Central Perk

miercuri, 30 iulie 2014

House Republicans just voted to sue President Obama:

The House of Representatives just took a vote -- and it wasn't to raise the minimum wage, put in place equal pay, create jobs, or reform our broken immigration system.

Instead, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives just voted to sue the President for using his executive authority. This lawsuit will waste valuable time and potentially millions of taxpayer dollars.

This is the least productive Congress in decades. And instead of doing their job, they are suing the President for doing his.

The President is committed to making a difference for the millions of hardworking Americans trying to do right by their families and communities. While Republicans in Congress continue to waste taxpayer money, this President is going to keep doing his job.

If you're doing your own job -- and you support President Obama doing his -- add your name.

President Obama remains ready and willing to work with Republicans in Congress if they decide to get serious and do something for the American people. But he is also committed to acting even as Congress won't. You've seen that time and time again this year -- from raising the federal minimum wage on new federal government contracts, to expanding apprenticeship opportunities and making student loan payments more affordable.

The President is not going to back away from his efforts to use his authority to solve problems and help American families. In fact, tomorrow, President Obama will announce his next executive action to crack down on federal contractors who put workers' safety and hard-earned pay at risk. It's just the next in a series of steps this Administration will be taking this year to make sure that American workers are getting a fair deal, and he has pledged to take executive action to deal with our broken immigration system in the months ahead.

That's what this President is focused on. If you want to see it continue, and are sick and tired of stunts like the House Republicans' lawsuit, then say so:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/doing-his-job

Thanks,

Dan

Dan Pfeiffer
Senior Advisor
The White House
@Pfeiffer44

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

Good News for the Economy:

Featured

Good News for the Economy:

Today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released a report showing strong economic growth last quarter, with the gross domestic product (GDP) increasing at a 4 percent rate.

This is a good indicator that the economy is continuing to improve, and another sign that the President's policies are starting to pay off -- but the economy could be doing even better if Congress decided to do its part, something the President talked about today in Missouri.

Find out more about the report, and how the President is continuing to create opportunity for middle-class Americans.

Using Modern SEO to Build Brand Authority

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 05:15 PM PDT

Posted by kaiserthesage

It's obvious that the technology behind search engines' ability to determine and understand web entities is gradually leaning towards how real people will normally perceive things from a traditional marketing perspective.

The emphasis on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) from Google's recently updated Quality Rating Guide shows that search engines are shifting towards brand-related metrics to identify sites/pages that deserve to be more visible in search results.

Online branding, or authority building, is quite similar to the traditional SEO practices that many of us have already been accustomed with.

Building a stronger brand presence online and improving a site's search visibility both require two major processes: the things you implement on the site and the things you do outside of the site.

This is where several of the more advanced aspects of SEO can blend perfectly with online branding when implemented the right way. In this post, I'll use some examples from my own experience to show you how.

Pick a niche and excel

Building on your brand's topical expertise is probably the fastest way to go when you're looking to build a name for yourself or your business in a very competitive industry.

There are a few reasons why:

Proving your field expertise in one or two areas of your industry can be a strong unique selling point (USP) for your brand.
It's easier to expand and delve into the deeper and more competitive parts of your industry once you've already established yourself as an expert in your chosen field.
Obviously, search engines favour brands known to be experts in their respective fields.

Just to give a brief example, when I started blogging back in 2010, I was all over the place. Then, a few months later, I decided to focus on one specific area of SEO—link building—and wrote dozens of guides on how I do it.

By aiming to build my blog's brand identity to become a prime destination for link building tutorials, it became a lot easier for me to sell my ideas on the other aspects of inbound marketing to my continuously growing audience (from technical SEO to social media, content marketing, email marketing and more).

Strengthening your brand starts with the quality of your brand's content, whether it's your product/service or the plethora of information available on your website.

You can start by assessing the categories where you're getting the most traction in terms of natural link acquisitions, social shares, conversions, and/or sales.

Prioritize your content development efforts on the niche where your brand can genuinely compete in and will have a better fighting chance to dominate the market. It's the smartest way to stand out and scale, especially when you're still in your campaign's early stages.

Optimize for semantic search and knowledge graph

In the past, most webmasters and publishers would rely on the usage of generic keywords/terms in optimizing their website's content to make it easier for search engines to understand what they are about.

