#( 'cos i may pay for it so i can be on multiple blogs rather than logging in and out again and again idk )

[melpcmene]

I may also need to make a new account for sessionbox, they keep giving me a recovery code that is invalid... yey.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: As a staunch royalist I would be interested to hear your views about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle deciding to quit the British royal family. Did they do the right thing or are they just being selfish and ‘woke’? Does this ‘Megxit’ the British royal family is in crisis and its future looks bleak by this act of betrayal to the Queen?

Short answer:

I have been avoiding answering this question precisely because I became tired of hearing about it around the family dinner table or with friends when I visited England recently or now with French friends here in Paris who can’t fathom what is going on. But too many have asked about this in my blog inbox.

I don’t mean to sound so dismissive but to me it’s just a passing storm in a tea cup rather than some cataclysmic crisis of the British monarchy. Everyone should stop take a deep breath.

After the joint press statement by Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex statement came out on 8 January 2020 it set in motion the usual hilarious pastiche of Cold War Kremlinology by the British press.  So at any one time you had sensationalist and sanctimonious headlines such as the fury of the palace press knew no bounds. How dare they? The Queen humiliated. The palace insulted. And so on and so on.

Every newspaper editor knows there is a yawning gulf between the “public interest” and what interests the public. By any standards, Harry and Meghan have become huge celebrities. They were idolised, their charities blessed, their presence craved. Unfortunately such is human nature, the public invest something of themselves in their heroes. They see in their idols a reflection of their own fantasies and delights, hopes and fears. When they witness celebrities traumatised it can be unsettling, as the death of Princess Diana vividly showed. People cried in the street.

As Harry knew from his mother’s tragic experience, all this is par for the royal course. The British newspapers - or rather those peddling in royal tittle tattle such as the Sun, Mirror, and the Daily Mail - have a habit of erecting pedestals one minute and then the next minute they enjoy destroying the icon in the name of the public interest. Andrew’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson, was appallingly treated. So at times were Princess Anne, and Prince Edward’s wife, Sophie. Press attention should be water off the royal duck’s back. Prince Philip’s advice was reportedly: “Don’t read the bloody papers.”

While Harry was brought up surrounded by the furies of the celebrity media, Meghan’s career was the opposite. In her profession as a known actor (albeit a middling TV actor at that), image is an artifice, daily crafted and laundered by publicists.

This does not work with British royalty, which comes with its own carefully minted image attached. Its rituals are those of mind-numbing deference. It has no accountability. The only mirror it has is the press. The tabloids are the price that must be paid for adulation. They honour no discretion and have no sense of fairness. The press is a memento mori, whispering into the victor’s ear that he – or she – is only mortal. And gosh do they take that role on with sanctimonious glee. 

To be daily compared to the Duchess of Cambridge, from an utterly different social background, must have been intolerable for Meghan: the dress comparisons, the stuffiness of the court, its hyper-caution and obsession with precedence and procedure, added to the impossibility of contact with ordinary people. As a self-made millionaire already perhaps she wanted to be more than a mere civil servant in a tiara. Perhaps it proved too much but who really knows? But then I don’t know what else she expected when she decided to marry into the British royal family.

Similarly one can only speculate how much it was really Prince Harry who wanted to drop out riding on the royal carousel as he has been since birth. Regardless of who he married perhaps this was always the plan. His loathing of the British press and paparazzi is well known - he still blames them for his mother’s tragic death in Paris. It’s well known the paparazzi have tried to catch him out in manufactured scandals as he grew up. He has refreshingly come clean and has talked about how he still goes to therapy over his mother’s death. It’s no wonder he would ever subject a future wife and especially a child to the level of press intrusion that he had endured.

Prince Harry is nobody’s fool. I won’t say a bad word about him because - unlike previous and present royals with the exception of his grandfather, Prince Philip, who did active naval service during the Second World War and his uncle Prince Andrew, who as a naval officer flew Sea King helicopters during the Falklands War - he didn’t play the ceremonial toy soldier. After Eton he worked his arse off to get through Sandhurst and got commissioned with the Blues and Royals regiment. Upon the outbreak of war in Iraq, he was alleged to have said around 2006, “There's no way I'm going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.”

As it was the military chiefs got cold feet and pulled him out. But he did see active service with the British forces in Afghanistan with two tours. By all accounts he acquitted himself very well as a Forward Air Controller in Helmand Province and later as a co-pilot and gunner on Apache helicopters. He was widely respected and accepted by rank and file because he was down to earth and never asked for special treatment.  He wasn’t a typical ‘Rupert’ - a squaddie’s nickname given to British army officers who typically came from privileged aristocratic backgrounds but were also ‘nice but dim witted’.

Overall I sympathise that the Sussexes’ predicament was clearly desperate, and it is perhaps to their credit that they have brought it to a head early and not let it drag on. I feel they are sincere in their reasons to ’step back’ from the royal family and frenzied media circus around it. The fact they want to pay their own way and pay back any outstanding sums back to the royal household is perhaps a sign of that sincerity.

Instead some sections of the British press rolled out the tired old trope of the parallels between the Duke of Sussex and his great-great uncle, the Duke of Windsor, are overwhelming. Once again, a dashing, sporting, ex-military prince leaves royal life for the love of an American divorcée. This is exactly the opposite of what Edward and Mrs Wallace Simpson did when they bit the hand that fed them. They took money to support their lavish lifestyle in exile from the Queen and all the while took every opportunity to snark the fledgling young Queen from their own alternative royal court in Paris. Harry no doubt loves his grandmother and his family and would try not sully the Windsor name.

Where I would be critical a little is in their handling of it which appears naive at best and inept at worst. I suspect - since verified - that having a transatlantic split of publicists, and in addition didn’t understand the full import of how this would play out, would inevitably drop the ball. But I would extend a finger of blame to the palace courtiers who were involved in their own games of intrigue with a whispering campaign to selected journalists of the press. Indeed multiple newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph in the UK, reported that the queen was “disappointed” with the surprise announcement, and had asked the Sussexes to hold off on issuing a public statement. When The gossip mongering Sun newspaper published a front-page story that the couple was contemplating a move to Canada, the Sussexes pushed the button on their statement.

I do think the Sussexes  and their advisors were fooling themselves into thinking that they could have their cake and eat it - in other words keep the royal titles but cut back on the public and ceremonial duties. The blunt truth is if you want to stay on the books, you do so by the leave of the firm and its boss i.e. The Queen. The contract is for life. If not, you resign. There is no half in and half out. This seems to have been the gist of the family only summit at Sandringham in January 2020, with media attention worthy of the Treaty of Versailles.

I am frankly surprised how worked up people are about this. Cut out the white noise and the picture is more prosaic.

The first point is that when all is said and done, none of this drama really matters. Politically, constitutionally, it is an irrelevance. Harry, at number six, is not seriously in line to the throne. The British monarchy has long shown itself immune to crisis; indeed I wonder sometimes if it welcomes crises as implying continued importance. The divorce and death of Princess Diana were awfully tragic, as was the very public shaming of Prince Andrew and his questionable friendship with billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. But how Harry leads his life is between himself, his wife and his father, Prince Charles. That is the point of heredity. It is immune to character, as it is to merit.

The second point is we should remember that other European royal families, of the same constitutional status as Britain, have been down sizing for many years now. These royal families balanced privacy and discretion whilst holding down ordinary professions. The King of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, is still an airline pilot. He occasionally flies KLM jets, safe in the knowledge that few people recognise him. In 2001 Prince Haakon, heir to the Norwegian throne, married a single mother with a drug-fuelled past. Despite some controversy, he survived incognito. 

The King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, has reigned for 46 inconspicuous years as a nine-to-five job, his family merged into the Swedish bourgeoisie. The Crown Princess, Victoria, works intermittently for the UN. The King of Spain, Felipe VI, may have taken after his philandering father, Juan Carlos, but he became king without fuss on his father’s retirement in 2014. None of these “houses” has an extended state-subsidised royal family. None has grown unstable as a result.

There is no doubt that the exploitation of the British royal family celebrity by palace courtiers as PR handlers has worked. The royal family recognises that truth for itself when HRH King George VI famously quipped, “We are not a family, we are a firm”. The Queen is regularly cited as central to “UK plc” and to tourism. The British people remain overwhelmingly in favour of retaining monarchy as the focus of their patriotism, even during the wobble over Diana’s death. Republicanism is dead. The last ostentatious republican, the Fife MP Willie Hamilton, left parliament in 1987. If Scotland ever went independent it would almost certainly retain the Queen as head of state.

As for how royalty behaves, a constitutional monarchy should be beyond all controversy. As the great political and constitutional commentator (and founder of the Economist magazine) Walter Bagehot put it, “the monarch should be a dignified rather than efficient element of the constitution”. In other words, the monarchy as personified in its reigning king or queen can represent the whole nation in an emotionally satisfying way - everything else is but pure embellishment.

The Queen must be a glorious anthropomorphism of the nation as a whole. If she has opinions, she keeps them to herself - much to her credit. The contrast is clear with countries where state headship is combined with an elected executive presidency. The state risks being tainted by partisanship: witness the embarrassment many Americans feel at having their national loyalty identified with any president based on divided partisan feelings e.g. from FDR to Obama and Nixon to Trump.

A rare occasion when the monarch might overstep the mark was conjectured by Mike Bartlett in his ingenious play, King Charles III, in 2014. It was based on the present Prince of Wales as king, refusing formally to sign a bill censoring the press (good on him). In the resulting crisis, William and Kate engineer Charles’s abdication, while the tearaway Harry takes up with a republican girlfriend. It was not wholly implausible. When Belgium faced a similar crisis over King Baudouin’s refusal to sign an abortion bill in 1990, he was allowed to abdicate for a day.

How the monarchy conducts itself is not wholly irrelevant. It is part of the collective context in which the nation’s politics are enacted. It represents tradition and upholds precedent. It sets boundaries and dictates a courtesy in the conduct of public affairs - however often that courtesy is infringed. What outsiders forget (especially our American friends) is that the British political system is gloriously resilient, as the past three years of Brexit hell have shown. It can tolerate the odd eccentricity, such as the blatant purchase of parliamentary seats in the House of Lords. But the question is how far such eccentricity can extend. 

The present heir to the throne, Prince Charles, is deft at stepping mildly out of line. His views on architecture, health and the environment are not overtly partisan. But it does not matter as he is no more “powerful” than a newspaper or television commentator. His influence is that of celebrity. I would rather have the heir to throne engage intelligently in public debate than arrogantly indulge in the sordid sexual antics of his younger brother, Andrew.

For all his perceived faults, Prince Charles knows his limits. To expect such controlled nuances in the constitutional mystique of royalty to apply to an ever larger family has always been an accident waiting to happen. More prescient is the fact that the current system will impose the same disciplines and direct the same public exposure on an ever widening array of royal offspring as the years go by. I feel genuine sympathy for the royal children. Most British minors have their faces blanked out on camera, but not royal ones. They are sentenced to be recognised for life.

As a nation then we are extremely fortunate that Prince Harry is no more militant than in defence of the planet, wild animals and injured military veterans - all worthy causes if we are honest to admit it. Full disclosure: as an ex-veteran, I do give charitable donations to Invictus Games Foundation, the multi-sports event put on for wounded, injured or sick armed services personnel and their associated veterans. Prince Harry was instrumental in founding the Invictus Games in 2014 on his own initiative so that we never forget the courage and sacrifice of our military veterans.

What is already clear is that the Sussexes intend forthwith to redraw the lines of engagement with the press. They are opting out of the Royal Rota, the arrangement whereby, for decades, the royals have given access to a pool reporter from the national papers; instead, they will invite coverage from personally selected media outlets and will use their own social-media accounts, especially Instagram, to communicate directly with the public. Having railed against the media’s commodification of his wife, Prince Harry now seems prepared to take its commodification into his own hands: it was reported in January 2020 that he and the Duchess have lately submitted a trademark application for hundreds of items, from clothing to printed items, that may be issued with the couple’s personal brand, Sussex Royal.

This step is unfortunate and unedifying. To my mind, Sussex is a title, not a brand name. It is no more Harry and Meghan’s to exploit than Buckingham Palace is the Queen’s to sell off. Even if they distance themselves from the monarchy by being financially independent (as well as disowning their titles) by pursuing other commercial opportunities it only takes one scandal - e.g. a goods with their brand made from sweat shop labour or some other unforeseen PR disaster - to reflect badly on the Queen and the British monarchy solely because of Harry’s proximity to the throne. Harry may not be a Prince but he is a Windsor.

We are back to Bagehot again. For it was he who argued that the constitution was divided into two branches. The monarchy represents the “dignified” branch. Its job is to symbolise the state through pomp and ceremony. The government -Parliament, the cabinet and the civil service - represents the “efficient” branch. Its job is to run the country by passing laws and providing public services. The dignified branch governs through poetry, and the efficient branch through prose. The monarchy certainly doesn’t govern through commercial exploitation of its brand as an end in itself.

Today, the dignified branch is trying to adapt to an age of populism and until recently it’s been doing a much better job than the efficient branch. But the monarchy must never lower itself to the lowest common denominator to satisfy the base instincts of populism. As Bagehot aptly said, “An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.”

A family spat of no public importance is obsessing the nation and the world. Everyone should sit down and have a nice relaxing cup of tea.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sacrifice banks to save businesses

Richard J Murphy is well-poised to talk about the economics of the pandemic and post-pandemic; he's co-founder of the Green New Deal, Director of the Tax Research Network, and a political economy prof at City University London.

