text:
You Ask, I Answer: How to Market Crowdfunding Campaigns?
by Christopher S Penn | Mar 11, 2019 | Marketing, Marketing Technology, Strategy | 0 comments
Dana asks, "How do you market a crowdfunding project?"
Crowdfunding sites are nothing more, when you think about it, than landing pages. They're landing pages which someone else manages, so a good chunk of the design and creative is taken care of for you, which leaves two other key areas for you to manage. Watch the video for more details.
Stackadapt was the platform mentioned in the video for ad targeting. (affiliate link)
In today's episode, Dana asks, How do you market a crowdfunding project crowdfunding sites, when you think about that really are nothing more than a landing page, right? They are single purpose landing page where you drive traffic for the purpose of trying to gain a conversion. And on those landing pages,
a lot of the design is taken care of. So if you're on GoFundMe, or whatever, the palette and the design and the overall aesthetic is taken care of. So that part is pretty easy, because you don't have to do a whole lot. So what do you need to do then in order to make a landing page. successful
landing pages are direct marketing and as a result, they follow Bob stones 1968 direct marketing framework, which is lyst offer creative, right so the creative is taken care of for the most part, we'll talk a little bit more about that.
But it really is the list and the offered translating that 1968 framework to today who is the audience who is the audience the page that would very much be interested in what it is that you have for sale. Now some crowdfunding campaigns are a product or service. Some are just charitable donation. But no matter what it is, you need to have a very clear definition of who it is that you are trying to attract funding from. If you're not clear on that, spend some time with tools like Facebook Audience Insights or with Google Analytics data, or with any of the major benchmarking services out there that can give you a sense of who's in an audience that you care about from a topic perspective. So if you are running a crowdfunding page for like a new consumer, electronic well, who else likes consumer electronics, what are their characteristics what are the what are the demographics the psycho graphics the the different things that
You would use to understand who those people are. So that's the really, really important aspect. And you need to figure out how you're going to reach those people. Generally speaking, if you don't already have a list, like an email list, you're going to have to pay to drive traffic. There is very little to no
easy way to get people to a crowdfunding site without paying for that reach. Because there's so many of them. There's so many of them that there's so much competition for eyeballs that unless you have that built in audience, that's going to be very, very difficult to attract attention. So plan to pay us again, use these different audience tools that are out there to try and figure out where that audience lives. Yeah, can you reach them through Google AdWords? Can you reach them through YouTube advertising? Can you reach them through Facebook and Instagram can reach them through LinkedIn where does that audience live? So let's say you're doing a crowdfunding
page for
certain type of medical condition or medical research well, who would be interested in that condition of the para their patient communities are their support communities, all these different aspects you'd want to identify to figure out that list. Without that list, your crowdfunding site will not grow. The second thing in stones framework is the offer.
Generally speaking, you have to have something to give in exchange for the money you're asking for. What is it now a lot of crowdfunding sites particularly things like Kickstarter and stuff and things have tiers of rewards for supporters one of those rewards going to be in are they commensurate with what you're asking people to give
musicians a lot will have things like no stickers, or albums or signed albums or house parties or any of these things that as your level of support goes up.
What you get in return goes up and it doesn't necessarily have to be
like a large physical world products a lot of the times it's it is either reputational words or his badge value. So
if you donate $1,000 to musicians, next album, they will come to your house and do a house party, you know, a living room concert, which if you really like that musician, and you want to see them succeed, that would be quite a treat to post them in your backyard or something like that.
So think about from your own crowdfunding perspective, what is it the people get? Now if you're doing product products, you obviously offer, you know, early bird pricing on products or exclusives or unique accessories that somebody else can't get anywhere else. So you have fancy consumer electronic, maybe it comes with some add ons, if it's a service of some kind, you would have tiers of service that are very accessible if it's a charitable donation. What do people get in return? You know, this is a
Need to the Human Rights Campaign which is a a charity supports equal rights for people of all orientations and you know after certain donation level you get like a hat this hat did not cost what was worth it has probably if I had to guess is probably you know made for pennies on the dollars but it's still a thing that you get that is tangible physical world demonstration that this is a cause that you support so
in a for charitable things think about what can you offer that gives supporters a chance to show their support to your cause in any meaningful way.
So that's list that's often finally is is the creative and you do need to invest some time and money in the pieces of the creative that go with it. So whatever your crowdfunding platform is it's going to take you're going to have the basic the graphics the layout stuff taken care of for you what you will need are things like a persuasive well shot video that will be
Explain what it is that somebody's going to get. And almost every platform either requires a strongly suggest some kind of intro video. So you will also need to have an almost white paper esque explanation of what's going to happen in the process. So when you give money to this cause, what happens to that money if it's product, this is a timeline of benchmarks that we're going to meet, getting this this product built, if its services, you know, these are the development milestones that we're going to have on the way to a final release, if it's charitable, here, the milestones that you know how the money is going to be using and where we're going to be investing your money to create the social change that you want, whatever the case is, so sort of a white paper that justifies in more detail why you should be donating so having that that creative those those extra flourishes, those things that help convince somebody This is really worth your time your money.
Your investment are essential if you want your crowdfunding platform to succeed.
And then once you've got it all built, then this time to market it. So again, figure out where does that audience live and start running ads and run ads using a platform that allows you to do a lot of testing and that allows you ideally, to buy into different audiences. So one of the platforms I used as a display platform called stack adapt, because allows you to do
very good granular targeting of people by interest as opposed to demographic I want to be able to target people who are interested in analytics for example, because that's that's what I do is when company trusted insights does
I want to be able to target people who are interested in data who are interested in machine learning are interested in a I don't care whether they're male or female or above or below the age of 40. I care that they have an interest in the thing and be able to target and that platform Facebook fantastic platform for the Instagram part you match that Facebook fabulous platform for that so
Look, look around, run some testing start small start with, you know, small investments 50, 100, $200
at a time to see which platform gets you the most traction. And then once you figured out where you're getting results, where you're getting conversions from, then you ramp up your spend on that platform until you hit your funding milestone. So lots of lots goes into this. It is a full marketing campaign. And as such, there's all the things that come with it like strategy and metrics and analytics and stuff. But those are some good starting points for building out a crowdfunding campaign. Good question. If you have additional comments or questions, please leave them in the comments below and subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter and I'll talk to you soon
want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you


