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marți, 3 mai 2011
Photo: Inside the Situation Room
Seth's Blog : Hard work vs. Long work
Hard work vs. Long work
Long work is what the lawyer who bills 14 hours a day filling in forms does.
Hard work is what the insightful litigator does when she synthesizes four disparate ideas and comes up with an argument that wins the case--in less than five minutes.
Long work has a storied history. Farmers, hunters, factory workers... Always there was long work required to succeed. For generations, there was a huge benefit that came to those with the stamina and fortitude to do long work.
Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can't fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don't make an emotional connection, or when you don't solve the problem or when you hesitate.
I think it's worth noting that long work often sets the stage for hard work. If you show up enough and practice enough and learn enough, it's more likely you will find yourself in a position to do hard work.
It seems, though that no matter how much long work you do, you won't produce the benefits of hard work unless you are willing to leap.
More Recent Articles
- On the day everyone is pleased...
- A game theory of NFL negotiations
- The $20,000 phone call
- Dreams, princesses and the Disney-industrial complex
- Headroom
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luni, 2 mai 2011
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog |
| Optimizing Your Google Places Page Posted: 01 May 2011 02:03 PM PDT Posted by Geoff Kenyon As increasing number of searches have local intent behind them, Google is showing Places listings in many more SERPs. This presents an opportunity to either gain a spot on the first page for many businesses or to gain more space on the first page for companies already ranking on the first page. Here are five things that I’ve seen impact rankings in Google Places. Completeness & ConsistencyThere are several fields to fill out when creating or editing and some of them may not seem like they are really necessary. Google wants to give users the best experience possible; in most circumstances the user will have a better experience if there is more information present on the Places page. This means not only filling out the required text fields but also the optional ones:
Further, you should make sure the hours are accurate, that you have filled out additional details, as well as uploading photos and videos of your business. While these may seem auxiliary, they all count towards profile completeness and should be submitted. When filling out your profile, be as thorough as possible, doing much more than the minimum required. Think about it like being back in in school and writing a paper; you'll pass doing the minimum set forth but a little extra effort can go a long way. Don't fill out some of the extra details, fill them all out; and don't just add one photo, add several photos.  Additionally, it is important to make sure that this information is consistent across all your different citations. Accuracy across all, or almost all, citation sources helps associate trust with a Places page. If you are looking for citation sources, Get Listed has a good overview of local citation sources. KeywordsAs with traditional SEO, having your keywords in the right places is important for ranking while stuffing keywords in the wrong places will make you look like a spammer. Avoid placing your keywords in the business name (unless the keyword is part of your business name) and the business categories. Both of these will bring the wrath of Google upon you and end up with your Places page removed. Do make an effort to strategically use your keywords in your description. Don't keyword stuff, but word your description carefully and use your primary keyword phrases. Service AreaSpecifying a service area is a great idea for many businesses that come to you such as tutors, maids, and handymen. If you are unfamiliar with the service area option, it is simply being able to set an area that your business serves rather than specifying an address for your company; it will show up on the map as a circle rather than a pinpoint. The problem is that we have seen a decrease in rankings when businesses have selected to display a service area rather than their business location. While I hope this is something that Google changes in the future and it becomes a viable option for business, but in the meantime, stay away from the service area feature.  Encouraging ReviewsReviews are one of the best ways to increase your local search rankings but good reviews can be difficult to come by as it seems the only folks motivated to write up a review feel they have been treated unfairly. While you can’t incentivize reviews (Google calls this a conflict of interest), you might try some of the following:
Make sure to make the process as easy as possible, provide a link to your Places page and give detailed instructions on what they need to do leave a review. Bulk UploadsWhile the idea of bulk uploads, creating multiple places pages (10+) at a time by uploading a data file to Google, is a godsend for many companies with franchises or several locations, it can be a long process to get the listings approved. There are a few things you should keep in mind when you are doing a bulk upload: Brand Name in the Title While this might be the only option for companies like Pagliacci Pizza, a Seattle Pizza chain, where all of the locations have the same name, some businesses have names that vary by the individual performing the work or by the location (such as West Coast Athletic Clubs, which own several athletic clubs operated under different names). For businesses doing an upload for branches with different names, make sure the parent company name is incorporated Aggressive Keyword Placement Putting keywords in places they don’t belong, such as the business name, categories, or keyword stuffing the description, is a surefire way to get your entire bulk upload denied. If you have a lot of different listings always err on the side of caution here. Unique New York If all of your listings have the same contact information, you are going to run into trouble. Make sure that all of these listings are as unique, differentiated, and complete as possible. In particular, make sure that the following are all different:
After you have gone through all of the work to create good listings, don't forget you need to verify your listings. Please share any tips for local search that you've learned in the comments. If you want to learn more about local SEO, I recommend the following these folks on twitter and reading their blogs: Other Local Resources:        |
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Seth's Blog : On the day everyone is pleased...
On the day everyone is pleased...
On that day, the day that everyone notices your work, approves and lets you know, then what will happen?
We spend an incredible amount of time and psychic energy planning and working for that day, but why? It will never arrive, and even if it does, it's not clear that anything special happens.
Perhaps the approval of every person in the entire world doesn't need to be the goal of your work.
More Recent Articles
- A game theory of NFL negotiations
- The $20,000 phone call
- Dreams, princesses and the Disney-industrial complex
- Headroom
- The paperback choice and my video dilemma
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duminică, 1 mai 2011
Seth's Blog : A game theory of NFL negotiations
A game theory of NFL negotiations
Off topic here, a bonus post for those that might be interested:
When two sides are negotiating over something that spoils forever if it doesn't get shipped, there's a straightforward way to increase the value of a settlement. Think of it as the net present value of a stream of football...
Any Sunday the NFL doesn't play, the money is gone forever. You can't make up for it later by selling more football--that money is gone. The owners don't get it, the players don't get it, the networks don't get it, no one gets it.
The solution: While the lockout/strike/dispute is going on, keep playing. And put all the profit/pay in an escrow account. Week after week, the billions and billions of dollars pile up. The owners see it, the players see it, no one gets it until there's a deal.
Seeing and counting money you don't get to touch is a very different story than merely imagining the money you didn't get to touch, money that's gone forever... Change the story, change behavior.
The alternative (if you don't do this) is that down the road, instead of announcing a deal where everyone gets a windfall, you are forced to announce a deal where everyone already starts way behind where they would have been in the first place. That money is gone forever, no one gets it back. The problem with the game of chicken is that someone has to lose.
I'm not even a football fan, but this seems like a clear way to both maximize value and minimize the damage to all those involved. Especially players with short careers and those fans with nothing to do on Sunday afternoons.
More Recent Articles
- The $20,000 phone call
- Dreams, princesses and the Disney-industrial complex
- Headroom
- The paperback choice and my video dilemma
- The flip side
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Seth's Blog : The $20,000 phone call
The $20,000 phone call
When a homeowner decides to put his house on sale and calls a broker...
When he calls the moving company...
When a family arrives in town and calls someone recommended as the family doctor...
When a wealthy couple calls their favorite fancy restaurant looking for a reservation...
Go down the list. Stockbrokers, even hairdressers. And not just people who recently moved. When a new referral shows up, all that work and expense, and then the phone rings and it gets answered by your annoyed, overworked, burned out, never very good at it anyway receptionist, it all falls apart.
What is the doctor thinking when she allows her neither pleasant nor interested in new patients receptionist to answer the phone?
More Recent Articles
- Dreams, princesses and the Disney-industrial complex
- Headroom
- The paperback choice and my video dilemma
- The flip side
- Changing personas
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