His longread on how the pandemic will either wipe out businesses and workers, or banks and landlords (and if the former, eventually the latter) is also a must-read:

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/05/05/people-and-jobs-or-wealth-the-government-has-to-decide-which-to-prioritise-and-there-is-only-one-right-answer/

As Yves Smith writes, "Murphy’s argument, in essence, is that [banks and landlords] are toast under any scenario, and they can’t be allowed to weigh down the productive sectors of the economy."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/05/people-and-jobs-or-wealth-the-government-has-to-decide-which-to-prioritise-and-there-is-only-one-right-answer.html

Here's the argument, best as I can summarize it: property values in the UK are grossly inflated.

(in Danny Dorling's 2014 "All That is Solid," there's sobering stats on this, with something like 60% of all UK wealth being property in the London area)

http://www.dannydorling.org/books/allthatissolid/

Related to inflated property values: 85% of all bank-loans are collateralized with property.

tldr: The rent's too damned high, and if it wasn't, the banks would collapse.

On to businesses and workers: businesses are paying too much rent. They're going to come back from the crisis burdened with debt and with too-high operating costs. If they continue paying rent at prices that can sustain the landlords' debt service, they will fail.

If they fail, workers' jobs will disappear, and that will trigger a collapse in property prices and then the banking sector.

So, as Smith says, either we save workers and businesses and sacrifice landlords and banks, or we'll lose workers, businesses, landlords and banks.

Murphy's argument, then, is that lawmakers should declare statutory rent holidays, and reduce rents by 80% thereafter, and nationalize the banks when this causes a wave of defaults on property-collateralized loans.

Murphy points out that if you let landlords fail, there will still be properties that businesses can operate out of and workers can work at that can serve the productive economy.

But if you let businesses fail, the businesses just disappear, and they don't come back, and neither do the jobs - and then the landlords are wiped out and the banks fail anyway.

He says that nationalizing the banks can even save landlords, through "a right to a statutory reduction in loan liabilities so that the sum secured on a property cannot exceed its market value, whatever that might be in the future...subject to periodic reviews."

Other landlord-saving measures:

* "Statutory bank (and other) loan deferral arrangements of two years"

* "Interest only arrangements...subject to the right to roll it up as part of the balance if it is necessary for the borrower to get through this"

Murphy sees no alternative: "right now most businesses in the UK cannot be profitable unless major costs and cash flow outgoings are immediately removed from their overheads."

Today, HMG is "preserv[ing] the appearance of value and wealth that is implicit in our overinflated property values at present, which also underpin all UK banking" at the expense of "the ability of this country to make a living."

The reduction in property values is inevitable. Once the property market thaws, the prices will tumble for new rents/sales, Murphy says "the old ones should follow suit."

"If we want an economy that generates income in the future then the blunt fact is that we now have to trash our balance sheet. Or rather, we have to accept that it has already been trashed and now deal with the consequences."

Irrespective of whether the government intervenes, the bank losses will vastly exceed their capital reserves, by many multiples. 85% of loans are collateralized with grossly overvalued property whose prices are about to tumble. All those loans will be underwater.

"Every single bank in this country, and across the world in all likelihood, will be insolvent. No bank will survive without nationalisation."

Part of this will involve wiping out part of the highest-value deposits.

Murphy says that any depositor whose "beneficial ownership cannot be proven" should be wiped out.  And any claims "from a tax haven there should also be a considerable haircut."

He also predicts that come what may, the UK's £6T in pension wealth will be devastated, as so much of it based on property speculation (but he points out that the property will still be there when it's all over, at much lower values).

But he says that keeping pensioners afloat requires keeping the productive economy going (so it can afford a new, liveable state pension), and that requires that we wipe out banks now, rather than waiting for them to take businesses and jobs down with them.

The pandemic forces us to reckon with the fact that "value creation does not come from financialisation, or balance sheet manipulation...it comes from work, which produces value as a consequence of the inherent worth of the activities undertaken."

Murphy believes we can rebuild society, "if we recognise there is no magic way to do so: financialisation as a source of value creation [is] a myth. It is work alone that generates value, and even then it can only do so if we respect the constraintsnature imposes upon us."

And to reiterate, Murphy says that the medium-term choice isn't between banks/landlords and businesses/workers - rather, it's between saving ANY of them, or letting them all collapse.

[bybmarketing]

Can you fake authenticity?

Authenticity has become somewhat of a “buzzword” over the past few years, and marketers have been scrambling to boast authenticity in marketing copy. For good reason, as recent data shows that 85% of shoppers consider authenticity an important aspect when making a purchasing decision.

Brand trust has declined, because of a contrast between the promises made by brands and what they deliver. As a result, consumers are becoming more doubtful of brand claims. Consumers do not trust brands that portray themselves as perfect, they instead want honesty and transparency.

There are multiple interpretations of authentic, such as real, honest, truthful, ‘integrity, actual, genuine, essential, verified and sincere; and is the foundation for building trust.

“Consumers are faced with the challenge of finding authentic happiness in a world of mass-produced and hence inauthentic commodities.” (Jantzen, 2012)

The History of Authenticity

Music academics have explored authenticity, both with cultural performances and modern music such as folk, rock, rap and pop music. Authentic music performance is for the sake of self-enjoyment or ability in the art, whilst commercial endeavours are inauthentic. Being an artist for the sake of the arts rather than doing it to make a commercial profit. Doing something solely for profit considered inherently inauthentic (why consumers often perceive brands as inauthentic).

There are two schools of thought: romanticism — where authenticity subscribes to tradition and cherishes the past, or a modernist approach to authenticity — grounded in experimentation and progress, and the belief true artists must move forward. In the arts, modernism is ‘Avant-Garde’ — the French term for ‘in advance’ — describing any work or style considered in its own time to be radical, consciously breaking from earlier traditions.

The tourism literature also widely discusses authenticity, as it has become a primary concern for consumers seeking experiences. Consumers often research their destinations and have a set of expectations, preferences and beliefs about what shall occur.

Objective Authenticity — Virtue

Objective authenticity is an assessment placed on or judgement placed on an object that is what it claims, and it is genuine. Such as a real Rolex watch, versus a counterfeit. A truthful representation of what they say they are. Consumers perceive an object as authentic based on their judgement of its sincerity. This perspective of authenticity has the notion that products produced by craftsmen primarily motivated by professionalism, tradition and love for what they are doing and not profit. Consumers seek uniqueness, originality, and genuineness. Marketing academics also describe this as “virtue” — the purity of motive to be an expert and being true to a set of morals.

Multiple forms of Authenticity

Authenticity is not just a judgement of an object’s legitimacy or a person’s intentions. The search for the authentic self is another important goal of consumption, as well as authentic experiences within consumption communities.

“Multiple forms of authenticity are concurrently constructed in a single consumption context. This is in respect to the object or experience itself, the self, and the community.” (Leigh et al., 2006)

The authenticity of the self — Control

Customers search for meaning through consumption — their desire for authentic brands is an identity creation activity. People want to feel like their ‘real’ selves, so immerse themselves in what they believe are authentic experiences, that reinforces a desired sense of self. The transferal of authenticity onto an object or experience is vital to an individual’s hopes of recognition as authentic, as this process validates the authenticator as well as the subject. The marketing literature also refers to this process as a control — mastering one’s self and environment.

Consumers deliberately put themselves in situations conductive to this goal, called self-authentication. Self-authentication revitalises self-meaning, which enhances an individual’s well-being. It is an embodied sensation of knowing, to find one’s true self. It is a “doing process” felt within, a gateway to existential authenticity.

Existential authenticity exists an individual’s experience, rather than something measured or judged. Being true to oneself. The concept originates in philosophy and is common in tourism, where activities achieve a state of being. It can be based on an individual level or achieved in the presence of others through feeling like “real” community member, through a collective sense of selves. Existential authenticity helps people feel more authentic and more freely self-expressed than in everyday life.

This collective sense of self strengthens social bonds between community members, an atmosphere where individuals may experience true self in the presence of relevant others. Individuals obtain authenticity through sharing and communicating enjoyment with others.

Authenticity as a Community — Connection

Customers seek authenticity in communities of consumption, often those that are based around a central brand. Collective gatherings supply a context for legitimisation, self-validation, and authenticity. A consumer’s collective identity significantly contributes to their individual quest for authenticity.

“Authentic consumers embrace the subculture’s own hierarchies and definitions of what is authentic and legitimate.” (Leigh et al., 2006)

Authenticity dictates who is and is not part of the community. Authentic subculture members must have legitimate intentions and should embrace subcultural values as a lifestyle. An individual’s role performance in their subculture helps them self-authenticate through proving commitment to the community and genuine membership. Actions perceived as breaking community norms result in a loss of authenticity.

Can you fake authenticity? The subjective nature of Authenticity

Individuals seek authenticity in a range of products, brands or experiences. Debates about authenticity within subcultures are common, usually concerned with and the nature of authentic membership and authentic behaviours. Being versus Doing.

Community members judge each other based on their intentions and acts. Members who adopt the accessories of a subculture without embracing its lifestyle and values considered as “doing” it — putting on a front to look the part. “Authentic” subculture members consider this as inauthentic, as their identity is not a reflection of the true self. In contrast, authentic members are those that are engaged in “being.” By paying their dues over the years, subculture members earn authentic status.

But authenticity is subjective to each individual, dependent on their interpretation. Intentions can seem authentic to some, authentic to others. An individual’s opinion based on their associations based on their unique experience and knowledge. People match an object with the idea created by their beliefs and stereotypes. The subjectivity of an individual’s goals allows them to find authenticity and objects which others consider fake.

Consumers co-create the authenticity of a brand or experience and the meaning is dependent on their personal and unique understanding of what it means to be authentic.

“Authenticity’s association with reality, truth, and believability is subjective and allows the term to be used in different ways.” (Kolar & Zabkar, 2010)

Authenticity for Marketers

Authenticity is an important concept for marketers to understand, as consumers are more likely to trust authentic brands. First, how do brands communicate their authenticity? To enhance feelings of authenticity, marketers of brands relating to products or services should aim to come across as more “human” in advertising and promotion. Thus, enabling customers to recognise the characteristic values of the brand. Customers associate warmth, competence and trust with authenticity.

Second, consumers want to feel authentic. A goal of the consumption of products, brands and experiences is self-authentication, to enhances peoples’ well-being.

“Brand authenticity is a subjective evaluation of genuineness ascribed to a brand by a consumer.” (Napoli et al., 2014)

Marketers must adapt their approach for their specific brand in specific contexts and be aware of their customer’s unique interpretation of authenticity. It is important to understand the intricacies of the consumption communities related to their product, service or industry before an attempt to enhance perceptions of authenticity. A brand community is everywhere, some examples are Facebook groups, YouTube channels, blogs, and forums. Marketers should engross themselves in these communities to gain an understanding of what is authentic.

Self-Authentication for rock concert consumers

The image below is a representation of how rock concert consumers self-authenticate. This is from an article published from my thesis in the Australasian Marketing Journal. It illustrates the process by which a concert experience increases the wellbeing of customers through the self-authentication process. The band, fans, and venue co-create the experience, which in turn legitimises the consumer’s quest for authenticity at rock concerts.

“Trust (like authenticity) is associated with consistency, competence, honesty, fairness, responsibility, helpfulness and benevolence.” (Morgan & Hunt, 1994)

Despite consumers having different goals, experiences, and expectations of what is authentic, one thing stays consistent — the desire for something real, true, and genuine. If customers perceive a brand as authentic, then they find them more trustworthy. People who trust you are far more likely to do business with you.

Thank you for reading.

This week’s video:

I hope you find this useful,

Dan

If you’re interested in learning more about marketing, 50 weeks of marketing might be of interest to you.

[herringbookshelf]

Grateful to have gotten my degree in economics at Bard College where this was standard training among the institutionalist economists I studied under including Pavlina Tcherneva, mentioned here.

Modern Monetary Theory says the world still hasn’t come to terms with the death of the gold standard in 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared that the dollar was no longer convertible into gold. In the modern era of “fiat” currency, MMT says, the U.S. and other big economies no longer need to worry about having enough gold to back their paper money, so they’re free to print however much they need.

MMT claims to be the legitimate heir to the theories of Britain’s John Maynard Keynes, who created the field of macroeconomics during the Great Depression. Keynes coined the term “paradox of thrift.” His insight was that while any single household can dig itself out of a hole by cutting spending when its income falls, the economy as a whole cannot. One household’s spending is another’s income, so if everybody cuts back, no one gets paid. What you get then is a depression—a situation only government can fix because, unlike the private sector, it can afford to spend freely, putting money in people’s pockets and thus getting the economy back on track.

In MMT’s reckoning, Keynesianism was gutted in the following decades by successors such as Paul Samuelson, who unrealistically tried to make economics like physics, playing down the role of fundamental uncertainty. MMTers haven’t endeared themselves to the mainstream by referring to that school of thought as “bastard Keynesianism,” a coinage of the late British economist Joan Robinson.

MMT also draws on the “functional finance” work of the Russian-born British economist Abba Lerner, who wrote in the 1940s that government should spend what’s required to achieve its goals, deficits be damned. Later, Britain’s Wynne Godley developed the concept of sectoral balances, which focuses on the accounting truth that when the government runs a deficit, the nongovernment sector must run a surplus, and vice versa.