But now, while the continuously evolving technologies behind search may seem to make the optimization process more complicated, the fact is that it may just reward those who pursue high-level trustworthy marketing efforts to stand out in the search results.

These technologies and factors for determining relevance—which include entity recognition and disambiguation (ERD), structured data or schema markups, natural language processing (NLP), phrase-based indexing for co-occurrence and co-citations, concept matching, and a lot more—are all driven by branding campaigns and how an average human would normally find, talk, or ask about a certain thing.

Easily identifiable brands will surely win in this type of setup.

Where to start? See if Google already knows what your brand is about.

How to optimize your site for the Knowledge Graph and at the same time build it as an authority online

1. Provide the best and the most precise answers to the "who, what, why, and how" queries that people might look for in your space.

Razvan Gavrilas did an extensive study on how Google's Answer Boxes work. Getting listed in the answer box will not just drive more traffic and conversions to a business, but can also help position a brand on a higher level in its industry.

But of course, getting one of your entries placed for Google's answer boxes for certain queries will also require other authority signals (like natural links, domain authority, etc.).

But what search crawlers would typically search for to evaluate whether a page's content is appropriate to be displayed in the answer boxes (according to Razvan's post):

If the page selected for the answer contains the question in a very similar (if not exact) form, along with the answer, at a short distance from the question (repeating at least some of the words from the question) and
If the page selected for the answer belongs to a trustworthy website. So most of the times, if it's not Wikipedia, it will be a site that it can consider a non-biased third party, such as is the case with a lot of ".edu" sites, or news organization websites.

Although, John Mueller mentioned recently that Knowledge Graph listings should not be branded, in which you might think that the approach and effort will be for nothing.

But wait, just think about it—the intent alone of optimizing your content for Google's Knowledge Graph will allow you to serve better content to your users (which is what Google rewards the most these days, so it's still the soundest action to take if you want to really build a solid brand, right?).

2. Clearly define your brand's identity to your audience.

Being remarkable and being able to separate your brand from your competitors is crucial in online marketing (be it through your content or the experience people feel when they're using your site/service/product).

Optimizing for humans through branding allows you to condition the way people will talk about you. This factor is very important when you're aiming to get more brand mentions that would really impact your site's SEO efforts, branding, and conversions.

The more search engines are getting signals (even unlinked mentions) that verify that you're an authority in your field, the more your brand will be trusted and rank your pages well on SERPs.

3. Build a strong authorship portfolio.

Author photos/badges may have been taken down from the search results a few weeks ago, but it doesn't mean that authorship markup no longer has value.

Both Mark Traphagen and Bill Slawski have shared why authorship markup still matters. And clearly, an author's authority will still be a viable search ranking factor, given that it enables Google to easily identify topical experts and credible documents available around the web.

It will continue to help tie entities (publishers and brands) to their respective industries, which may still accumulate scores over time based on the popularity and reception from the author's works (AuthorRank).

This approach is a great complement to personal brand building, especially when you're expanding your content marketing efforts' reach through guest blogging on industry-specific blogs where you can really absorb more new readers and followers.

There's certainly more to implement under Knowledge Graph Optimization, and here's a short list from what AJ Kohn has already shared on his blog earlier this year, which are all still useful to this day:

Use entities (aka Nouns) in your writing
Get connected and link out to relevant sites
Implement Structured Data to increase entity detection
Use the sameAs property
Optimize your Google+ presence
Get exposure on Wikipedia
Edit and update your Freebase entry

Online branding through scalable link building

The right relationships make link building scalable.

In the past, many link builders believed that it's best to have thousands of links from diversified sources, which apparently forced a lot of early practitioners to resort to tactics focused on manually dropping links to thousands of unique domains (and spamming).

And, unfortunately, guest blogging as a link building tactic has eventually become a part of this craze.

I've mentioned this dozens of times before, and I'm going to say it one more time: It's better to have multiple links from a few link sources that are highly trusted than having hundreds of one-off links from several mediocre sites.

Focus on building signals that will strongly indicate relationships, because it's probably the most powerful off-site signal you can build out there.

When other influential entities in your space are vouching for your brand (whether it's through links, social shares, or even unlinked brand mentions), it allows you to somehow become a part of the list of sites that will most likely be trusted by search engines.