Gorgeous, so cute, I love this!!!
This is such a gorgeous creation, Jacqui! I love the abundance of layers, so expertly designed. The bird cage is stunning and the image is so beautifully colored. Thank you for sharing this sweet creation with us at 7 Kids College Fund!
What a fabulous card! Great attention to details! So glad you were inspired by this week's "love" theme at Cupcake Inspirations!
Beautiful card, just love it. Thanks for joining us @ Tilda's Town this week.
Hi there, thanks for joining the DML challenge with your beautiful card!
Gorgeous vintage look card! Thanks for joining us at Cupcake Inspirations this week!
Gorgeous!! Love this! Thanks for playing with us at Cupcake Insirations.


More than four years after officials broke ground on the new University Medical Center New Orleans, the hospital officially opened to the public on Saturday.
While some people weren't sure when this day would come, it's finally here. The doors to the new $1.1 billion UMC-New Orleans are now open.
It's size alone is impressive at 2.3-million-square-feet. It's become the anchor to the Crescent City's medical corridor, called the BioDistrict.


text:
package iht.models.application.exemptions

import iht.utils.CommonHelper
import play.api.i18n.Messages
import play.api.libs.json.Json

case class Charity(id: Option[String],
                   name: Option[String],
                   number: Option[String],
                   totalValue: Option[BigDecimal]) {

  def isComplete = CommonHelper.isSectionComplete(Seq(id, name, number, totalValue))

  /**
    * If there is no charity name then returns an Option of an appropriate message to indicate this. If there is
    * a name then it returns None. The possible scenarios are listed below:-
    *
    * Scenario 1: No charity name, no charity number, charity value => "No charity name or number added", charity value displayed
    * Scenario 2: Charity name, no charity number, no charity value => Charity name
    * Scenario 3: No charity name, charity number, no charity value => "No charity name added"
    * Scenario 4: Charity name, no charity number, charity value => Charity name, charity value displayed
    * Scenario 5: No charity name, charity number, charity value => "No charity name given", charity value displayed
    */
  def nameValidationMessage()(implicit messages: Messages): Option[String] = {
    (name, number, totalValue) match {
      case (None, None, Some(_)) => Some(messages("site.noCharityNameAndNumberGiven")) // scenario 1
      case (Some(_), _, _) => None // scenarios 2 & 4
      case (None, _, _) => Some(messages("site.noCharityNameGiven")) // scenario 3 & 5
    }
  }
}

object Charity {
  implicit val formats = Json.format[Charity]
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
She Was the First!: The Trailblazing Life of Shirley Chisholm (Hardcover)
By Katheryn Russell-Brown, Eric Velasquez (Illustrator)
The Finest Hours (Young Readers Edition): The True Story of a Heroic Sea Rescue (True Rescue Series) (Paperback)
By Michael J. Tougias, Casey Sherman
Finish The Fight!: The Brave and Revolutionary Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Hardcover)
By Veronica Chambers, The Staff of The New York Times (Illustrator)
One Giant Leap (Paperback)
By Robert Burleigh, Mike Wimmer (Illustrator)
If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks (Paperback)
By Faith Ringgold, Faith Ringgold (Illustrator)
Who Was Theodore Roosevelt? (Who Was?) (Paperback)
By Michael Burgan, Who HQ, Jerry Hoare (Illustrator)
Call Me Miss Hamilton: One Woman's Case for Equality and Respect (Hardcover)
By Carole Boston Weatherford, Jeffery Boston Weatherford (Illustrator)
Titanic: A Nonfiction Companion to Magic Tree House #17: Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Tree House (R) Fact Tracker #7) (Paperback)
By Mary Pope Osborne, Will Osborne, Sal Murdocca (Illustrator)
Rad American Women A-Z: Rebels, Trailblazers, and Visionaries Who Shaped Our History . . . and Our Future! (City Lights/Sister Spit) (Hardcover)
By Kate Schatz, Miriam Klein Stahl (Illustrator)
Only Margaret: A Story about Margaret Wise Brown (Hardcover)
By Candice Ransom, Nan Lawson (Illustrator)
One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance (Hardcover)
By Nikki Grimes
The Shelter and the Fence: When 982 Holocaust Refugees Found Safe Haven in America (Hardcover)
By Norman H. Finkelstein