MMT rejects the modern consensus that economies should be steered primarily by the raising and lowering of interest rates. MMTers believe that the natural rate of interest in a world of fiat money is zero and that pegging it higher is a giveaway to the investor class. They say tweaking interest rates is ineffectual because businesses make investment decisions based on prospects for growth, not the cost of money.

MMTers argue that economies should be guided by fiscal policy—government spending and taxation. They want a nation’s central bank to do the bidding of its treasury. So when the treasury needs money, the central bank accommodates it with a keystroke—creating base money from thin air by crediting the treasury’s checking account. The new textbook says that today, governments “tend to run unduly restrictive fiscal policy stances so as not to contradict the monetary policy stance.”

MMT says that, contrary to appearances, banks don’t make loans out of deposits. Rather, they make loans based on the demand for borrowing, then the borrowers stash the proceeds in the bank. Anyone they write a check to simply makes a deposit in another bank. The bottom line is that loans create deposits rather than deposits creating loans. This is one aspect of MMT that even some conservative central bankers—including those at Germany’s Bundesbank—agree with.

To stabilize employment, MMT would add a federally funded, locally administered job guarantee. Government would employ more people in slumps than in booms. Pavlina Tcherneva of Bard College’s Levy Economics Institute is refining the plan. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist from the Bronx who’s in her first term in Congress, supports the job guarantee and says MMT should be “a larger part of our conversation.”MMT challenges a core principle of conventional economics, which is that an increase in budget deficits will tend to raise interest rates, all else equal. Just the opposite, it says, sounding a bit like the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland. When the government spends more, the private sector gets the money and puts it in the banking system. With more money in the system and no increase in demand for it, interest rates will tend to fall, not rise, MMT says. That is, unless the government chooses to soak up reserves by selling bonds, which it doesn’t have to do.

The reason the government doesn’t need to sell treasury securities, or levy taxes, to spend money is that the central bank, under the control of the treasury, can pay for everything by conjuring up electronic money. In MMT’s ideal world there would still be taxes, but their main purpose, aside from lessening inequality, would be as “offsets” to keep inflation under control. Taxes would drain just enough money from consumers and businesses so total spending in the economy won’t be excessive.

The Critics and Practicing MMT

With that formula, it’s no wonder that MMT has loud critics on Wall Street, where it’s sometimes derided as Magic Money Tree. What’s more surprising is how much flak the school of thought is taking from liberal economists who’d appear to be natural allies, such as Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president. Summers has been making the case that wealthy nations are suffering from “secular stagnation” and require permanently high levels of stimulative deficit spending by governments to keep them out of recession, which is similar to what MMT argues. Yet in a recent Washington Post op-ed, Summers called MMT “fallacious at multiple levels.”

Summers and others may be worried that MMT will give a bad name to their more conventionally dovish views on deficits. “As long as they’re out there claiming that standard macroeconomics is all wrong, I guess we need to respond,” Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate who is a professor at City University of New York Graduate Center, wrote on his New York Times blog.

MMT’s critics argue that trying to use fiscal policy to steer the economy is a proven failure because Congress and the president rarely act quickly enough to respond to a downturn. And they say politicians can’t be relied upon to impose pain on the public through higher taxes or lower spending to squelch rising inflation. MMTers respond that they also oppose fine-tuning and instead want to use automatic stabilizers—including the jobs guarantee—to keep the economy on track.

MMT’s detractors are skeptical of the idea that the treasury and central bank should work in concert. The Federal Reserve did the Treasury Department’s bidding during World War II, but that “overdraft” privilege was used spottily thereafter and permanently ended in 1981—precisely because economists warned that a subservient central bank would allow inflation to race out of control. They’re also dubious of the jobs guarantee, arguing that if the government’s wage for guaranteed jobs is too low it won’t do much to help unemployed workers or the economy, while if it’s too high it will undermine private employment. Tcherneva’s plan calls for $15 an hour. MMT envisions that government-employed workers would move back into the private sector when the economy strengthened, but that means some government functions would no longer be performed. In an email, Wray said the cyclical fluctuations in government employment are manageable.

Critics of MMT reject its reassurance that a country with its own currency doesn’t need to worry about deficits. After all, it’s been proven that a nation that loses the confidence of the world’s investors will see its currency plummet. As recently as 1976, the U.K. was forced to appeal to the International Monetary Fund to stabilize the value of sterling. Wray said the U.K.’s mistake was trying to peg its currency to the dollar and the crisis eased when it allowed the pound to float.

Other disagreements are harder for laypeople to parse. There are complicated arguments over how interest rates are determined and whether the government and private sectors compete for savings, for example. Mainstream economists argue that the correct parts of MMT aren’t new and the new parts aren’t correct. But MMTers point out that the establishment hasn’t covered itself in glory in recent years—largely failing to foresee the global financial crisis a decade ago, for instance. Paul McCulley, the former chief economist of bond giant Pacific Investment Management Co., says that though he’s “not a card-carrying MMTer,” he believes it offers a “robust architecture for a fiat currency world.”

In any case, the new textbook gives MMT a good slingshot. Samuelson, in the preface to the 1990 edition of his best-selling principles book, wrote, “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economics textbooks.” Stephanie Kelton, an MMTer who was the economic adviser on Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016 and is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, sees the tide turning. In presentations, the Stony Brook University economist likes to flash up a quote that says, essentially: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. Then you win.

[lawinformation]

Tips for beginning the school year for recently divorced parents in Texas

On the off chance that you have require a best reasonable Texas Divorce Law encounter, Tips for beginning the school year for recently divorced parents in Texas with the immense procedure!

Houston Divorce Attorney: If you find yourself having recently divorced your spouse the summer time and beginning of a new school year are perhaps the most important tests that you will encounter to determine how your new family unit will handle these changes. Shuffling the children back and forth between parents for their specific periods of possession, then transitioning back into the “normalcy” of the school calendar is a lot to take on both logistically and emotionally. While some divorced families struggle with this transition, others are able to overcome these sort of difficulties and succeed in spite of them.

So what exactly separates the family that is able to cope with these changes and the one who fails to do so? More importantly- how can you best ensure that you can count your family among the latter rather than the former? The attorneys with the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC would like to discuss some tips and advice that we have seen be effective for past clients of ours when it comes to transitioning into your first school year as divorced parents.

When life gets busy make sure you are communicating with your ex spouse.

Houston Family Lawyer: Extra curricular events, church, doctor appointments and family commitments all take up time during the school year. Note that I haven’t even gotten to homework and other assignments from school yet. When you and your children are being pulled in multiple directions all at once it is critical to be on the same page with your ex spouse.

This can be done through tools as simple as Google Calendar where you both can update and view appointments, information on sporting events or any other information that is important for your family. If you and your ex spouse do not currently have a relationship that would do well for collaboration in something like Google Calendar then using a co-parenting website like Our Family Wizard will allow you to send messages and updates to your ex spouse regarding changes or updates for the kids’ schedules.

The key here is to avoid being petty. It’s that same instinct that we had in high school to maybe not tell the friend that’s been annoying us lately about the party on Friday night that will want to not tell your ex spouse about information pertaining to the children. My advice would be to ignore that instinct if you have it and to always aim to be the bigger person. At this stage in the game your divorce is done and the people that are most affected by your and your ex spouse’s inability to be civil to one another are your children. From my experiences as a family law attorney I have never seen a client gain a longstanding advantage by being petty in this way. Communicating with your ex spouse will force you to overcome this obstacle.

Plan ahead for back to school supplies and homework/project deadlines

Divorce Lawyer Houston: If you are the parent whose responsibility it is to pay child support to your ex spouse you may be thinking that the child support money should be used to pay for supplies before school begins. For many children you may be right about that. Office supply stores and grocery chains sell prepackaged school supplies that meet the needs of the schools in their area. However, many children (possibly your own) are involved in extra curricular activities, sports or other pursuits that require materials and supplies that go above and beyond what you can pick up at the grocery store. In this situation it is wise to find out as early as possible what your child is going to need to be prepared for the school year and to work with your ex spouse on determining how the costs are going to be allocated. This can avoid misunderstandings and resentment on both sides.

Another area to make sure that you and your ex spouse have planned ahead for is school projects, assignments and daily homework responsibilities. I have learned from representing many parents of school aged children that schools are much more “aggressive” in handing out lengthy homework assignments and school projects with short turnaround times for completion compared to when you or I were in school. The best way to manage this workload is to make sure that your ex spouse is aware of the assignment if it is handed to your child during the time that you have possession of him or her. That whole communication thing I was just discussing with you comes into play here. It is frustrating to say the least if your child were to come home to you on a Sunday night with a huge project due on Monday morning where no work has been started yet. Avoid these situations by communicating and planning with your ex spouse- even when you don’t feel like it.

The health of your child is the number one priority.

Houston Divorce: If you learn from an email that your child’s school has a case of [insert name of infectious sickness here] it is always a good move on your part to make sure that your ex spouse is aware of this too. Also, if your child needs to stay home from school during a day that you have possession of him or her because he or she is under the weather always communicate this to your ex spouse. I have had a former client receive angry text messages and phone calls from an ex spouse when she received emails from the school notifying her that the child was not present when attendance was counted. Had our client contacted his ex wife the morning before school began this misunderstanding (that almost led to a lawsuit) could have been avoided.

Questions on issues surrounding the beginning of the school year? Contact the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC

If you have read through this blog post on the beginning of the school year and have questions for one of our attorneys please contact us today. A consultation is free of charge and a licensed family law attorney is available to meet with you six days a week ... Continue Reading

[bolddeducktionneverfails]

Episode 216! What Could It Be?

Back in January, DT co-producer Frank Angones revealed on his blog that Episode 16 of Season 2 with be focused on Launchpad and then later released some pretty darn interesting quotes that may be from it. He’s also revealed that there are some episodes missing from the list of premieres set to air next month, so there’s a good chance we’ll be learning about this one very soon.

I’ve been anticipating this episode since its production code was posted and I’ve been thinking a lot about the possible subject matter:

Guess 1#: A DWD-related episode that could involve Mrs. Beakley and Launchpad.

In the earlier days of Season 1, Darkwing Duck creator, Tad Stones, questioned Frank about how Mrs. B and his titular character were now wearing similar colors. Frank's reply seemed to indicate that there was a reason behind this , which led me into wondering if the two characters had worked together at some point. Or that maybe that they’re family in some way. 

Months later, the SDCC 2018 panel had a slide where Mrs. B is dressed as Darkwing Duck.

(Sᴏᴜʀᴄᴇ)

In January, we were let in on a future plot point about Beakley making a new friend and in March, we found out that it's someone we're very familiar with.

For the longest time, I was thinking that it was Darkwing (or his actor, Jim Sterling, rather) who would be the one she ends up having a friendship or something with, but Launchpad could work just as well. They're more acquaintances than anything and he already has a huge established connection to Darkwing Duck. If she doesn't know him, LP could be the one to introduce her or get her into being a fan of the show.

All three of them could be affiliated with S.H.U.S.H, so a connection could definitely be made between them that way. 

Lᴀᴜɴᴄʜᴘᴀᴅ ʙʀɪᴇғʟʏ ᴡᴏʀᴋᴇᴅ ᴀs ᴀ sᴘʏ ɪɴ “Dᴏᴜʙʟᴇ-O-Dᴜᴄᴋ” ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴏʀɪɢɪɴᴀʟ sᴇʀɪᴇs ᴏғ DᴜᴄᴋTᴀʟᴇs. Iɴ ᴀᴅᴅɪᴛɪᴏɴ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜɪs, ʜᴇ ᴡᴀs ɪɴᴠᴏʟᴠᴇᴅ ɪɴ ᴀ S.H.U.S.H ᴍɪssɪᴏɴ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ Dᴀʀᴋᴡɪɴɢ Dᴜᴄᴋ ᴇᴘɪsᴏᴅᴇ, “Iɴ Lɪᴋᴇ Bʟᴜɴᴛ”

Webby has an equation on her board that could be hinting at something pertaining to the three:

The “22” is more than likely a reference to Beakley since that's her agent number and while the “1400” is uncertain, it does has a “double-o” in it; possibly indicating that this is either LP or DW’s agent number.

Another out-of-context post contained the phrase “Beware of Agent D”. That could stand for “Darkwing” or “Double O”.

Episode 14 of Season 1 was “Beware of The B.U.D.D.Y System”, an LP-centric episode where DW made his reboot debut. The number 87 is being referenced again, which is LP’s birth year as well as the year the original DuckTales premiere. This could also be another possible agent number.

Any sort of episode we could be getting with Scrooge's closest employees will certainly be an interesting one. Mrs. B seemed to be getting suspicious of Launchpad towards the end of Season 1. If they start to hang out, maybe she could confront him about that.

Iɴ "Tʜᴇ Lᴀsᴛ Cʀᴀsʜ ᴏғ Tʜᴇ Sᴜɴᴄʜᴀsᴇʀ!", Mʀs. Bᴇᴀᴋʟᴇʏ ɪs ᴠᴇʀʏ sᴜʀᴘʀɪsᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴀᴛ Lᴀᴜɴᴄʜᴘᴀᴅ ʜᴇsɪᴛᴀᴛᴇᴅ  ᴀᴛ Sᴄʀᴏᴏɢᴇ's ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴀɴᴅ ᴀɴᴅ ɪɴ "Tʜᴇ Sʜᴀᴅᴏᴡ Wᴀʀ!", sʜᴇ sᴇᴇᴍᴇᴅ ᴘᴜᴢᴢʟᴇᴅ ʙʏ Lᴀᴜɴᴄʜᴘᴀᴅ's ᴏᴠᴇʀʀᴇᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴ ᴛᴏ ʜᴇʀ sᴘᴇᴇᴄʜ.