It can most definitely impact how people will see your brand as an authority as well, when they see that you're being trusted by other credible brands in your industry.

These relationships can also open a lot of opportunities for natural link acquisitions and lead generation, knowing that some of the most trusted brands in your space trust you.

Making all of this actionable

1. Identify and make a list of the top domains and publishers in your industry, particularly those that have high search share.

There are so many tools that you can use to get these data, like SEMRush, Compete.com, and/or Alexa.com.

You can also use Google Search and SEOQuake to make a list of sites that are performing well on search for your industry's head terms (given that Google is displaying better search results these days, it's probably one of the best prospecting tools you can use).

I also use other free tools in doing this type of prospecting, particularly in cleaning up the list (in removing duplicate domains, and extracting unique hostnames; and in filtering out highly authoritative sites that are clearly irrelevant for the task, such as ranking pages from Facebook, Wikipedia, and other popular news sites).

2. Try to penetrate at least 2 high authority sites from the first 50 websites on your list—and become a regular contributor for them.

Start engaging them by genuinely participating in their existing communities.

The process shouldn't stop with you contributing content for them on a regular basis, as along the way you can initiate collaborative tasks, such as inviting them to publish content on your site as well.

This can help draw more traffic (and links) from their end, and can exponentially improve the perceived value of your brand as a publisher (based on your relationships with other influential entities in your industry).

These kinds of relationships will make the latter part of your link building campaign less stressful. As soon as you get to build a strong footing with your brand's existing relationships and content portfolio (in and out of your site), it'll be a lot easier for you to pitch and get published on other authoritative industry-specific publications (or even in getting interview opportunities).

3. Write the types of content that your target influencers are usually reading.

Stalk your target influencers on social networks, and take note of the topics/ideas that interest them the most (related to your industry). See what type of content they usually share to their followers.

Knowing these things will give you ton of ideas on how you can effectively approach your content development efforts and can help you come up with content ideas that are most likely to be read, shared, and linked to.

You can also go the extra mile by knowing which sites they mostly link out to or use as reference for their own works (use ScreamingFrog).

4. Take advantage of your own existing community (or others' as well).

Collaborate with the people who are already participating in your brand's online community (blog comments, social networks, discussions, etc.). Identify those who truly contribute and really add value to the discussions, and see if they run their own websites or work for a company that's also in your industry.

Leverage these interactions, as these can form long-term relationships that can also be beneficial to both parties (for instance, inviting them to write for you or having you write for their blog, and/or cross-promote your works/services).

And perhaps, you can also use this approach to other brands' communities as well, like reaching out to people you see who have really smart inputs about your industry (that'll you see on other blog's comment sections) and asking them if they'll be interested to talk/share more about that topic and have it published on your website instead.

Building a solid community can easily help automate link building, but more importantly, it can surely help strengthen a brand's online presence.

Conclusion

SEO can be a tremendous help to your online branding efforts. Likewise, branding can be a tremendous help to your SEO efforts. Alignment and integration of both practices is what keeps winners winning in this game (just look at Moz).

If you liked this post or have any questions, let me know in the comments below, and you can find me on Twitter @jasonacidre.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Seth's Blog : This is ours

This is ours

Last night on the bike path I passed a well-dressed citizen, walking along with a bottle of water. I was stunned to see him finish his water and hurl the bottle into the woods.

I stopped and said, "Hey, please don't do that."

He looked at me with complete surprise and said, "what?" as if he didn't understand what 'that' was. His conception of the world seemed to be that there was two kinds of stuff... his and not-his. The park wasn't his, so it was just fine to throw trash, in fact, why not?

The challenge we have in the connection economy, in a world built on ever more shared resources and public digital spaces is that some people persist in acting like it belongs to someone else. When they spit in the pool or troll anonymously, when they spam or break things, it's as if they're doing it to someone else, or to the man.

Too often, we accept this vandalism as if it's a law of nature, like dealing with the termites that will inevitably chew exposed wood on a house's foundation. It doesn't have to be this way. Over and over, we see that tribes and communities and organizations are able to teach people that this is ours, that it's worth taking care of and most of all, that people like us care for things like this.

