structure is simple - request the top 3 content pieces your audience desires, then ask specifically about features that would make the page worthy of sharing (this is important, because it often differs substantively from what makes a page merely answer the user's query). Finally, you can ask them to actually do the search (you don't want them to do it until the end, because what they find might bias their responses) and report any results they liked (which can provide additional insight).

Step 2: Send it to Your Customers / Potential Customers

I cheated and used a tweet:

Tweet for Content Experiment

You can find customers or potential customers virtually anywhere - your friends, neighbors, co-workers, friends on social networks, etc. Anyone who fits your customer demographic or is creative enough to imagine themselves as that demographic will work. A link in the bottom of your email newsletter or a share on Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter can often do the job, too. You might even try posting a link in a relevant industry forum or discussion group (so long as you're sure it won't be perceived as spammy).

Step 3: Record Responses + Leverage them to Build What the People Want

My Twitter followers are clearly office chair experts because I got some fantastic responses:

Content Experiment Responses

There are some fantastic suggestions in there - enough to form a serious roadmap for content generation and to steer me clear of crafting a landing page missing these features (which would likely increase bounce rate, earn less links/shares and, probably, have a lower conversion rate).

It gets even more fleshed-out with the next section:

Content Experiment Responses

You can see all the responses to my Tweet here

Simply amazing. I really believe that by following the recommendations of these few, late-night, Twitter-obsessed, good web-samaritans, I could build a page of content better than anything the top 20 at Google or Bing have to offer right now.

When you're doing this formally, collect as many responses as you reasonably can (before all the answers start to look the same) and use your intuition plus the aggregates of the data to make the best page possible. Any feature/content mentioned by 3+ respondents should definitely make the cut. From there, you can learn from what they liked/didn't in the current SERPs and bolster it with any remarkable suggestions they gave for making the page "share-worthy."

That's all there is to it.

And while you're thinking, "He's right! It's so easy... I can do this in 15 minutes tomorrow and have the perfect roadmap to build something searchers will love," you're probably busy and might put this on the back burner for another time. Don't do it! Implement now - even for just one keyword and one page. Even if you only get 2 responses! Heck, you can just fill it out yourself 4 or 5 times with how you think others might respond and it will still give you a better plan than 90% of what's in the top 10 results for most queries.

If you follow this process and have examples to share, I'd love to see them in the comments. Feel free to use live links to your pages, feedback forms or responses. You might even be able to recruit some Moz readers to take your survey :-)

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Seth's Blog : Shopify contest launches today

Shopify contest launches today

I jumped the gun last week. As promised, here's the updated link to the Shopify contest. The first 5,000 entrants get a free hardcover copy of Poke the Box, a chance to win their part of over $250,000 in prizes, support a great cause and build a store at the same time. Check it out.

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Photostream: Behind the Scenes in Early April

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Photostream: Behind the Scenes in Early April

The White House Photo Office releases their latest batch of behind-the-scenes photos, this time following the President from town halls across the country to the Situation Room to a moment alone reading on the patio outside the Oval Office.

See more photos.

President Barack Obama salutes as he walks to Marine One following a town hall meeting in Fairless Hills, Pa., April 6, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)