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Silver and Green: Senior Citizens Get Lit on 4/20, Too
The senior demographic is largely ignored in the cannabis industry's marketing efforts. But let's not forget they've been getting high for 50 years longer than all of us.
Ah, 4/20. The New Year's Eve of weed, where tokers around the globe collectively puff all day in honor of that sweet, sweet, cheeba. Even seniors are getting in on the action — and why not? Most cannabis elders have been smoking since before the term 4/20 became code for meeting to get high. And they were the first generation of cannabis users to welcome the phrase into the lexicon and lore of weed.
But other than local efforts to shuttle residents of retirement homes to dispensaries, Baby Boomers are largely ignored in the cannabis industry's marketing efforts. What would happen if the Most Interesting Man in the World decided to forgo Dos Equis for dabs? Research shows that seniors are the fastest growing group of cannabis users. That said, there honestly isn't a better way for seniors to exercise their freedom than sparking up on 4/20, the highest of high holidays.
Grandma Throws a Celebrity 4/20 Coachella Party
Susan Soares hasn't been smoking that long, but the grandmother from Long Beach, California became a cannabis advocate in the '90s after the herb relieved her of migraine headaches resulting from a serious head injury. Soares even started a nonprofit with cannabis education as its mission and is currently raising funds to publish What's Growing in Grandma's Garden?, a children's book she authored to help kids understand cannabis.
"I believe that if you grow cannabis you learn to love it even more," she says.
4/20 weekend also happens to be the second weekend of Coachella, and Soares is throwing a desert weed-soiree. For the sixth year in a row, she is hosting the "Green Oasis," a private estate party near the Polo Fields where Coachella performers can chill, puff, and learn about the plant. The goal of Green Oasis, Soares says, is to provide a cannabis-friendly environment for artists where they can learn about cannabis and get pampered at the same time.
"We're doing a lot of wellness stuff," Soares says. "We got all kinds of spa treatments, body treatments. We're infusing the hot tub and calling it the Pot Tub."
Soares decided to throw the Green Oasis party after realizing how 4/20 un-friendly the music festival was — and still is.
"No bro, your medical card is not valid here," says Soares, recalling the festival website's FAQs. Today, that portion of the frequently asked questions has been updated and notes the legalization of cannabis, but it's just as flippant. Needless to say, the anti-weed attitude of the festival motivated her into action — and party mode.
In past years, Soares has hosted the Alabama Shakes, A$AP Rocky, The 1975, and even received visits from Kendall and Kylie Jenner.
At this year's Green Oasis, the swag bags of cannabis are equipped with concentrates and topicals. And the party will be loaded with gourmet food and adult beverages for everyone to enjoy. But Soares says she'll personally be celebrating at the party with an old fashion joint.
"I don't get the same experience consuming cannabis any other way," she says. "It's also the easiest way to dose yourself. You know immediately where you are."
Feeling Fine in Phoenix
Rich Wesdzunas, a 73-year-old retiree living in Phoenix, Arizona remembers celebrating 4/20 back in the '70s in California. And he's had his share of parties for the High Holiday since then, including several years spent reveling in Amsterdam. But this year he plans to check into a hotel in town and take a break from the usual routine, which includes helping to care for his 98-year-old father-in-law. He'll be happy to have some time without any dogs barking or cats running around.
"I'm going to take a couple days off to get away from all the craziness I go through during the week," says Wesdzunas. "That's going to be my way of celebrating 4/20."
He's been invited to a party hosted by a vape cartridge company, but says he doesn't handle crowds well due to epilepsy. Along with two herniated discs — which he treats with medical marijuana — it's difficult for him to stand for long periods of time.
Wesdzunas' ties to the cannabis community go back decades. We asked him if he used to sell pot back in the day and he replied, "of course," followed by a deep chuckle. Although he gave cultivating weed a couple of tries, he confessed that he was "never much of a grower." These days, however, he's partial to oils and concentrates, and even says a friend might drop by the hotel this weekend to share a dab or two.
Partying with a Purpose in B.C.
Carol Francey of Victoria, British Columbia, will also be celebrating 4/20. But rather than just getting stoned, she's planning to protest at the British Columbia legislature building. And she's going to dress up as a pot leaf growing out of a terra cotta pot while she shares the failings of Canada's Cannabis Act that was passed by Parliament last year.
"I'm protesting [the fact] we have more laws against cannabis now than we had before legalization," says Francey. "There are 45 new laws and many of them will give you jail time of up to 14 years."
"These are important things to recognize," she says. "It looks good to say, 'Well, you can smoke in your own home,' and that is one relief. But it's only if it's government weed. You can't buy outside of that [system]."
Francey first smoked pot in Toronto's Yorkville in 1965. She watched hippies in the neighborhood get high for a year before taking her first puff. In those days, it was widely believed that smoking cannabis led to heroin addiction. And the stigma of being a "stoner" made her hesitant to try it. But after a year of observing stoners having a good time, she realized the plant was supremely misunderstood. That's when she joined the cannabis community, and never looked back.
Then, after years of experiencing the plant's benefits, Francey decided to leave her career as a kindergarten teacher and become a drug and alcohol counselor.
"I wanted to do something about the bad drug laws, and I knew I wasn't going to be a lawyer or anything like that, but with social work, I could make a difference," she says. "On a one-to-one basis, I could help people."
She's still making a difference as a retiree today, commanding a social media following that showers her posts with 500,000 likes per month, and working with activist group Sensible B.C. Francey also says her pot costume makes her an approachable messenger with the ability to change minds.
"People look at me and they can't help it, a little smile comes over their face," she says. "And it makes me feel great because they're okay about this."
Francey says she intends to incorporate plenty of pleasure into her 4/20 protest.
"People come up to me and want to take selfies and just want to be part of it to bring a little flavor to the festivities or the protest. Little kids will come up and start dancing. It's really fun to do."
Seniors and 21-year-olds are no different when it comes to celebrating 4/20. They may have grey hair — but they love green just as much the next generation.
Follow A.J. Herrington on Instagram
A.J. Herrington is a freelance writer focusing on cannabis news, business, and culture and has written for publications including High Times, Sensi, and HEMP. When he's not banging away at the keyboard, you'll probably find him tending to his plants in the garden.