Guess 2#: An episode related to Launchpad’s adventure in Macaw. Possibly “The House of The Lucky Gander!” from his perspective.

In February, during the time of the New York Toy Fair, PhatMojo did not allow attendees to take pictures of their display, but they updated their website banner with their office's own display of merchandise they plan to release this year. In the DuckTales area, there's a mock-up for a posable Launchpad figure dressed in his Chinese armor:

The fact that this particular version of LP has a toy, really seems to indicate that this subject will be brought up again with a significant amount of screen-time. Because...why would a toy based on something that's supposedly a running gag from Season 1...be included in a very Season 2 focused wave? “The Depths of Cousin Fethry!” has a very similar episode format to “Gander” and yet there's isn't an Aquapad figure being featured…

Guess 3#: An episode about his stunt pilot family.

He hasn't talked about them in the reboot at all, so to finally see them show up would be one heck of a doozy.

Lᴀᴜɴᴄʜᴘᴀᴅ's ғᴀᴍɪʟʏ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴘɪsᴏᴅᴇ, "Tᴏᴘ Dᴜᴄᴋ"

Bᴏᴛᴛᴏᴍ, Lᴇғᴛ ᴛᴏ Rɪɢʜᴛ: Rɪᴘᴄᴏʀᴅ MᴄQᴜᴀᴄᴋ, LP ᴏғ ᴄᴏᴜʀsᴇ, Bɪʀᴅɪᴇ MᴄQᴜᴀᴄᴋ ᴀɴᴅ Lᴏᴏᴘʏ MᴄQᴜᴀᴄᴋ.

Guess 4#: Something about Launchpad's fear of being replaced.

When the quote about him wanting to be fired was posted, I thought about the ending of “B.U.D.D.Y” where Scrooge assures him that his job isn't going to be taken away from him. I also thought about “The Ballad of Duke Baloney!” where Glomgold made his bet with Scrooge about who can make the most money during a certain period of time.

As seen in “The Most Dangerous Game...Night!”, Scrooge is very competitive and with the risk of his company being handed over to Glomgold if he loses, things will only get worse. He might get to the point where he begins to let his employees go and Launchpad could be one of the first since he causes so much damage. It would be difficult for Scrooge to win if he continues to pay for him. So, perhaps he tries to find another pilot who is more competent at the job and won't cost him much.

Someone else who could threaten Scrooge's chances of winning is Della. If the family finds out about Della being on the Moon before any attempt for her to finally be able to leave, they're gonna want to go up there and save her. This eventually made me wonder: What if Scrooge or Gyro insist that a robot/self-driving rocket would be better suited for the job of getting Della back because they don't trust Launchpad for the mission? And Launchpad desperately wants to prove them wrong? He’s the pilot of the group, it’s his job. He should be the one to do it. (And depending on things, he might feel like he needs to do it.)

I previously speculated about this iteration of Launchpad being an astronaut due to his extraordinary ability to navigate a submarine without previous experience and all the interesting comparisons that can be made between traveling through space and underwater...And the fact that he’s included in multiple space-related episodes of the original DuckTales and the Darkwing Duck series.

Tᴏᴘ,  Lᴇғᴛ ᴛᴏ Rɪɢʜᴛ: "Wʜᴇʀᴇ Nᴏ Dᴜᴄᴋ Hᴀs Gᴏɴᴇ Bᴇғᴏʀᴇ", "Tʜᴇ Rɪɢʜᴛ Dᴜᴄᴋ" (DᴜᴄᴋTᴀʟᴇs)

Bᴏᴛᴛᴏᴍ, Lᴇғᴛ ᴛᴏ Rɪɢʜᴛ: "Wʜᴇɴ Aʟɪᴇɴs Cᴏʟʟɪᴅᴇ", "U.F. Fᴏᴇ" (Dᴀʀᴋᴡɪɴɢ Dᴜᴄᴋ)

If this is true, he could try to bring this to their attention, but he gets ignored. (This tends to happen a lot when LP has something important to say.) Maybe this prompts him to take matters into his own hands.

History could repeat itself a little with Launchpad stealing the rocket to save Della behind everyone’s back. Maybe with the kids sneaking on board. Or maybe they encouraged him to steal it like Huey and Dewey did with the sub in “Depths”. It does look like a HDLW astronaut set is included in PhatMojo’s Wave 2 display...

Tʜᴇ ʜᴇʟᴍᴇᴛs ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ ғɪɢᴜʀᴇ ᴄᴜᴛ-ᴏᴜᴛs ʙᴀʀᴇ ᴀ ʜᴇᴀᴠʏ ʀᴇsᴇᴍʙʟᴀɴᴄᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ MᴄDᴜᴄᴋ Iɴᴅᴜsᴛʀʏ sᴘᴀᴄᴇ sᴜɪᴛs. (Sᴄʀᴇᴇɴsʜᴏᴛs ғʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴘɪsᴏᴅᴇ "Wʜᴀᴛᴇᴠᴇʀ Hᴀᴘᴘᴇɴᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ Dᴇʟʟᴀ Dᴜᴄᴋ?!")

Tʜᴇʀᴇ ᴀʟsᴏ sᴇᴇᴍs ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴀɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴠᴇʀsɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Sᴘᴇᴀʀ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴀᴄᴋɢʀᴏᴜɴᴅ ᴏɴ ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴇғᴛ.

This along with Selene’s out-of-context quote really seems to imply that a rescue with be attempted, but they miss Della leaving. (That matches with the “we came all this way” thing going on with the “Gander” styled episodes where Donald scolded Gladstone and where Huey fussed at Fethry.) Then when they return home, everyone starts yelling at Launchpad for being reckless and putting the kids in danger. Being defiant towards your boss certainly would be a fireable offense.

Also on the subject of being replaced, I’ve seen some speculations about LP becoming fearful and jealous over possibly losing his job to Della when she returns. While very understandable, I feel like this is less likely to happen. There are two seats; they could end up piloting the Sunchaser together. Launchpad is great at flying, it’s just his landings that need work. Maybe she can help him with that. Depending on how Della’s Spear incident affected her love of adventure, she may not be too quick to become the main pilot again.

A sʜᴏᴛ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Sᴜɴᴄʜᴀsᴇʀ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴘɪsᴏᴅᴇ"Sᴋʏ Pɪʀᴀᴛᴇs...Iɴ Tʜᴇ Sᴋʏ!"

Heh, got a little creative with that last guess. But seriously...LP has taken a bit of a backseat so far this Season. I'm really looking forward to seeing him get put in the foreground again. I can't wait for May!

[royal-red-asks]

How to Use SEO to 2019

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Right here is the trick, attach the link inside your content of your own target website, helping your focus on audience in reaching your web site, increasing traffic and impacting SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. SEO optimized posts are likely to rank high in lookup results compared those unoptimized articles. The point about YouTube Google rankings considering that April 2014 Google had the major update, many vseo have got been crying however the remedy is pretty simple. If a person have just started your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION campaign for any brand-new website, after that you should focus on long-tail keywords. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, alone, is not enough in order to guarantee success and content marketing and advertising, alone, is not enough in order to guarantee success. We believe by now, most associated with the principles of SEO are usually more or less well comprehended by people that have completed their amount of time within the trenches since 1999, even though new platforms and data sorts arrive all the time maintaining the need for ongoing exercise or testing even more essential than in the past. That's why a good consumer experience from an SEO viewpoint is more than your web site's speed. For instance, a few businesses miss the mark along with SEO and images, and nevertheless rank well. If you want increased rankings, you need to examine his stuff - he's the particular Unicorn among a sea associated with donkey SEOs. Consumer Experience as such has a good enormous influence on SEO. Off-page SEO very efficiently within promoting your company where interpersonal media, bookmarking sites, forums, weblog directory, Q&A, articles, videos, picture and infographic sharing, and record sharing play well. So just how do the SEO masters cope-up with the ever-changing context through the search engines? For instance, let's imagine we want to create a blog post about SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION because we are trying in order to build a inbound link in order to an SEO website. That will number will probably tick upward as SEOs become more advanced in their strategies and Search engines is constantly on the location so much emphasis on hyperlinks. Many business individuals find checking up on the particular "moving target" of SEO distracts them from daily priorities a lot more than they ever imagined, consequently it is good to appearance closely at why is feeling for each business. Your readers are always the nearly all important part in regards in order to a blog post, so by no means compromise writing quality for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION benefit. But mobile SEO is various in terms of search behaviour, quality signals, levels of consumer engagement, and above all, rank algorithms. For this particular to happen a variety associated with local SEO strategies, need in order to be implemented to obtain the site rated on search engines like Search engines, business directories such as Yelp, Superpages, Google My Business record etc. This will be a development opportunity for content marketing-specific firms and a necessary and validated budget line item for in-house SEO teams. According to experts, Content is usually the most critical element associated with SEO trends in 2018. The objective of a increased ranking in the SERP s i9000 is to increase quality plus quantity of the visitors the site by creating content plus resources that are relevant in order to target audiences searching for specific information-SEO helps businesses get discovered online. Within this guide I'll teach you exactly how to get the most SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION value from the Google Keyword Advisor. As a CMO, you more than likely cringe when you hear the phrase SEO” (search engine optimization), because why don't face it — it's not probably the most pleasant marketing tactic to strategy, strategize and execute. First, understand that schema markup is one of the particular most powerful, least used components of SEO today Schema are usually basically brief snippets of information that can give extra info to find users and search motors. We already understand that User Experience for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION will become a growing number of important within 2018, such as UX is definitely a major ranking factor. Along with increasing your transformation rate, reviews may also assist to increase the effectiveness associated with your SEO efforts, because user-generated content is a consistent supply of unique and fresh content material that you didn't have in order to pay an employee or service provider to write for you. Posts with this blog are readable plus informative, sharing news about Search engines, SEO trends and more. With brand new technologies and techniques, algorithm up-dates and trends, SEO is permanently evolving and offering new possibilities for marketers to rank highly looking results. I feel that specialized SEO mistakes that affect examine budget - and also dirty Google with non-SEO-friendly content like as social landing pages, Wp media archives, offer pages plus cloned e-commerce product pages : will have a more harmful effect on sites moving ahead. Using the effort to comprehend actually the basics of SEO may help your site gain increased click-through rates, engagement, and associated with course, rankings. Getting experience that spans multiple stations with an integrated mindset -- especially on SEO and PAY PER CLICK synergy, combined with a functionality mentality—sets up people who are usually new to the marketplace regarding success. Voice research is also an emerging pattern in SEO strategies. A person can use this configuration in order to improve your mobile SEO concerning providing users best design intended for all devices. Many people try to get their SEO strategies into their own own hands, but this may lead to a waste associated with time and resources. SEO Check - which may test out your website plus give you tips for much better search engine optimization. If you need to understand more, check this infographic through Digital Marketing Philippines, which talks about the very best trends that will you should know if a person want to transform your SEO technique this 2018. Using a common sense approach in order to SEO, you can do your personal keyword research and do SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION yourself. Due to the fact the niches are fairly wide, I'm fortunate to have the lot of keyword opportunities (as opposed to doing SEO regarding a local business). Within this post, we've broken lower the top SEO techniques to assist you skyrocket your rankings plus boost your quantity of monthly website visitors. With almost all that said…SEO is still regarding content and links. Use long-tail key phrases, full sentences and questions -- although your present keywords are usually still important and play the big part in SEO, even more people are choosing to research in full questions now, due to the fact they're speaking, instead of within short term. This is the component of an SEO strategy that will focuses on building quality exterior referral links that trust the given site as an specialist or source in the focused categories. Eliminated are the days where very much of what one did regarding SEO was purely for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (link building, highly optimized content material, content only for the major search engines, etc). Well, backlinks are the particular evergreen ranking factor of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, there's no doubt about this. But times are changing plus so does the things. I've been ranking video clips last few weeks for key word like SEO Outsourcing” and Wp training London” and some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency terms here. In the sixth chapter of our SEO with regard to beginners guide, we will talk about backlink - one of the particular most important aspects of search engine optimization. Exactly what you are going to discover is that you simply require to do a bit associated with SEO search engine optimization. 50 Best On-Page SEO Techniques to rank within the 1st page with absolutely no Back links. We were trying in order to rank once with one associated with our article for the key word SEO tips”. Google and additional major search engines take the particular SEO title and display this within the search engine outcome pages. Remember, it requires time to generate good SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings. Listed here are the top six SEO developments that, I believe, will rule in 2018. Therefore I realize that many of a person sometimes wonder, "Gosh, it seems overwhelming to try and describe to someone outside the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION profession how to get an internet page ranked. " Well, perform you know what? The particular importance of user experience intended for SEO is here to remain this 2018 and it really is one of those SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION changes you must take straight into account. Off-Page SEO refers in order to the techniques that are utilized to improve the ranking associated with website or blog. In this situation, in, the article ranks soon after the official Google guidelines (and it seems sensible that Search engines should be number 1 upon their own branded query) yet Smashing magazine is shown because a position 0” snippet associated with text for the query Google take up guidelines” in. Search Motor Land, a high-quality SEO blog page that is a pillar associated with the community is ranking right after Smashing (which happens to end up being more of a design blog site than an SEO one). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the discipline that enables people and websites to gain access to the potential of the internet. Search motor optimization (SEO) is the procedure by which a website is usually optimized for making sure this has the highest position position for the search engines results web page. Create new and fascinating blogs, have them optimized intended for SEO, link to other appropriate pages, and share them upon social networking. Associated with all the SEO tools away there, thousands of online internet marketers, small businesses proprietors, and SEO's prefer to use Ahrefs in order to help them improve their lookup rankings. Key phrases are like a compass intended for the SEO campaigns: they inform you the best and regardless of whether or not you're making improvement. Knoxweb understands search motor technology, and can set a person up with an SEO advertising campaign which will see results. This particular technique involves collecting a listing of brand mentions of your own website using any SEO device and reaching out to internet sites to convert your brand describes into backlinks. As search engines still develop more advanced technologies plus responsiveness to online searches, brand-new SEO techniques will emerge in order to keep companies ranking high upon search engines. If you increase your own site loading speed, develop the beautiful mobile-friendly design, and framework your website for users, a person will notice a positive effect on your SEO performance. As a result, I would say that 2018 is a challenge for Search engines, as much as it may be for SEOs. This also ties directly into another hot SEO trend : voice search. If you click upon the link for post, The reason why SEO Is Not Going Away…But Will Change - Here's The reason why #155, ” you can select to pay attention to the particular site's 155th digital marketing video clip or read the transcripts. If you don't take treatment of SEO, you can obtain lost among the trillions associated with links out there. Search engine methods are closer than ever in order to mimicking a human understanding associated with query intent based on synthetic intelligence; therefore the focus associated with all facets of SEO want to be biased toward customers with an emphasis on relevance, quality, and engagement. If you started 2018 along with a strong SEO campaign, yet aren't too sure if this is worth your time plus effort, it's time to contact Knoxweb. For hyperlink building in 2016 and further than, the ability to understand these types of external website concepts and furthermore to use effective off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques can help you along with in influencing a website's standing power. In 2018, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies will be more focused towards visualizing the information because it will provide an online method of users. With the particular explosion of mobile search, we will continue to see SEOs appear narrower than regions, counties or even even suburbs. According to the particular survey, 77% of our clients voted for user experience since the main SEO trend with regard to 2018. Google has introduced (at least) a ‘percieved' risk to submitting plenty of lower-quality pages upon your site to in a good effort to curb production associated with old-style SEO friendly content centered on manipulating early search motor algorithms. Since a person working on the particular fringes of SEO, not our daily focus, it's great in order to have this broad overview with regard to getting at least the fundamentals right on my websites. With voice research becoming as popular as this is, featured snippets are using a huge part within the particular SEO game. We understand a lot about our customers but just a small amount associated with that information usually switches straight into an SEO strategy. As a matter associated with fact, the power of any kind of website lies in the DE UMA. Domain Authority is SEOmozs determined metric for how well the given domain will probably position in search results. SEO training courses will create you well-versed with various SEO strategies like link building, keyword analysis, optimizing content by using the particular right keywords, optimizing the web site structure, off-site SEO, PPC marketing and many more. Therefore in addition to adapting the particular SEO technique of writing content material based on keywords, it is definitely SEO 2019 Slide important for businesses to develop a responsive website, both with regard to mobiles and computers. SEO” stands intended for Search Engine Optimization - SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the process of obtaining your website to rank increased in search engines. The best thing a person can do to assist your own local SEO ranking is in order to be sure that all existing listings possess the correct Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) and web site URL.