• Email to a friend •

marți, 29 iulie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Whopping 35% Have Debt in Collection! Delinquent Debt in America: By Region and Metro Area, Where Is It?

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 12:21 PM PDT

The Urban Institute has an interesting 14-page synopsis on Delinquent Debt in America.

By percentage, the number of people in collections is largely concentrated in the South, while amount owed shows no geographic pattern. The Urban Institute uses 2013 credit bureau data from TransUnion to measure how many Americans are reported as at least 30 days late, not including late payment of mortgages. The institute also examines how many Americans have debt in collections and the amount of this debt.

In order to have credit card debt, one first must have credit. However, some without traditional credit show up as delinquent on account of late utility, medical, or other bills.

The key general finding is: Of those with credit files, an astonishing 35% have debt in collections.

Study Synopsis

5.3% (Roughly 1 out of 20) of people with a credit file are at least 30 days late on a credit card or other non-mortgage account (e.g., automobile loan, student loan). In other words, they have debt that has been reported as past due to the credit bureau.
The share of people with debt past due ranges from 4.6% in the West, North Central, and Middle Atlantic divisions to 7.5% in the West South Central division.
Three states have less than 4% of the population with debt past due: Utah, Washington, and New Jersey.
Three states have more than 7% of the population with debt past due: Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi.
Nearly 40% of the high-concentration census tracts in the country are in Louisiana or Texas.
Areas with lower household incomes have more people with debt past due, but the correlation is only -0.3. So, while income matters, the concentration of delinquent debt is not simply an income story.
Of those with credit files, an alarming 35% have debt in collections.
Debt in collection ranges less than $25 to more than $125,000. The average amount owed in collections is $5,178.
Nevada, which was hard hit by the housing crisis, tops the list of past-due states: 47% of people with a credit file in Nevada have reported debt in collections. The District of Columbia and an additional 12 states (11 in the South) are over the 40 percent mark: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia.
At the low end are three Midwestern states - Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, with 20% of the people with a credit history now reported debt in collections.
Among the largest 100 MSAs, only six have fewer than a quarter of people with debt in collections reported i n their credit file. None are in the South: Minneapolis - St. Paul, Minnesota (20.1%), Honolulu, Hawaii (21.0%), Boston, Massachusetts (22.4%), Madison, Wisconsin (22.6%), San Jose, California (23.0%), and Bridgeport, Connecticut (24.5%).
At the other extreme, five MSAs have at least 45 percent of people with collections debt reported in their credit files : McAllen, Texas (51.7%), Las Vegas, Nevada (49.2%), Lakeland, Florida (47.3%), Columbia, South Carolina (45.2%), and Jacksonville, Florida (45.0%).
An astonishing 70% of census tracts have at least 25% of people with reported debt in collections. In comparison, less than 1% of census tracts (40) have at least 25% of people with debt past.

Debt Past Due

Debt in Collections

Average Debt in Collections

click on any chart for sharper image

The report concludes ...

Financial distress is a daily challenge for millions of American consumers. Nearly 1 2 million adults — 5.3 percent of Americans with a credit file — have non-mortgage debt reported past due, and they need to pay $2,258 on average to become current on that debt.

Further, an alarming 77 million Americans — 35 percent of adults with credit files — have debt in collections reported in their credit files, with an average debt amount of nearly $5,178. Debt reported past due, and in particular reported debt in collections, is more concentrated in the South.

In addition to creating difficulties today, delinquent debt can lower credit scores and result in serious future consequences. Credit scores are used to determine eligibility for jobs, access to rental housing and mortgages, insurance premiums, and access to (and the price of) credit in general (Federal Trade Commission 2013; Traub 2013).

High levels of delinquent debt and its associated consequences, such as limited access to traditional credit, can harm both families and the communities in which they live. This brief contributes to our understanding of financial distress in America by exploring the spatial patterns of delinquent debt in the United States. Future work will explore the drivers of financial distress and those factors influencing its spatial patterns.

Interestingly, the concentration of delinquent debt to income has a negative 0.3 correlation. In a footnote the study reports "The correlation between average household income and average amount of debt past due (amount required to become current on that debt) is even lower at -0.1."

I called the Urban Institute and asked for an explanation as to how the percentage in collection can be so much bigger than the percentage past due. The answer has to do with a definition of terms and also with charge-offs.