text:
Standard250 - 499ccSingle-CylinderAriel Motorcycles
1947 Ariel Red Hunter
webbike July 14, 2021
1947 ARIEL RED HUNTER BACKGROUND
The 1930s were indeed the Golden Age for the British motorcycle industry. At the time, nearly all of them relied heavily on one basic engine architecture: the air-cooled, pushrod OHV single, and most marques had built their lineup of 350 and 500 singles. World War II ruined all the fun starting in 1939, at which time all production of civilian products ceased and war production began. With the cessation of hostilities in 1945, it took a year for British industry just to catch its breath again, after the fever pitch high-volume production that Britain's War Department required. By 1946, the British motorcycle industry was building motorcycles for public consumption once again. However, the rush to market necessitated carrying over outdated pre-war designs, in many cases. The Ariel Red Hunter was already such an advance machine in its day that even before postwar changes could be made, they were still very capable machines. However, one welcome improvement was the telescopic front forks, which replaced the pre-war girder forks, for a huge improvement in both handling and ride.
1947 ARIEL RED HUNTER DESIGN
The Red Hunter's 500cc engine used a cast iron cylinder and head with 2 overhead valves per cylinder. The crankcase was made of aluminum alloy and split vertically, carrying a built-up crankshaft in two large main bearings. Lubrication was by plunger-type pump and was dry sump with a separate oil tank. While the front forks were new, the 1947 Ariel Red Hunter still used the same rigid frame that it had since the model's inception in 1932.
1947 Ariel Red Hunter SPECIFCIATIONS
Bore & Stroke
Horsepower @ RPM
Suspension, front
Suspension, rear
Brake, front
Brake, rear
Acceleration 0-60 mph 1947 Ariel VH Red Hunter
Air-cooled OHV vertical single
497cc / 30.0 ci
81.8mm X 95mm
26 hp @ 5,600 rpm
Chain, oil bath
Multi-plate, wet
4-speed, right-foot shift
Girder forks
SLS drum
3.25 US gal / 12.3 L
45-65 mpg est


CW is the lead partner for a winning consortium which includes the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) and the TM Forum.
The 5G Innovation Network will bring together and market the UK's 5G eco-system - including the national DCMS Testbed & Trials programme along with other business-led 5G initiatives. It will also work with the Department of International Trade (DIT) on a conduit for overseas partners wishing to invest in UK 5G.
The strength of the partnership comes from its credibility and impartiality in establishing independent networks of organisations developing 5G technologies in the UK and beyond. CW have a varied and established network of companies across the UK technology market encompassing a range of technology verticals. KTN's national and cross-sector reach gives them an unrivalled convening power across a network of over 90,000 organisations and businesses. TM Forum brings together over 850 member companies and 100,000 professionals representing the global telecommunications industry.
TM Forum is delighted to play a key role in the development of the UK5G Innovation Network, which is underpinned by our commitment to connect digital ecosystems in a variety of settings around the world. Exposing this learning in the UK and amplifying experience from the UK to the rest of the world is at the heart of what we do, and we look forward to working with CW, KTN and 5G-In's partner organisations on establishing the UK's position as a leading developer of 5G technology.
In the recent DCMS 5G Prospectus, Matt Hancock (Minister of State for Digital) comments on the importance of 5G, stating "the 5G Testbeds & Trials Programme will harness the power of fast changing technology and further the UK's leadership". The report explains how the programme will make use of areas where the UK has a competitive advantage such as engineering talent, and its rich ecosystem of relevant technology companies, both large and small.
Due to launch in early 2018 the UK5G Innovation Network will support this phased activity, including the numerous private sector 5G projects and other relevant government funded projects. It will operate autonomously from Government and at its heart will be an independent Advisory Board, which will inform and review the operations of the Network, provide a leadership focus for the UK 5G ecosystem, and provide advice to Government as it further develops national 5G programmes.
The UK5G Innovation Network seeks to facilitate innovation partnerships, deliver a national calendar of events which will be aimed at both the technology supply-side and the stimulation of industry demand, support 5G inward investment opportunities, and provide a regular source of news and information from the UK 5G ecosystem, all of this operating under a recognised UK 5G brand.
Along with CW (Cambridge Wireless), Knowledge Transfer Network and the TM Forum, the consortium has engaged three Associate Partners including the Digital Catapult, Real Wireless Ltd and DG Cities Ltd. The wider 5G community - such as the University of Surrey, Bristol and King's College are all in support.
KTN is looking forward to developing the UK5G Network's reach across the UK to join up telecoms tech providers with industrial demand from many different sectors. An independent, impartial Network to share information and to encourage industry-led collaboration gives the UK a great opportunity to be a world leader in 5G services.
This is a fantastic opportunity for the UK to build and enhance its position in the implementation of the next generation of mobile communication - and the end-goal is to help these technologies rapidly transform our societies and economic performance. CW is known for it's rich mix of members and supporters so to be able to engage the CW community in this significant innovation programme is a huge opportunity both for the CW organisation and for its membership. I'm looking forward to seeing the progress during the coming months.
The Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) is the UK's innovation network, established by Innovate UK to help to deliver economic growth. We work to help businesses get the best out of creativity, ideas and the latest discoveries, to strengthen the UK economy and improve people's lives.
TM Forum is an association of over 850 member companies generating US$2 trillion in revenue and serving five billion customers across 180 countries. We drive collaboration and collective problem-solving to maximize the business success of communication and digital service providers and their ecosystem of suppliers around the world. Today, our focus is on supporting members as they navigate their unique digital transformation journeys, providing practical and proven assets and tools to accelerate execution and platforms to facilitate collaborative problem solving and innovation. Learn more at www.tmforum.org.


You fear you're going to have to completely overhaul your life in order to shed a few pounds.
You'll have to go to the gym 7 days a week, eat nothing but fresh air and kale, you'll beat yourself up every time you eat a sweet, you can no longer receive communion at mass because of #Carbs, goodbye social life, hello starvation.
They key to seeing progress is to make just small changes consistently over time.
Day by day you will start to make better decisions.
These decisions will lead to more confidence in your life, more energy to chase the kids/dog/cat when they're acting up.
You'll slowly notice you've a better outlook on life each day.
Now imagine for a moment where you could be in the next month, 6 months or even a year?
You can develop healthy habits to benefit yourself both physically and mentally.
And these habits can become the foundation for your future self and even children.
So avoid the fear that you build up in your own head about making a positive change in lifestyle.
Take it day by day, make 1 small change every day and in time it will accumulate into big results.
Want To Shift A Stone?
If you're ready to get working on losing weight, toning up and looking great for Christmas then we can help you.
On October 2nd our "Shift A Stone Challenge" kicks off.
It's an 8 Week programme tailored to help you see changes both on the scales and in your clothes and confidence.
It's only €200 for the full 8 Weeks.
You can apply here (Spaces are filling up).