[unlovedaddict]

How to Use SEO to 2019

SEO or else known since Search Engine Optimization. Because when somebody searches for SEO via tone of voice search, he would speak ‘what is SEO' or ‘How in order to do SEO' rather than just requesting SEO. The search engine informs 500-600 updates annually and the particular SEOs need to comply along with these changes to ensure that will their websites follow legitimate optimisation practices. They are considered a crucial Local SEO search engine ranking factor. SEO within 2018 means greeting the consumer with the exact information these people are looking for at the particular exact time they are searching for it. This is often on the variety of platforms, from tone of voice search to local businesses plus online shopping. Google algorithms for SEO are usually quite complex and are becoming updated constantly to keep company quick-witted and responsive. At the same period, the rise of messaging applications and personal assistants has shown new challenges which SEO should continue to overcome in 2018. On the particular other hand, traffic coming through SEO is free and organic” and can take a lengthy time to obtain recognized, whilst the traffic generated from PAY PER CLICK (Pay Per Click) and SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (Search Engine Marketing) is just not free of charge and companies pay for to look on the top of the particular Search Engine to get fast not organic results. So, I would certainly declare 2018 is a problem for Google, just as very much as it might be intended for SEOs. We have several good rankings, but we are usually always trying to improve and observe what the future holds intended for SEO. In 2018, the user experience is the particular center of development as properly as the key point intended for the SEO strategies. SEO continues to be king of the Internet, plus businesses will continue to require valuable, and unique content that will will meet the need associated with their company in the yrs ahead. Backlinks are one of the most significant SEO factors. In order to give you a head begin, here are the SEO tendencies and techniques we expect in order to dominate in 2018. Debbie A. Everson is the particular CEO of, experienced SEO Specialists and Search Engine Optimization Company to 2, 000 small companies. Off-Page SEO refers in order to all the things that may be done directly OFF your own website to help you much better search engine positions, such since social networking, article submission, discussion board & blog marketing, etc. SEO (or Search Engine Optimization ) is probably the most significant competitive digital marketing advantage that you could have over your competition. For online marketers who were brought up inside the ‘traditional SEO market, ' 2018 is a time in order to adapt or die. Today, I'll discuss the on-page SEO techniques which will assist you to increase your position searching results in 2018. Long descriptions are usually great for Youtube video SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and give you a location to add timestamps, useful hyperlinks, and an overall summary. SEO may be the process associated with maximizing a site's search motors visibility to connect with the potential users and customers throughout their search journey. 2 tools to help with nearby SEO are BrightLocal (for rankings) and MozLocal (for local research optimization). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION professionals have highlighted the likelihood that Google will get much more specific in analyzing relevant content material. CRAWL it, such as Google does, with (for example) Screaming Frog SEO spider, and repair malformed links or things that will result in server errors (500), broken hyperlinks (400+) and unnecessary redirects (300+). SEO is mainly about keywords. See how I naturally included multiple variations of the keywords (called LSI keywords) that I am looking to target how to do seo”, seo tips and techniques”, search engine optimization wordpress”, and so forth Whether the marketer or a business proprietor, as well as an agency for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, it's always good for analysis and learning new SEO strategies. With that will in mind, here are a few key tips for enhancing your own Google rankings, based partially within the latest SEMrush SEO study, plus partly on our own evaluation of marketing trends. Within SEO terms of speech, that will means much more long-tail key phrases included in the list. Taking the effort to understand even the basics of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION can help your site get higher click-through rates, engagement, plus of course, rankings. This particular will lead to an even more individualized experience, while the rise associated with voice search and digital co-workers can offer the ideal terrain to develop artificial intelligence plus reward successful SEO strategies that will keep up with the styles. Whilst this does mean that many local SEO-rich sites can very large (and therefore, potentially expensive), it remains one of the particular most effective processes to get your own website on the first web page or two of Google's SERP. In purchase to analyze your SERP functions, you'll need a powerful device like SEO Powersuite's Rank System, which lets you track fifteen Google SERP features, along along with your keywords and organic outcomes. And many SEO ideas and tricks increase your cyberspace user experience quality while at the same time improving your ranking in lookup engine algorithms. You possess to know many vital marketing and advertising SEO tools and associated along with order to create good SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for the online business. It optimizes technical SEO and can help you with keyword optimization of your content. In case you build quality backlinks intended for your blog post, you'll furthermore rank higher for the competing terms like SEO Tips” easily. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is even more required compared to before, because everything that reduces UX will fck up your own rankings (even inside a personalized search). The particular rise of featured snippets, PAY PER CLICK, voice search and local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION can often yield better results compared to an organic ranking. SEO in 2018 is also expected to include some amazing features with new technology and the trends are currently favoring the popular expectations. Content that will is clearly designed for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION purposes is something that Search engines is already reducing - annihilation is the only way this can go. Dropping obvious key phrases into a piece of content material as many times as you can, whilst not focusing on the high quality and relevance of the content material will get a site no place (apart from down! ). So, rather than packing plus cracking a keyword into your own content as much as a person can, white hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION will help you with the particular usage in such a method the content makes sense plus engages visitors well. I can clearly state that In 2018, Smart SEOs and even data-driven company may focus more on Searcher purpose and less on keyword quantity, difficulty and links metrics. Right here is the trick, attach the link inside your content of your own target website, helping your focus on audience in reaching your web site, increasing traffic and impacting SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. SEO optimized posts have a tendency to rank high in research results compared those unoptimized articles. The factor about YouTube Google rankings considering that April 2014 Google had the major update, many vseo have got been crying however the remedy is pretty simple. If a person have just started your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION campaign for the brand-new website, after that you should focus on long-tail keywords. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, alone, is not enough in order to guarantee success and content advertising, alone, is not enough in order to guarantee success. I actually believe by now, most associated with the principles of SEO are usually more or less well comprehended by people that have performed their amount of time within the trenches since 1999, even though new platforms and data sorts arrive all the time maintaining the need for ongoing exercise or testing even more essential than in the past. Hazel, SEO Advisor and founder of SEO+, functions with businesses throughout the UNITED KINGDOM. She's passionate about making web sites work effectively and has the reputation for increasing traffic, prospects and sales. I first started promoting the mobile first” approach to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION back in March of 2015, when I dubbed Google's impending mobile update Mobilegeddon”. A successful SEO effort demands to move beyond building content material to rank on highly explored keywords and should possess the heavy focus on providing solutions for genres of unique concerns that lots of people may search by voice. The particular SEO tools with this roundup supply tremendous digital marketing value with regard to businesses, but it is necessary not in order to forget that we're residing within Google's world under Google's continuously evolving rules. Along with the rise of voice lookup, over half of Google queries coming from mobile devices, the particular impending mobile-first index, and mobile-friendliness being a ranking factor, a person simply can't afford to disregard mobile SEO anymore. In today's rapidly moving world, SEO techniques can alter on the dime—and the most severe part is that you just might not even know this. Hacks which could have gained you a front-page result simply because recently as 2016 are outdated now, but they may actually hurt your website's rankings. It's a really great and knowledgeable blog to enhance your SEO ranking. Take some time plus find out about your Meta titles, description, URL readability plus how to earn featured thoughts and site links SEO's about the globe are taking click through rate seriously claiming it in order to be one of the best ranking signals. Bing has confirmed that will they track unlinked brand says and use them as the ranking signal — and the patent by Google (along along with observations from many SEO experts) indicates that Google may become doing this as well. I've seen success with producing videos lately and am searching forward to utilizing your SEO guidelines to help my videos position on page 1. Plus SEO professionals are absolutely thrilled about this new opportunity mainly because featured snippets provide a possibility for low-ranking pages to access the particular top of search results along with almost zero effort. The objective of a increased ranking in the SERP h is to increase quality plus quantity of the visitors the site by creating content plus resources that are relevant in order to target audiences searching for specific information-SEO helps businesses get discovered online. Within this guide I'll demonstrate exactly how to get the most SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION value from the Google Keyword Adviser. As a CMO, you more than likely cringe when you hear the word SEO” (search engine optimization), because why don't face it — it's not probably the most pleasant marketing tactic to program, strategize and execute. First, understand that schema markup is one of the particular most powerful, least used components of SEO today Schema are usually basically brief snippets of information that can give extra details to find users and search motors. We already understand that User Experience for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION will become increasingly more important within 2018, such as UX will be a major ranking factor. Along with increasing your transformation rate, reviews may also assist to increase the effectiveness associated with your SEO efforts, because user-generated content is a consistent supply of unique and fresh content material that you didn't have in order to pay an employee or service provider to write for you. Posts from this blog are readable plus informative, sharing news about Search engines, SEO trends and more. With brand new technologies and techniques, algorithm up-dates and trends, SEO is permanently evolving and offering new possibilities for marketers to rank highly looking results. I feel that specialized SEO mistakes that affect examine budget - and also dirty Google with non-SEO-friendly content like as social landing pages, Wp media archives, offer pages plus cloned e-commerce product pages : will have a more harmful effect on sites moving ahead. Using the effort to comprehend actually the basics of SEO may help your site gain increased click-through rates, engagement, and associated with course, rankings. Getting experience that spans multiple stations with an integrated mindset : especially on SEO and PAY-PER-CLICK synergy, combined with a efficiency mentality—sets up people who are usually new to the marketplace regarding success. Voice lookup is also an emerging pattern in SEO strategies. A person can use this configuration in order to improve your mobile SEO concerning providing users best design intended for all devices. Many people try to consider their SEO strategies into their particular own hands, but this may lead to a waste associated with time and resources. SEO Check - which may test out your website plus give you tips for much better search engine optimization. If you need to find out more, check this infographic through Digital Marketing Philippines, which talks about the very best trends that will you should know if a person want to transform your SEO technique this 2018. Using a common sense approach in order to SEO, you can do your own personal keyword research and do SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION yourself. Mainly because the niches are fairly wide, I'm fortunate to have the lot of keyword opportunities (as opposed to doing SEO regarding a local business). Within this post, we've broken lower the top SEO techniques to assist you skyrocket your rankings plus boost your variety of monthly website visitors. With most that said…SEO is still regarding content and links. Use long-tail key phrases, full sentences and questions : although your present keywords are usually still important and play the big part in SEO, even more people are choosing to research in full questions now, mainly because they're speaking, instead of within short term. This is the component of an SEO strategy that will focuses on building quality exterior referral links that trust the given site as an specialist or source in the focused categories. Long gone are the days where very much of what one did regarding SEO was purely for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (link building, highly optimized content material, content only for the major search engines, etc). Well, backlinks are the particular evergreen ranking factor of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, there's no doubt about this. But times are changing plus so does the things. I've been ranking video clips last few weeks for key word like SEO Outsourcing” and Wp training London” and some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency terms here. So, to make it easier for you personally, we compiled a list of the 25 best SEOย tools you need to know and grouped them into five neat categories: keyword research tools, technical SEO, backlink analysis, link building and rank tracking. We looked at hundreds associated with SEO companies to decide which usually ones would make our ratings list. Thus, really time for mobile optimization with regard to better SEO result. SEO means helping businesses perform everything they can to create more money from those that are visiting their website through organic search. Google offers been actively encouraging businesses in order to convert their websites to HTTPS, and those websites are getting rewarded with a minor SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION boost. Now please bear in mind most of this is my viewpoint on SEO but remember that will is from someone who is usually getting results with search motor optimization and to prove this particular you can run a couple of Google searches to see that will yes Infobunny gets results towards some very, very strong respected competition. Off-Page SEO refers in order to the techniques that are utilized to improve the ranking associated with website or blog. In this situation, in, the article ranks immediately after the official Google guidelines (and it seems sensible that Search engines should be number 1 upon their own branded query) yet Smashing magazine is shown because a position 0” snippet associated with text around the query Google place up guidelines” in. Search Motor Land, a high-quality SEO blog page that is a pillar associated with the community is ranking right after Smashing (which happens to end up being more of a design blog site than an SEO one). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the discipline that enables people and websites to gain access to the potential of the internet. Search motor optimization (SEO) is the procedure by which a website is usually optimized for making sure this has the highest position position around the search engines results web page. Create new and fascinating blogs, have them optimized regarding SEO, link to other appropriate pages, and share them upon social networking. Associated with all the SEO tools out there there, thousands of online internet marketers, small businesses proprietors, and SEO's prefer to use Ahrefs in order to help them improve their research rankings. Key phrases are like a compass intended for the SEO campaigns: they inform you the best and whether or not or not you're making improvement. Knoxweb understands search motor technology, and can set a person up with an SEO advertising campaign which will see results. This particular technique involves collecting a checklist of brand mentions of your own website using any SEO device and reaching out to sites to convert your brand describes into backlinks. As search engines still develop more advanced technologies plus responsiveness to online searches, fresh SEO techniques will emerge in order to keep companies ranking high upon search engines. If you increase your own site loading speed, develop the beautiful mobile-friendly design, and construction your website for users, a person will notice a positive effect on your SEO performance. SEO stands for research engine optimization. ” It is definitely the procedure for getting visitors from the free, ” natural, ” editorial” or natural” lookup engine results on search motors. This typically involves using advanced SEO tags (e. g., tags) that search motors like google reference when the more visual search engine outcomes page is displayed. Focal points for SEO in 2018 functions suggestions on what to prioritise in 2018, including on-site research, topical, local and mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and where SEO capabilities ought to sit within organisations. We would certainly construct a blog post that will has the SEO related key phrases in it and we might put the link of the particular website that people are trying in order to build the back link in order to within text of that blog site post. My SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION guide will break search motor optimization down for you. Meta description is not a immediate SEO ranking factor but this helps in ranking indirectly. Once such an interview gets published, it nearly always gets a lot of backlinks and SEO value. SEO a lot more usually discuss domain trust plus domain authority based on the particular number, type and quality associated with incoming links to a web site. As electronic assistance gets more accurate right now there is a great opportunity each for SEO and content, reaping helpful benefits from a growing market that expands the brand with a consumer in a unique but nevertheless relevant and useful way. Not simply search engine algorithm changes yet also the way in which usually people search keeps changing, as a result, considering the above 10 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends- digital marketers and company owners could make their site ready for ranking high within 2018. Whenever you look at huge brand names like Amazon and Walmart, a person see how powerful SEO may be. When you search intended for nearly every consumer product on Search engines, Amazon and Walmart are even more than likely to appear upon top. In the similar vein, you can't check out an SEO blog at the particular moment without seeing a function on Voice Search. As a matter associated with fact, the power of any kind of website lies in the DE UMA. Domain Authority is SEOmozs determined metric for how well the given domain will probably position in search results. SEO training courses will create you well-versed with various SEO methods like link building, keyword study, optimizing content by using the particular right keywords, optimizing the web site structure, off-site SEO, PPC marketing and many more. Therefore in addition to adapting the particular SEO technique of writing content material based on keywords, it is usually SEO 2019 Slide important for businesses to develop a responsive website, both with regard to mobiles and computers. SEO” stands regarding Search Engine Optimization - SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the process of obtaining your website to rank increased in search engines. The best thing a person can do to assist your own local SEO ranking is in order to ensure that all existing listings have got the correct Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) and web site URL.