Appendix Figure A.1 Explains

Note: Federal regulations require creditors to charge-off revolving credit accounts (e.g., credit card accounts) after 180 days of payment delinquency. Uniform Retail Credit Classification and Account Management Policy, 65 FR36903-01 (June 12, 2000).

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

Ukrainians Ordered to War, Women Burn the Military Writs

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 01:42 AM PDT

The war in Ukraine is going so well that soldiers are unpaid and men are ordered to serve whether they want to or not.

Hats off to a group of women who confront a Ukrainian soldier and burn military writs right in front of the soldier's face.

Writ Burning Video

Video link: Ukrainians Burn Writs

Transcript

Woman to Ukrainian soldier: Who are you?
Soldier: I am the head of the local recruiting center.
Woman: Why are you bringing military writs?
Soldier: It's an order from above. I can't explain all the details but you can read about it on the internet
Soldier: When did you get the writs?
Very disgruntled woman: Yesterday evening.
Another Woman: This one we got recently.
Soldier: Yes, we're sending those to put the potential recruits under control.
Yet another woman: We don't need it. We don't need any war.
Multiple women chime in with the same thing at once about not wanting war.
Very disgruntled woman: We've been told that the police will handle those who refuse to sign the writs for mobilization. What does that mean?
Soldier: It's an official order for total mobilization.
Another woman: We've been told those fairy tales many times. They told us those who refuse to go to war will go to jail for 5 years.
Soldier: I ask you, did we take anyone to war so far?
Woman: When you take someone it will be too late to worry.
Another woman: We've never been on Maidan. We didn't touch anyone. We don't need it.
Very angry man gesturing: Take your recruit list and make sure no one will be taken to war.
Soldier - finally admitting the truth: They will take your sons anyway.
Same angry Man: Who will take them?
Soldier: The state
Same angry man: We don't give a damn about your country and your war!
Large group gathers writs and sets them on fire.
Background conversation: mostly untranslated but also containing We are sickened of the authorities.
More background conversation: The authorities flee like rats from a sinking ship, but they come here and take our sons and send them to death. They all made the mess and now they need us to clean it up.
Fire takes hold
Another woman: Those who wanted all this, let them go to war! We never needed this nor Maidan.
Cars stop, many more people including more men watch on the periphery.
Writs go up in ashes. Many still confront the soldier

Congratulations!

Congratulations to all those who told the soldier to go to hell. No better way than burning draft papers and refusing to serve.

Musical Tribute

Video Link: Country Joe at Woodstock

Quotes

Voltaire: "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

Tom Robbins: "There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for."

Thought of the day: The Vietnam war would have ended years before it did if everyone would have refused to serve. A big F U was called for. Too few did it. My number never came up, but I am proud of the fact I resolved not to go. And I assure you I wouldn't have. History has proven that point of view was the correct one.

By the way, I disagree with the second quote. Killing in self defense or defense of your family makes perfect sense.

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

"The President Wants to Meet You"

Featured

"The President Wants to Meet You"

This summer, President Obama has been traveling around the country meeting with everyday Americans who have written him about what's going on in their lives.

Ahead of the President's trip to Kansas City today, Press Secretary and Kansas City native Josh Earnest called a few hardworking Americans and invited them to have dinner with the President.

Watch the Press Secretary call some letter writers -- and hear their reactions:

miercuri, 30 iulie 2014

House Republicans just voted to sue President Obama:

Good News for the Economy:

Using Modern SEO to Build Brand Authority

Using Modern SEO to Build Brand Authority

Pick a niche and excel

Optimize for semantic search and knowledge graph

How to optimize your site for the Knowledge Graph and at the same time build it as an authority online

Online branding through scalable link building

Making all of this actionable

Conclusion

Seth's Blog : This is ours

This is ours

More Recent Articles

marți, 29 iulie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

"The President Wants to Meet You"

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

miercuri, 30 iulie 2014

Pick a niche and excel

Optimize for semantic search and knowledge graph

How to optimize your site for the Knowledge Graph and at the same time build it as an authority online

Online branding through scalable link building

Making all of this actionable

Conclusion

marți, 29 iulie 2014

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

Subscribe to