Successful BC landlords know how important it is to raise your rents every year. With inflation and rising costs if you don't raise the rent you can quickly fall into the trap of not only losing your cash-flow but even being cash-flow negative! Losing money every month can be a stressful and scary experience!
Many landlords across British Columbia were worried this year the rent guideline would be very low.
After all, BC landlords are facing a lot of challenges these days. For many of us, it feels like investing in real estate, creating jobs and great rental properties is a 'bad thing' in BC.
Many landlords are even thinking of investing outside of BC now.
The good news is the rent increase guideline for 2019 is very fair. The BC government has set the maximum allowable rent increase at 4.5% in 2019. It was only 4% for 2018.
This is the biggest increase since 2004 (When it was capped at 4.6%). Alberta landlords can raise the rent as much as the market can bear each year with property notice.
Many Ontario landlords are furious that despite the same type of inflation and rising costs as we have in BC they can only raise the rent by 1.8% in 2019.
BC landlords you can raise the rent 4.5% in 2019. According to the CBC this has many BC tenants angry but this is a great step by the gov't to help us small landlords succeed (and not sell and invest in friendlier markets).


text:
By SonOfTheGods, December 4, 2013 in The Rabbit Hole
SonOfTheGods
lonemanpai.com
Shepard Ambellas | November 30, 2013 | 2:22pm EDT	In what will soon be considered as the Holy Grail of extraterrestrial research, the Mexican government has released ancient documents proving the existence of E.T.'s once and for all.
[1] The two circles near the center of the artifact appear to be earth. [2] This appears to be a spacecraft of some type. [3] This appears to be a massive comet or asteroid headed toward earth. [4] Appears to be a specially designed spacecraft capable of deflecting a large comet or meteor, such as NASA "Deep Impact". [5] Appears to be an astronaut in control of a craft. [6] What appears to be an intelligently controlled spacecraft.
CALAKMUL, MEXICO (INTELLIHUB) — Newly released Mayan documents, i.e. artifacts, dating back at least 1300-years reveal that the human race is not alone and highly advanced technologies including space travel have likely existed for quite some time.
Not only does this documentation released by the Mexican government show the existence of an explorer race, it may also reveal the roots of mankind.
Some consider the government's presentation of the information to be a major step forward for humanity as the truth is finally being slowly let out. Hopefully this will prompt other governments around the world to be more forthcoming with such information, turning the tide in the UFO and extraterrestrial research community for good.
Sundance winner Juan Carlos Rulfo's
2012 and Beyond also touches on such technology. "Producer Raul Julia-Levy said the documentary-makers were working in cooperation with the Mexican government for what he said was "the good of mankind". He said the order to collaborate had come directly from the country's president, Álvaro Colom Caballeros.
"Mexico will release codices, artefacts and significant documents with evidence of Mayan and extraterrestrial contact, and all of their information will be corroborated by archaeologists," he said. "The Mexican government is not making this statement on their own – everything we say, we're going to back it up."
Caballeros himself was conspicuous by his absence from the statement released by Julia-Levy. So far, the minister of tourism for the Mexican state of Campeche, Luis Augusto García Rosado, appears to be the highest-ranking government official to go on record confirming the discovery of extraterrestrial life, but he's not holding back.
In a statement, Rosado spoke of contact "between the Mayans and extraterrestrials, supported by translations of certain codices, which the government has kept secure in underground vaults for some time". In a telephone conversation with the Wrap, he also spoke of "landing pads in the jungle that are 3,000 years old".[2]
These secrets have been said to be "protected" by the mexican government for as long as 80-years.
[1] The Mexican government reveals Mayan documents proving extraterrestrial contacts - Arcturius.org
[2] Mayan documentary to show 'evidence' of alien contact in ancient Mexico - TheGuardian.com
[3] Aliens and UFOs Depicted In Mayan Artifacts Released By Mexican Government - ConciusLifeNews.com
http://intellihub.com/2013/11/30/mexican-government-releases-proof-of-e-t-s-and-ancient-space-travel/
He's a very naughty boy!
Intriguing.
Nungali
Reverse geyser
The Dao Bums+
'The Guardian' seems like a good reference ?
Lets look it up;
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/sep/29/mayan-documentary-alien-mexico
"Sundance winner Juan Carlos Rulfo's Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond is currently in production for release next year to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar …
"Producer Raul Julia-Levy said the documentary-makers were working in cooperation with the Mexican government for what he said was "the good of mankind". He said the order to collaborate had come directly from the country's president, Álvaro Colom Caballeros ….
"Caballeros himself was conspicuous by his absence from the statement released by Julia-Levy.
"So far, the minister of tourism for the Mexican state of Campeche, Luis Augusto García Rosado, appears to be the highest-ranking government official to go on record confirming the discovery of extraterrestrial life, (my emphasis )
"In a statement, Rosado spoke of contact "between the Mayans and extraterrestrials, supported by translations of certain codices, which the government has kept secure in underground vaults for some time". In a telephone conversation with the Wrap, he also spoke of "landing pads in the jungle that are 3,000 years old".
"Guatemala, like Mexico, home to the ancient-yet-advanced Mayan civilisation … has also kept certain provocative archeological discoveries classified, and now believes that it is time to bring forth this information in the new documentary," Guatemala's minister of tourism, Guillermo Novielli Quezada, said in a statement.
Also note that all sources and references all cross link to the same article and info = self referential.
{which basically means that if I say it is true I can back it up by linking to .http://thetaobums.com/topic/32822-mexican-government-releases-proof-of-ets-and-ancient-space-travel/ post # 3. }
Those pictures remind me off those 'ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics' that had images of modern army tanks and things in them … whatever became of them ?
AS much as it may disappoint some … it is not entirely impossible that the 'evidence' was constructed recently . And for anyone who is observant … the idea of ministers of tourism being the only government support and verification perhaps suggests something – hmmmmmmmmmm ???
Of course, many of us don't trust 'the government' …. Unless its an issue like this … then all of a sudden they seem to have a validity ??? Curious !
Edited December 4, 2013 by Nungali
The Wondering Taoist
They made that announcement right after they announced that Mexico has nothing to do with drug traffic.
Go To Topic Listing The Rabbit Hole