[northside-serpent]

Bail

Now, I admit that this may not be my best work, but I wanted to finally get something up on the blog. If you have any suggestions, please send them in and I’ll see what I can do.

-H

Pairing: Sweet Pea x Reader

Fandom: Riverdale

Warnings: Fighting

Words: 1,214

You began working at Pop’s a few weeks ago after deciding that you wanted to begin saving money for after graduation. You enjoyed your job, you loved Pop, and your co-workers were welcoming.

So far, after a mere two months of working, your savings were still on a lower end, a little over two-thousand, but it was better than nothing.

It was a dreary Friday after school, and Pop’s was rather busy, as-per-usual. It was mostly people you recognized from school, Bulldogs and River Vixens. The bell above the door jingled, signalling a new customer. You glanced up, meeting the familiar figures of Fangs Fogarty, Toni Topaz, and your boyfriend, Sweet Pea, all damp from the drizzle that had began to fall.

Fangs and Toni sent a smile your way as they made their way to a booth, and Sweet Pea sauntered over to lean on the counter in front of where you stood.

“Hey there.” He greeted you with a smirk.

“Hey, Pea,” you leaned over the counter, placing your face just inches from his. “What’ll it be?“

“Three buckets of fries and three strawberry shakes,” he paused, leaning closer, “and a kiss.”

You laughed. “Well the fries and shakes will be a minute, but I think I can take care of that kiss right now.”

You pressed your lips to his, grabbing the collar of his jacket to keep him in his place. You would have stayed together longer if it hadn’t been for the obnoxious voice that cut in.

You pulled back to see Reggie Mantle sizing up your boyfriend. “You snakes don’t seem to be lost, this is Bulldog territory.”

Sweet Pea stood to his full height, puffing out his chest. “You Bulldogs must’ve forgotten, we go here now too.”

“That’s during school hours, after that you slither back to your own side of the tracks, and stay off of our girls.”

This seemed to piss Sweet Pea off even more. “You mean my girl?”

Reggie scoffed, “(Y/N) is one of us, always has been, always will be. Even now when she’s some Serpent’s slut.”

At that, Sweet Pea grabbed Reggie by the collar of his shirt. “You wanna say that again?” His voice had dropped an octave, now sounding twice as angry, and quite terrifying.

FP finally emerged from the kitchen with two burger platters, but stopped when he saw the two boys and your desperate expression. He dropped the plates onto the counter before grabbing the back of both of the boys’ shirts and shoving them out the door.

“Take it outside, we don’t want any of that here.” He hollered at them over the sudden downpour.

You knew that despite being kicked out, neither of the boys would back down. Toni and Fangs rushed out the door, followed by the other Bulldogs that had been in the diner. You watched from the window as the boys confronted each other, nasty words obviously being shared back and forth between the pack of Bulldogs and the three Serpents. Then the first punch was thrown.

The second that Reggie’s fist made contact with Sweet Pea’s cheek, every other Bulldog pounced on the outnumbered Southsiders. You rushed past the crowd that had gathered around the door to watch the fight and out into the parking lot.

You beelined to where Sweet Pea was taking on Reggie, along with Chuck Clayton, and another approaching Northsider.

“Pea!” You called over the deafening rain.

His attention broke from the three boys who threw punches every-which-way, and was directed to you as you approached him. This gave the other three multiple good hits to his face and stomach.

You didn’t remember being hit, just the throbbing of your head from hitting the pavement, along with your left cheek and eye.

Toni’s petite frame was suddenly standing over you as she grabbed your shoulders and pulled you out of the action.

The sudden shriek of the police siren made the scene before you still, and soon Sheriff Keller was grabbing Sweet Pea by the wrists and retraining them in a pair of cuffs.

The Bulldogs cleared out as quickly as they had appeared, leaving a bruised Sweet Pea to be forcefully shoved into the back of the police car, and soon the car sped out of the parking lot.

You burst back inside, grabbing your jacket and purse and sending a quick apology to FP, before hopping on the back of Toni’s bike. You were 99% sure that both Toni and Fangs were driving way over the speed limit, but you really didn’t care.

Sheriff Keller leaned against the reception desk as you marched up to it.

“How much for his release?” You demanded, fearing the answer.

Usually, Tall Boy or FP took care of bail charges, but neither of them were around, and you also felt somewhat responsible, as the fight was over you.

Keller stared at you for a moment before responding. “(Y/N), you shouldn’t have to waste your money on this, one of the other Serpents can take care of it.”

This only fueled your impatience. “How much?” You snapped.

Keller sighed, “Two-thousand.”

The amount made you want to throw up. That was almost all of your savings.

“Done.” You turned to Toni and Fangs, who now stood behind you. “Can one of you drive me to the bank?”

“(Y/N), you don’t have to, we can call Tall Boy, he’ll handle it.” Toni told you, but you weren’t hearing any of it.

Fangs agreed to take you to the bank, and soon you were handing over your savings in a thick envelope. The receptionist handed you some forms to sign while Sweet Pea was being released.

When Keller brought him out, he immediately slumped over to you and pulled you into a hug.

“Thanks for coming.” He muttered into your hair, giving it a quick kiss before leading you to the exit.

“(Y/N)!” Keller called after you, making you turn towards him. “You’re a good kid, don’t let that get ruined by getting involved in the wrong stuff.”

You sent him a fake smile. “Thanks, Sheriff, but I can handle myself.”

***

That night at Sweet Pea’s trailer, you were curled up in his bed, nursing a bag of ice to your now black eye, waiting for him to join you.

“I forgot to ask you,” he began as he slid in next to you. “Did Tall Boy leave before they let me go? I didn’t see him at the station.”

You were silent for a moment before answering. “Tall Boy wasn’t there. I paid your bail.”

“What?” The confusion was clear in Sweet Pea’s voice. “Why? You didn’t need to.”

“I wanted to.” You reassured him.

He hesitated before asking the question you were dreading. “How much?”

“Two-thousand.”

Pea leaped out of the bed. “Two-thousand? Baby, that’s almost all of your savings!”

“Pea, it’s okay, it was worth it.”

He continued to rant about how you shouldn’t have, and after taking a look at your annoyed expression, got back into bed with you.

“I’ll pay you back.” He told you as he held you close. “Every cent.”

“You don-” he cut you off.

“No, but I want to.”

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

6 Oct 2021: Shortages in the entropocene. Metaverses. Facebook.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter. Forward it to a friend who’d like to read about what the internet is doing to retail businesses, people, communities and society.

[Image: Keiichi Matsuda]

Shortages in the entropocene

Another fortnight of driver, petrol, goods and gas shortages. You can draw out the chains of cascading failures. Policy and market structure leads to lower gas reserves, and to reduced resilience, and to energy price volatility, then to fertiliser production stopping, then CO2 production stops, then to food packaging shortages... Policy and market structure leads to a shortage in HGV drivers, and then to shortages of food and every other thing that is delivered, including petrol. Brexit and the virus as amplifiers of most of these shortfalls.

But you might summarise it all like this: industrial policy and supply chains were optimised for conditions that have abruptly changed, and it’s now clearer that they’re too brittle. Supply chains and the web of jobs and capital need to be more resilient for a more volatile future. And consumer expectations may need a reset. It looks as if higher prices will be inevitable. Will shoppers happily pay higher prices if they get reliability in return?

Metaverses

Adam Warburton, Co-op’s Chief Product Officer, wrote this great piece for the newsletter:

The first stage of the internet was the mainframe, then came desktop computing, and then mobile. We now live in an era of internet-everywhere given cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Azure make information permanently accessible anywhere. Each evolution of the internet takes between 5-10 years to mature, so we're only really seeing the internet-everywhere era mature now. Looking ahead, the next stage is an immersive internet, which moves from us being surrounded by the internet, to us being in​ the internet. That's where metaverses start. 

There are already early metaverses; no doubt your children play Roblox, Minecraft or Fortnite. These games have metaverse tendencies, in that they create an immersive world where players are not themselves (they have a digital avatar) and they interact with other avatars and build and shape the world around them. If you've seen the movie Ready Player One, then you'll know what I mean. As is often the case, industries like gaming can lead the way in new tech.

In reality, the last 18 months working from home has created a small-scale Co-op support centre metaverse: we all existed online with purely digital interactions, and with with mixed reality backgrounds. Change the video from your face to a digital avatar, and we've essentially been in our own mini-Minecraft. We're seeing Facebook take this a stage further with Horizon Workrooms, a combination of Virtual Reality and work to create virtual collaborative spaces for businesses. It's not connected to your Facebook profile; you could be anyone inside Horizon, working for any company. Virtual reality for work might seem like a stretch (and to be fair, work meetings may not be the most exciting VR future you’d have hoped for), but we know that the nature of work has changed:

“in 2018 a work destination was, for the vast majority of people, a physical space; suddenly, though, for millions of white collar workers in particular, it’s a virtual space. And, if work is already a virtual space, then suddenly virtual reality seems far more compelling. In other words, virtual reality may be much more important than previously thought because the vector by which it will become pervasive is not the consumer space (and gaming), but rather the enterprise space, particularly meetings.”

We'll see this go further. There's debate around whether this will all amalgamate into a single metaverse or multiple metaverses, with portability and transfer of assets key; meaning I can port my avatar from Horizon into Roblox or another metaverse, for example. 

There are interesting use cases for businesses. Will people order food inside the metaverse to be delivered in the real world? How do you deal with someone's estate when some of their life is now in a different reality? New legal precedents will be set, and how will we insure our metaverse assets? (side note, there's already a metaverse insurance startup YuLife). 

All of this might be useful stimulus to think about where digital and technology go next. And of course, this might be completely wrong and the next internet era might take a different direction. Microsoft is betting on metaverses, and Zuckerberg says Facebook is becoming a metaverse company.

If you'd like to read more, these are the articles I'd recommend:

Metaverses, by Ben Thompson

Are We in the Metaverse Yet?, New York Times

Matthew Ball’s metaverse primer - lots of detail.

Thanks Adam!

Facebook: difficult week

Last week, media started running stories based on information released by a Facebook whistleblower: “FB chooses profits over safety”. When organisations get big enough, incentives pull them in what you’d charitably call challenging directions. They have outsized effects, unintended consequences, and too often damage to wider society.

Then on Monday, facebook.com, WhatsApp, Instagram and FB’s internal tools all went offline for about 6 hours. Technical details here and here, but the simple version is that some FB engineers made some configuration changes that took Facebook’s network off the internet.

When organisations get big enough, their operations get complex and eventually big failures happen. Big tech firms could cut out single points of failure etc by adding suppliers, but they generally find it harder to trust third parties to provide key bits of their service. Partly this is because they consider using networked software to provide fine-grained access to things as a core competency, and partly it’s because the other providers are their competition. The bigger picture is that (regardless of FB’s behaviour) fb.com, Insta and WhatsApp have become critical infrastructure for communities and small businesses. A sense of how critical: some people estimated ecommerce was down 27% during the outage.

Amazon: difficult products

So many cameras, in search of a vision: Amazon launched various things that use cameras, including a robot that’ll follow you around your house tracking your behaviour, and anyone else’s too. When it sees you looking at it, the robot’s screen will display your to-do list. Obvious privacy concerns, but also some “what’s the point” ones. (The point for Amazon is perhaps clearer: get you to be less reliant on your non-Amazon mobile phone for your computing.)

Elsewhere, the presence of a Ring doorbell may signal to burglars that your household has higher value contents. Again, unintended consequences.

Various things

Morrisons to scrap home deliveries from 50 stores with 1,400 staff affected - "we must now adapt and make some changes to the size of our online operation to meet our customer demands."

Pret to hire 3,000 staff after cutting same number in 2020.

Doordash doubledash - Deliveroo meets supermarket delivery.

A ‘game-changing’ revolution taking shape in communities across the UK - mainland UK’s most remote pub is community-owned.

Co-op Insurance celebrates 15 years of carbon offsetting as Co-op Group launches new net zero target.

Most workers don’t expect full-time office return.

Co-op and Co-op Digital news

Introducing Co-op’s Customer Experience Strategy team - “We need to consider CX across the whole customer journey”.

Inclusive meetings: encouraging collaboration from all.

“We don’t chase profit”: Steve Murrells, CEO of the Co-op Group, on running the UK’s biggest mutual.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[freakflagbyiana]

Pretty without the Poison

I have had my eye on the “Toxic-free” or “Clean Beauty” movement for a while, since I switched to sulfate free shampoo around 2013. As a small business owner, finding the balance between my realistic budget and the ideal products can be difficult. The struggle is fully real nowadays, as the industry is currently completely polarized. It was true before the pandemic and it is has only intensified as we compulsively sanitize everything we touch. On one side we have the evil empire of giant corporations that is basically the embodiment of the boogey man: testing on animals, buying out small companies and destroying their formulas, weakening your immune system or causing cancer... On the other side we have the coven of luxury hippie companies that cost more because they make everything in small batches with handpicked pollen from the butts of free range bees and oh btw there’s no preservatives so you have to use this $70 cream by next week or it gets moldy...

Now, I lean towards the latter camp, I’d rather be woo-woo than toxic. But for everyday consumers it’s not a question of ideals, it’s a question of budget. The cheapest ingredients are synthetics and carcinogenic, the best ingredients are natural and expensive to process gently and efficiently. Meanwhile most of us are not in the 1% tax bracket. The money for “real shit” has to come from somewhere and it can be difficult to see your beauty routine as “real shit” when you’ve got rent and car payments due. I get it, I’m in the same boat.

The thing to be cautious of with Clean Beauty is, just because its “natural” doesn’t mean its automatically good for your hair. After all, lead is natural, arsenic is natural, cocaine is natural, opium is natural... Start with making sure your products are toxic-free, but do further research. Be weary of alcohol, salt, and silicones. I’m making a more detailed glossary of specific chemical ingredients but here is a basic understanding of the terms I use.

Surfectants: detergent, soap, the thing that makes the bubbles happen. Used to cut grease but at the price of stripping moisture. Think “dish pan hands” but your hair. I’m not a fan of surfectants because the more moisture you strip, the more you have to put back in, and your scalp usually produces more grease to compensate. When I was using shampoo I was also having to follow it with a deep conditioner mask every time. Now I don’t use either. (see my previous blog, what type of shampoo should I use?)

Endocrine disruptors: Such as parabens and pthylates. These may not affect your hair in a noticeable way, you may not have an allergic reaction or breakage. But there are so many in the products we use every day that the harmful affects easily accumulate over the years. It can contribute to hormone imbalances like PCOS or endometriosis. Fragrance/Parfum/Perfume: Basically the get out of jail free card for chemicals. A company can put anything in a fragrance and does not have to disclose what it is, in the name of preventing corporate espionage. Every successful luxury brand product has a generic dupe and that dupe needs to smell as close to the original as it can. However, fragrances often include endocrine disruptors. Not to mention, for the number of people who are highly allergic to “fragrance” - It’s unfair that they don’t get to know what chemical they are actually allergic to. Silicones: Think of them as plastic food wrapping... It coats the hair with “plastic” with shiny results but at the cost of preventing moisture from getting in. Clients who have used silicones for years have to go through several clarifying washes to get rid of all the buildup. Afterwards the hair is bound to feel rough from the combination of silicone damage and clarifying shampoo. It’s like having to sand a piece of furniture before re-varnishing, it feels rough at first but the hair is much better off after recovering. Shea butter: This is one of those things that used to be good but is somewhat problematic now. It’s natural but the cheaply processed shea butter (what most people are using) is just as bad at coating the hair and blocking moisture as silicones. Cold-pressed high quality shea butter can be okay, so to determine if the product is “good” or “bad” requires deeper research on the specific brand. Sodium Chloride: Table salt. A natural, non toxic ingredient that is still bad for your hair in large quantities. If you have ever been to the ocean with fresh haircolor, you know. I once spent a week in Tulum; as an experiment I started with fresh dark teal and lime green hair and I returned with pastel minty blue. Salt is powerful when it comes to stripping haircolor and moisture. I would avoid in shampoo, but with styling products like salt sprays? It really depends on the rest of the ingredients, imo. Generally, if the only product you use contains salt and your hair feels dry or the color is fading - stop using it and try something else. But if your scalp and hair feels okay, no harm no foul. Charcoal: Everything with charcoal is so tempting because it’s my favorite color, so TRUST I get it. But think about this - if you take birth control or other important medication, they warn you not to eat or drink anything containing activated charcoal while those pills are in your stomach. It is so good at “detoxing” that it detoxes the medicine right out of you! Dentist’s have denounced charcoal toothpaste as too harsh for everyday use. It wears down the enamel in your teeth, which is much stronger than your hair. Charcoal is natural but powerful, use sparingly.

The thing I struggle with, the thing that prevents me from being fully on board with this movement, is I’ve tried expensive natural organic small batch small business brands and was also disappointed by the results. Innersense Organic Beauty: A brand I had heard a lot of good things about. Mostly from people who use them but also from my co-worker who specializes in curls. My coworker has been following the Toxic-Free movement more closely due to her specialty being all ends of the curly hair spectrum. She explain to me that shea butter is becoming a big problem, but that the shea butter contained in Innersense was okay because it’s high quality and all of their ingredients are cold-pressed. I raised an eyebrow about the shea butter but the cold-pressed ingredients sounded promising, so I tried it anyway. I ordered an intro kit for $66, which is a lot of money to shell out on something that you may completely hate... and it turns out I did! I wasted no time putting Innersense’s “Color Awakening Hair Ceremony” to the test. As with most lines, the conditioner isn’t really problem, but the shampoo is a dealbreaker. Innersense Color Awakening Hairbath is natural and organic but instead of surfectants, the main cleansing ingredient is Sodium Chloride... common table salt! I used it a couple of times and immediately watched my neon green color come out of my hair and circle down the drain. I hadn’t used any type of shampoo since I started using New Wash last year, but Innersense faded my color just as much as my sulfate-shampoo days. Not only that but my scalp was so dry, I had more scratchy flakey scalp problems after shampooing with Innersense than I do after BLEACHING MY ROOTS. That’s insanity to me! Your scalp should not be more upset with your shampoo than it is with a chemical bleach solution that, if left unattended for hours, can melt your hair off. Reverie: This is brand that I’ve seen all over instagram alongside brands I use already, and it looks like it’s a really good quality line, too good. I inquired about wholesale and trying it out. The line is so expensive that the sample kit of all 7 products is $157. If it’s too expensive for me to try right now can I really expect my clients to pay $52 for Ever hair oil or $72 for Cake scalp tonic? Furthermore, I fundamentally can’t get on board with brands that make you buy multiples of all the products in order to get wholesale pricing. It doesn’t work for my small space and if I only sell one product from that line, then I’m stuck with a bunch of expensive stuff that no one wants. I also am turned off when I want to see an ACTUAL ingredient list and they only list the luxury ingredients and the ingredients they don’t use.. but won’t provide the list itself. We need to normalize TRANSPARENCY about ingredients! So this is where I find myself at a crossroads. Is it really too much to ask for something to be organic and natural AND color safe? I fundamentally believe it is chemically possible to do both, but then it is very difficult to find brands that people can realistically afford in a pandemic-induced recession...

Good News, Everyone! Clean Beauty brands I’m using now

Cult+King: This line is so rad! I straight up swiped their “pretty without the poison” tagline for the title of this blog. It’s the first brand I’ve truly felt an ideological kinship with. They don’t gender their products (because that’s stupid), they prioritize people and planet over profits, and everything is so natural and nontoxic that you can use the hair Balm on your face. I love that they use beautiful glass bottles and offer refills in recyclable aluminum containers. I do have one little issue... Their only offering for shampoo is in bar form, which is cool, but it has charcoal in it and is not recommended for colored hair. Which would be 90% of my clientele. The shampoo bar smells AMAZING and I really want to use it, can we please get a charcoal-free option? I’ve been using Jelly on myself and my clients. Full disclosure, I was worried about it because it also contains salt, but it hasn’t faded my color and it actually feels more moisturizing than drying. I’m guessing it’s because the main ingredient is banana leaf juice, not the salt. I love their Tonik, it smells amazing and I use it to refresh my curls in the morning. It’s also a scalp tonic that can be used if you have any break outs or, in my case, ingrown hairs from shaving my mohawk myself - quarantine problems, amirite?