Dravid is currently mentoring the India 'A' and Under-19 team.
Former India batsman Rahul Dravid, who has retired from international cricket nearly 6 years ago, is currently involved with the India 'A' and Under-19 team as a chief coach. Following his retirement back in 2012, Dravid had spent some time in the commentary box as well. And now the batting legend has said that he enjoys coaching more as it gives him a sense of fulfillment.
"After I was done playing, I did some commentary, corporate speeches. But the thing I enjoyed the most was coaching. Commentary was nice and great, but you just don't get a fulfillment at the end of the day. Being involved with young people, their lives gave me the most satisfaction. So, purely for selfish reasons I am doing something that gives me satisfaction. I enjoy doing it. Also, I figured out that I can do it at this stage, because it will get tougher as you grow older – coaching has also become physically demanding," Dravid was quoted as saying by The Field.
The 44-year-old also stressed on the significance of failure and said that it has taught him more than success.
"When we fail, we often tend to brush things under the carpet. We blame someone, we always tend to find an excuse. When you do things like that, you lose an opportunity to fail well. When you fail, you have an opportunity to understand yourself. Failure teaches you to deal with tough situations. The more you put yourself on the line, you will learn to get better," the batting great added.
Dravid also put forward his viewpoint on an ideal coach and ward relationship. He believes that a good coach will always get along well with someone who is keen to learn.
"I don't think a good coach should expect the people who he's working with to listen to everything he says. A good coach will like someone who's willing to learn. He might be the quietest in the team, he might not take everything you say, but will be open to learning. That's what coaches look for," concluded Dravid.


text:
Meet the Two of Us Cast
Chris Bert
Chris is excited to be returning to the NYC stage as Mark David Chapman. Chris has appeared as a guest star on such television shows as Sleepy Hollow (FOX), Person of Interest (CBS), and NCIS (CBS), as well as co-starring in independent films like The Green with Cheyenne Jackson and Julia Ormond, and Cheerleader, which is currently on the festival circuit.
Vivian Chiu*
Vivian has appeared in the Broadway production and International tour of David Henry Hwang's Chinglish. Other performances include: Agamemnon (dir. Gisela Cardenas); Limbs: A Pageant (dir. Niegel Smith); and an off-Broadway revival of Night Over Taos (dir. Estelle Parsons). Co-founder of InTandem Lab. M.A in Theatre: Northwestern Univ.
www.intandemlab.org
Christopher Daftsios*
Chris's credits include - NYC: Picture Ourselves In Latvia (NLTP; published by Samuel French), Visitor from Forest Hills (Tony Roberts/Louise Lasser), The Muckle Man (Rattlestick), In Bed with Roy Cohn (Lion Theater). Regional: NJ Rep, New Century Theater, Forestburgh Playhouse, Luna Stage, Shadowland Theatre, Chicago Dramatists. Film/TV: Royal Pains, Law & Order, Law & Order: Conviction, Incident at Chekhov Creek (David Strathairn), Terry from Ohio (Fox). Created/performed 10 pieces performed throughout Europe including Dance is Not Enough (Faust Award: Best Choreography 2014, Germany). Currently in commercial/print: NYC PSA I Thrive.
Dan Fenaughty*
Honolulu Gun Store, Husband, & Photographer
Dan's recent Credits: Anything Goes (Stages St. Louis), Camelot (Westcester Broadway), Addams Family (Forestburgh Playhouse), The 39 Steps (Ivoryton Playhouse), God of Carnage (Weathervane Theatre). Films: Gutboy: a bad time story. Thanks to Sarah for her friendship, family for their support and Larissa for her love.
Lea McKenna-Garcia*
Jude, Sonny, Wife
Lea is a theatre artist based in New York City. With NLTP: Rex. Regional: Alabama and Texas Shakespeare Festivals. In New York: Playhouse Creatures and Wide Eyed Productions. Proud member of the Fail Better Reading Series as a writer and actor. Training: Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Janae Mitchell
Janae is happy to return to NLTP after appearing in In the Soundless Awe. Previous credits include: When I Come to Die (KCRep), Clybourne Park (Unicorn Theatre), Seven Guitars (UMKC). A graduate of Louisiana State University and the University of Missouri - Kansas City. Smith Talent Group
* Appearing courtesy of Actors Equity Association