Hairstory: New Wash is what I have been using instead of shampoo for nearly 2 years. It was so nourishing that it helped me realize I actually have curly hair now! Plus my hair never fades, which is great for my clients but problematic for me when want to change it up. It’s a higher price point for New Wash, but actually $40 for a product that replaces shampoo + conditioner is no different to paying $20 for each one. You scrub your scalp (with their amazing scalp brush) and leave it in a few minutes to condition, so you’re using half the product. New Wash scents are all botanical, free from chemical fragrance. Their styling line is also very versatile, I use Dressed Up before diffusing to set my curls in place. They also have refillable aluminum containers which can be recycled (along with the scalp brush) and their refill packaging can be flat packed, creating much less waste. Plus they have an amazing subscription option so you can buy refills in bulk and get the best value for money. Afterworld Organics: A promising line I found often tagged alongside these other two brands. I just started using them and I’m in loooove. They, like Hairstory, provide a combination of scalp brush and 2-in-1 soap free hair cleanser. Hair Glow comes in two fragrance-free scents, Royal Lavender and Amberwood, which is great because on rare occasions I’ve met people who hate lavender... they exist. Moisture Lock is my absolute favorite! It’s used like a gel and dries with extreme hold, but it leaves your hair insanely shiny and soft. Hair Healer is a heat protectant that also nourishes and smooths. Texture Mist is a gentle, buildable salt spray. Afterworld does a great job of explaining the use of salt in their Texture Mist “Atlantic sea salt and Polyquat 20 work together to increase texture and volume while hydrating the hair.  Polyquat-a powdered extract made from plant cell fibers- binds moisture to the hair, acting as a barrier against the drying nature of the sea salt.” Overall, they do a great job of explaining the use their ingredients. Their About page contains a note on “alcohol ingredients” that talks about fatty alcohols being different from isopropyl alcohol. All of these lines have something in common, they focus on glass, recyclable, and overall less wasteful packaging. They are concerned with the long term effects of their ingredients on the human body and the ecosystem. These lines also allow me to earn commission while offering products for sale online for your convenience. This is imperative for a small business like mine to stay afloat. With such little retail space and in the middle of a recession, small businesses need all the help we can get. No more overhead cost for me to gamble on selling products. You can order what you want and it comes right to your door without fear of breaking quarantine. This is especially valuable for those of you working from home and, due to being high-risk, still having zero contact with people outside of your household.

On principle, I use brands that assume your intelligence, not depend on your stupidity to sell their snake oil. The integrity of their ingredients can speak for itself.

Stay safe, stay clean, and...

Beware of false prophets.

[unlovedaddict]

7 Videos About SEO You Should Watch

Whenever I mention SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, people always ask, what will be SEO? These three make certain that the content that we all put out is high-quality, high quality, and SEO-friendly. Pro tips: In MyTasker, we have seasoned content material writers and SEO experts which can assist you to upgrade your old blog posts centered on the trend. DA is SEO organization Moz's rank showing how respected a website is, based upon its link profile and various other factors (i. e. the amount of backlinks pointing to a few site from another site). Leveraging voice search is definitely another among the top SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends that will be impacting search engine optimization in 2018. You should outline your NAP data for your business at the start of your Local SEO campaign and keep it consistent. Chances are a lot of SEO experts have observed that only building a huge number of links will never assist in ranking a website within the long terms. SEO will gain importance over all else as it assists you drive quality traffic, obtain visibility, boost your brand plus lend your business the trustworthiness it requires to succeed. Without a doubt, a single of the biggest trends that will has already begun to get place and will continue nicely into 2018 is the combination of niche MarTech players simply by larger content cloud vendors, along with the role and importance associated with SEO increasing significantly throughout this particular transformation. The essential to successful SEO is focusing on long-tail keywords you would like to be along with individuals search results because even in case you have thousands even large numbers of social media following, this still won't be as eective as ranking high on the particular SERPs for your target key phrases. While obtaining as many pages indexed on the internet was historically a priority with regard to an SEO, Google is today rating the quality of webpages on your site and the particular type of pages it is usually indexing. As mentioned earlier around 95% of general population will certainly not move beyond the 1st page SEO search results, therefore as a business you require an in-depth knowledge of the particular latest SEO techniques and begin incorporating them in your company today. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Sometimes SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is simply a matter associated with creating sure your site is definitely structured in a manner that will search engines understand. SEO can also stand for internet search engine optimizer. 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Taking the effort to understand even the basics of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION can help your site get higher click-through rates, engagement, plus of course, rankings. This particular will lead to a far more individualized experience, while the rise associated with voice search and digital co-workers can offer the ideal surface to develop artificial intelligence plus reward successful SEO strategies that will keep up with the styles. Whilst this does mean that many local SEO-rich sites can very large (and therefore, potentially expensive), it remains one of the particular most effective ways to get your own website on the first web page or two of Google's SERP. In purchase to analyze your SERP functions, you'll need a powerful device like SEO Powersuite's Rank System, which lets you track fifteen Google SERP features, along along with your keywords and organic outcomes. 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SEO in 2018 is also expected to include some wonderful features with new systems and the trends are currently favoring the popular expectations. Content that will is clearly designed for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION purposes is something that Search engines is already reducing - termination is the only way this can go. Dropping obvious key phrases into a piece of content material as many times as you can, whilst not focusing on the high quality and relevance of the articles will get a site no place (apart from down! ). So, rather than packing plus cracking a keyword into your own content as much as a person can, white hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION will help you with the particular usage in such a method the content makes sense plus engages visitors well. I can clearly state that In 2018, Smart SEOs and even data-driven company will certainly focus more on Searcher objective and less on keyword quantity, difficulty and links metrics. During this phase we furthermore perform tasks like keyword study (for existing pages), on page” SEO corrections, schema markups plus more. As far since I know, this only functions for HTML or CSS webpages - I don't go very much for Flash websites, and feel am not sure how that will pans out with respect in order to search engines and SEO. SEO is usually targeted on organic search outcomes — progressing to the top associated with the list when a consumer searches for keywords related in order to your business. With no Local SEO program in place your company may not be able to consider advantage of the local on the internet demand for your products or even services. If a person want higher rankings, you require to read his stuff -- he's the Unicorn among the sea of donkey SEOs. Every business is limited in order to its own budget for customization organic marketing results and the particular SEO professionals' aim is in order to make the most of elaborate allotted. Consequently, Link Building is one particular the most important in the particular list of ‘SEO trends 2018'. Hazel, SEO Specialist and founder of SEO+, functions with businesses throughout the UNITED KINGDOM. She's passionate about making web sites work effectively and has the reputation for increasing traffic, potential clients and sales. I first started promoting the mobile first” approach to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION back in March of 2015, when I dubbed Google's impending mobile update Mobilegeddon”. A successful SEO effort demands to move beyond building content material to rank on highly researched keywords and should possess the heavy focus on providing solutions for genres of unique concerns that lots of people may search by voice. The particular SEO tools within this roundup offer tremendous digital marketing value intended for businesses, but you should try not in order to forget that we're residing within Google's world under Google's continuously evolving rules. 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[ukiyoe-reproduction]

-Report on the results of paint analysis pt1-

・Introduction

The paints analysis of "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, Choemon Minakuchi" (published in 1852) by Toyokuni Utagawa III (Kunisada Utagawa) has been completed, so I will report the details.

I asked HORIBA Techno Service Co., Ltd. for this analysis.

HP:

They worked very cooperatively.I would like to take this moment to thank them.

Ukiyo-e paint analysis methods have been steadily developing since the 1990s.

However, there were exceptionally few opportunities for them to be utilized for "reproducing ukiyo-e" (The concept of "restoration" is sparse in the old reproducing industry of traditional woodblockprinting, so it can't be helped, and there are also constitutional problems in the industry.)

This is the first time for me to conduct an analytical survey of paints myself.

I have long recognized the need for analytical research and elucidation of paints ,as my goal is to restore traditional ukiyo-e rather than reprint them, but when I actually conducted the analysis this time, I strongly realized how effective these analysis methods are in restoring ukiyo-e.

There are few opportunities to introduce information on the use of ukiyo-e paints in the Edo period, and I am happy to be able to report on this blog.

Since there is only one analysis survey target this time, there is nothing that can be said to be a "new discovery" regarding the use of paints in the past based on the results of this survey, however, as I continue my research, I hope to bring new clarifications and discoveries.

I hope that this activity will contribute to the field of ukiyo-e research in the future and to help you learn about ukiyo-e in the Edo period.

・About analysis method

When analyzing ukiyo-e paints, non-destructive analysis methods have become the mainstream of research and development in recent decades. This is a method of irradiating the colored part to be measured with "light" and measuring and analyzing the response reaction to judge the sample.(On the other hand, for example, a method of applying a chemical to the measurement point and judging by the reaction is a "destructive" analysis method.)

Not only visible light but also ultraviolet rays, infrared rays, and X-rays are used for this "light" depending on the application.

The equipment used for this paint analysis were (1) "energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence analyzer" (2) "microlaser Raman spectroscopic analyzer" and "Raman microscope".

(1) Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence analyzer

There are "pigment" type and "dye" type paints in the original ukiyo-e, and this fluorescent X-ray analyzer was used to judge the pigment.

Each pigment has its own main component element, and when it is irradiated with X-rays, it emits the unique energy derived from that main component element.

The energy emitted at this time is called fluorescent X-ray, and by measuring this, the main component elements of the pigment can be analyzed and specified.For example, if a "lead" component is detected in the measured part, it can be judged as lead white if the part is white, and lead tan if the part is red.　

2) Microscopic laser Raman spectroscopic analyzer and Raman microscope

Raman spectroscopy is a method of irradiating a sample with laser light and observing the generated scattered (Raman scattered) light.　　

From the Raman scattered light data, information on elemental bonds can be obtained and the molecular structure can be known, from which paints can be judged.

While the X-ray fluorescence analysis method described above targets pigments (dye is not allowed), Raman spectroscopy can also analyze dyes.(Raman spectroscopy can also analyze pigments, but this time I followed the judgment of the other party that it is better to use multiple instruments.)

Unfortunately, I couldn't attend the analysis site for this Raman spectroscopic analysis, and I didn't take a picture of the work.

Please refer to the link below for each device.

・Microlaser Raman spectroscopic analyzer

https://www.horiba.com/jp/scientific/products-jp/raman-spectroscopy/details/labram-hr-evolution-17309/

・Raman microscope

https://www.horiba.com/jp/scientific/products-jp/raman-spectroscopy/details/xplora-tm-plus-124/

・Result of analysis

  It's explained clockwise from the upper right.

1- [prussian blue + white lead + sumi + rice flour]

The use of white lead was a part that could not be discerned by the naked eye only. White lead changes black with age. When reproducing the original color on which the original image was printed, it is necessary to subtract the change over time, but in this case, sumi is also used, so it is black to some extent from the beginning. Therefore, when making paints, it becomes even more delicate and difficult to judge how much blackness should be added to the paint (how much blackness should be subtracted from the original picture).

I think it would be great if a technology that could analyze the color mixing ratio of the paints printed on the original picture would be developed in the future.

2-[bengala(red iron oxide) + sumi + safflower red + glue]

The safflower paint turns brown with age, but since bengala and sumi were detected in this analysis, it was found that the paint was printed with a slight brown tint from the beginning.

3-[turmeric + glue]

Normally, glue is mixed with paint as a fixing agent to prevent peeling and separation of paint after coloring and drying.(It also acts as a dispersant when a pigment dissolved in water.) Therefore, the more grainy the paint (pigment), the greater the need for it, but since turmeric is basically a dye and has high permeability and fixability to paper, it seems that there is no need to mix it with glue.But glue was detected relatively clearly from this analysis.

In the past, the original indigo paints were called indigo sticks and indigo wax, and it is said that the pigments were hardened with glue or starch paste and molded before being distributed on the market.From this analysis, it was inferred that turmeric, which was hardened with glue and molded, might have existed as a paint at that time. However, T. TOKUNO "JAPANESE WOOD-CUTTING"

AND WOOD-CUT PRINTING "1894 has a description of" Turmeric, "wakon-ko(turmeric powder)" "as a printer's paint.

It can be seen that at least in the Meiji era at the end of the 19th century, there was a powdery substance of the paint.

4-[prussian blue + orpiment + rice flour]

The green color of Ukiyo-e in the Edo period is a mixture of blue and yellow paints, but it seems that the combination of Prussian blue and orpiment was common around the time this work was published.

The combination of blue and yellow paint types and their transition in the original green are also themes that I would like to clarify in the future.

5-[prussian blue + white lead + lead sulfate]

This detection of lead sulfate is a point to pay particular attention to. Historically, lead sulfate was not used as the original ukiyo-e paint, but it has been confirmed to be used as a white paint in the Shosoin treasures(正倉院宝物).

Reference material:

https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/bunkashingikai/kondankaito/takamatsu_kitora/rekkachosa/09/pdf/shiryo_2.pdf

https://shosoin.kunaicho.go.jp/api/bulletins/26/pdf/0000000017

On the other hand, lead sulfate may be a natural product of white lead over time.

http://www.tobunken.go.jp/~ccr/pdf/35/pdf/03503.pdf

In this survey, the existence of lead sulfate emerged as a white paint for ukiyo-e in the Edo period, but it is highly possible that this is just one of the special exceptions, and I would like to proceed with verification in the future.

6-[prussian blue + white lead]

17 uses prussian blue and rice flour, but compared to that part, 9 colors here are blackish.White lead has the property of becoming lead sulfide and turning black over time, which is thought to be the effect. The use of white lead in this area is indistinguishable to the naked eye, so if I hadn't done a scientific analysis like this one, I would presume that it was a little blackish blue from the beginning,and  I think I mixed a small amount of sumi and printed it.　　　

7-[prussian blue + white lead + orpiment]

The main components of orpiment are sulfur and arsenic.

White lead turns black over time, but mixing it with sulfur-containing paints makes the change even easier.With that in mind, it is expected that the finished product to be created will have a stronger impression of being brighter than the colors 1 and 9 that are adjacent to each other.

↑ This photo shows the part where the pattern is out of color at the edge of the kimono. Due to the manufacturing method, this part is the same woodblock as 5, and the same paint should be used , but the part that is out of color and sticks out is quite brownish,This brownness can be confirmed in another place on the same woodblock as 5. "Can lead-white or lead-white + Prussian blue paints turn brown over time?", this question has become an issue for future clarification.

Continued to the next post.