We recently had a fantastic webinar that allowed guests to ask questions about blogging, WordPress, and SEO from three experts; let's learn about each of them.
Shelly is a WordPress Dev, owns her own SEO consultancy business, is the President of SearchHou and is also a Community Manager for SEMrush.
Casey has been in SEO since about 1999, and his specialty is site auditing. "So what I do is take a site, tear it to shreds, try not to make the blogger cry too much and then we tell them what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong and what we can get them to significantly increase the bottom line traffic and of course, their ad income."
Arsen is an SEO and runs an agency out of Los Angeles. They specialize in technical SEO but are a full-service digital marketing agency. Arsen has been in the SEO business for about ten years, nine years as an agency.
We have included some of the key questions discussed in the webinar below, but not all of the discussion is included because of the length of the webinar. We have included a time stamp so you can find each question in the video and watch the full discussion.
Casey: There are three reasons why you are going to find that Jetpack stats are not nearly as reliable as Google Analytics. The first one is that Jetpack doesn't ignore as much bot traffic as Google Analytics. It is funny because it is a very well-maintained plug-in and it is maintained by Automattic, which is well-known in the WordPress community, but they just don't do as good a job filtering out bot traffic as Google Analytics.
The second issue might be the fact that Google Analytics uses sessions as the default metric. So sessions can contain multiple page views. Jetpack uses page views as the user metric and many people; unless you know how to go in and look at the correct stat, you might be looking at page views and trying to line them up with sessions, and they are never going to match. They are going to have significantly more page views than sessions.
And finally, kind of a pro user tip for Jetpack, if you are using Jetpack, you need to make sure that you go in and match your timezone settings to be the same as Google Analytics, because if they are different, you are going to find overlapping traffic and that is going to throw off your Jetpack traffic considerably.
Arsen: At the same time, you want to make sure that your analytics is firing properly, as well, all right? So I would take a look and make sure everything's installed properly and do some recordings and make sure that that's coming through without any issues for you.
Casey: Actually, that is a good question. So Genesis is a very well thought out framework and Genesis is, again, a framework. The good thing about Genesis is that you can buy the framework and a child theme and basically, you are given a developer license. You can install it on 300 sites if you want. That is really pretty cool. You can leverage it considerably. The good thing about Genesis is that is has a lot of built-in bells and whistles that give you a competitive SEO edge. One of them is schema, for example.
Many bloggers always ask me, Casey, how can I generate the search box in Google? You know, like sometimes you will type in a site, and it will have a nice search box there and Google for the whole site? That is website schema. Website schema is built into Genesis frameworks, as an example.
It is amazing how many sites don't do that. They also have other schemas built-in from web page down to creative work and then site navigation element. Site navigation element is great for helping you qualify for site links. So, really, really very important with regards to using a theme that has these built-in features.
And there are some other things, too. There are tons of customizable widgets; the code is pretty nice. It is not bloated. There is a fantastic way to customize the site, and one of the really cool things is that you can optimize your category pages. This is an extremely underutilized benefit of WordPress, is that your category pages are basically your windows into the house of your blog.
Shelly: I could not agree more. The company's been around for a long time. They are established, and now they are with WordPress Engine, so they really are a big part of the WordPress community. I know that is super important because we want to make sure that whatever theme you are using, that the developers are staying on top of changes and that you don't have to worry about things.
So one of the things I'm seeing as I am working with some of the food bloggers that have been referred to me, some of them have these massively customized websites, which is amazing that they were able to invest, they found developers that could realize their dreams, essentially, but that customization is actually hurting them.
I am finding a lot of duplication with a lot of these custom post types, and the way things are patched together really can come back to harm you. And as there are major changes that occur in WordPress, we are talking about like Gutenberg, this big change that's coming, that's here but is not going away, essentially, we want to make sure that we're building on a framework that is forward-thinking and that can evolve.
You don't want to have to start from scratch every single time with a brand new custom website when there are these major changes so you really need something that is adaptable and that you can feel confident that a dev team behind it is there to support it and continue to approve it and they're on top of stuff. So for me, that is super important coming from the technical side of building out some of these sites.
Shelly: I couldn't agree more. If you ask me, I have a hate relationship with certain like page builders like Divi.
Casey: Now, that actually brings up a good point, because there are some things you can do to minimize the unnecessary stuff or fluff that is loaded in the background. I actually have a plug-in here. Let me see if I can actually find it and paste it over here. It is called WP Asset Clean-up; this is a fantastic plug-in. It might be news to Arsen and Shelly, as well, but basically how this works is it will scan each of the pages on your site and let you know what needs to be loaded on that page and what does not.
The good thing about WordPress is that you have the ability to find plug-ins that will minimize the impact per page. If we don't need certain resources on a page, a plug-in like I mentioned above will do that for you. It will tell you, here is what is loading, here is what's not loading and it will just eliminate that. It is going to immediately help your page speed.
Shelly: Honestly, I have always loved the original toolset in that I can put in a website, I can see what is driving traffic to it. For me, creating a content strategy plan for clients and deciding what should we go after keywords. It is so, so valuable. So that is always been my favorite.
But I will tell you, there are so many new tools; if you are looking at exploring new content and as bloggers, you guys are always publishing posts and needing new material, and I feel like I would certainly run out of ideas. So it might be a struggle from time to time. You get a little writer's block. We have our keyword magic tool, which is amazing. There are just so many different components in our toolset that will allow you to come up with ideas as far as creating new content.
But we also have our really great tools for writing content, as well, that embed into Google Docs. And so as you are writing your articles, there is all this really great feedback about is it readable? Are your keywords in there?
Arsen: I love the domain overview part of SEMrush. Can we say the original toolset? Amazing. My second most favorite part of SEMrush is the API. We do a lot of interesting stuff, and you don't really need to code. You can use Google Sheets, and you can pull in a lot of information, and you can visualize it in so many different ways.
Especially from a forensic standpoint if you are trying to figure out what happened. Why did I lose ranking? Which keywords exited which positions over time? Which keywords that have a specific search feature like a local pack or a featured snippet or a YouTube video. All of that is a layer on top of what you can get out of Google Search Console.
And then obviously, my third most favorite tool is the auditor, and I recommend this all the time. And the auditor can crawl, I think right now we are up to 100,000 pages, right Shelly? With SEMrush, but yeah, for any blogger, I recommend using the auditor, have SEMrush set up ongoing crawls to make sure you are monitoring everything that is happening with your site, surface level or subcutaneous and ongoing level. Blogging, you are adding more content, internal links and there is so much room for error, having these ongoing once a week or once every two week crawls of your website is so important.
Shelly: Oh, I couldn't agree more. That is one of my favorite tools, as well. We have some amazing tools for monitoring your site. Setting up the site audit is super simple and fun. I love it. I love being able to discover new things that I would not see to the naked eye, so it is just so helpful, especially if you don't have that technical background. Absolutely try it out. Casey, what do you think?
Casey: You know what? I love featured snippets. And the good thing about SEMrush is they have a featured snippet report under position tracking that is really cool. So look at what is currently being tracked. You can look at what is being launched. You can look at opportunities. It is fantastic. So I tend to recommend that.
Shelly: And I will tell you, we have actually Melissa Fach on here and she runs the SEMrush blog. There are so many great articles. I know it might be a little overwhelming when you are like "How do I utilize this tool?" It isn't free, so obviously, you gotta figure out "Can I justify this expense?"; utilize the blog to find the answers to these questions.
Casey: This is a very good question. Alt tags are extremely underutilized and usually done incorrectly by the majority of people online, especially within the food, do it yourself, and lifestyle niches.
It is just amazing how we can tell a blogger, here is what Google would like you to do, and then they will go to a Facebook group and do exactly the complete opposite even though you have got a guide right there in front of you or you have got a professional telling you "Here is what we want to do." So the thing is that alt tags are for visibility. Alt tags are for accessibility. Alt tags are for visual readers.
Now your question about how many words should be in an alt tag. Google basically counts up to about 16 words in the alt text. I think 16 words is quite a bit for alt text so I don't agree with that, but if you have to go that long, it is clear that Google is picking it all up.
So if I am looking at a recipe and it is banana cream pie because I love banana cream pie, and there is a picture of a piece of banana cream pie on a white plate with bananas in the background, that is what I am going to explain in the image. I am not going to say banana cream pie dash food blog.com/#bananacream pie or something along those lines. Because I get that all the time; alt tags are for users only.
Pinterest, if you want to optimize for Pinterest, you can use the title tag, or you can download a plug-in like Social Warfare or Social Pub or Tasty Pens, which will generate a custom pin description field, which Pinterest will also pick up, but one of the things that we are looking for when we are doing site auditing is quality.
And there is nothing high quality about a site that has spammed or incorrectly used alt tags on every image. So as we go in, we want to make sure that we are putting that information down in a way that is digestible and that is correct. So definitely review the resources we have mentioned and get on that in 2019. That will help you long term.
Casey: Oh, so I am all about consolidation with regards to thin content. One of the things that I hear a lot is that "Oh, my God, I'm ranking for banana cream pie, so I need to publish more recipes about banana cream pie." That kind of topical relevance or that kind of belief is just incorrect. Just because you are ranking well for something doesn't necessarily mean you are going to have a better chance of ranking for other things that are very similar or it is going to hurt you to write other things that are not as similar.
Now, that being said, if I have got five banana cream pie recipes on my site or if I have got five posts on a very similar topic. I am going to cannibalize the ability of each of those pieces of content to rank competitively individually. So we want to make sure that you are looking at that and asking yourself, well, maybe I can combine or merge or consolidate two or three of these resources into a longer form piece of content.
I know many of you have probably heard the term skyscraper content, and it is as old as vegan bacon, which I don't want to talk about anymore. But if you were going to do this, you would go, and you would take these resources and look and say, "Gosh, I can't understand why these two resources. I have got one resource here solidly on page one, and I have got these other two resources, which are just not competitive".
Well, I think what you might want to do is just consider maybe consolidating those other two resources into one better resource or trying to really look at eliminating thin or low-quality content.
I want you to think of your site as a garden.
Your blog posts are all of your flowers. If you have got these low-quality blog posts or these thin content pages or empty pages, maybe you have a tag page, author archives, paginated content, keyword fills, you are leaving all those open. Think of those as weeds. If we don't do anything to those weeds, they will strangle our flowers. It will make it harder for individual content to rank competitively. So we want to prune those weeds. We want to prune that thin content.
Arsen: Yeah, so to follow-up to what Casey was saying, so a few things that I am noticing, and I think we have a question about this, tags competing with categories. So let's say you are writing about desserts or you are writing about all kinds of different recipes and you have a category for desserts and you have a tag for desserts. Those two will compete with each other; that is cannibalization.
You want to pick one or the other and stick with it, most likely a category and then you can use tags as frequently as you want and as many times as you want, as long as they're being blocked from crawling.
Casey: Just to kind of add one more thought on this, really quickly. It is okay to delete content, folks. 404s are not going to kill you. 404s are not a sign of low quality. 404s are how the internet works. I have people that are just vehemently opposed to 404s, and they will try to redirect something to something that is not related, they will redirect it to the home page. They just don't like 404s. That doesn't do you any good.
Google treats that kind of redirect as a soft 404, meaning that they just wipe out the redirect. You don't get any authority, and it was a waste of action on your part.
If you are not sure about the quality of the content, no index it, that is fine. If you no index something, we are just telling Google don't algorithmically score it against me. But I am going to leave it open so that those who are navigating through my site can find it easily.
Arsen: So the question is why do you want to change the URL of the post, right? Are you changing it because you are migrating? Are you changing it because you are redoing your site? Or are you changing it just to add a keyword to it, which I would completely recommend against doing. But that is just my opinion, Casey?
Casey: Yeah, I would rather you go outside and stick, get a stick and stick it in your eye than to change your URLs. It is that big of a deal. When you change a URL, you are resetting all the end authority on that post. We just don't change URLs. The only time that I advise people to change URLs is when it is a site-wide issue, like for example, they have dates in their URLs.
If you still have dates in your URLs, that puts you at a disadvantage to update and republish content. And updating and republishing content to make it better and more future proofed is one of the single greatest things you can do to generate new and existing traffic.
Arsen: Especially if it is ranking, because a lot of times, I have on my consult calls with clients, they are like, "Oh, I have a blog post that is doing really well. I want it to do better, and I wanted to expand for more keywords so I want to add more exact match keywords to my URL". That is a terrible idea; if it is already ranking why would you want to do that? If it is bringing in traffic, optimize page level, don't change the URL, don't change an address.
Casey: So that is a user-first optimization. It is kind of interesting because we also call those jump links. And Google will actually generate a jump link for you or multiple jump links in search if you do that, as a matter of fact, and they have been doing that for a while, and I am of the belief that any time you can make your content easy to navigate for users, you should.
It is why if you are a food do it yourselfer, or lifestyle blogger, you really should be using "jump to recipe" buttons or "jump to content" buttons because users want those. It is amazing, whenever we do a survey, we always ask, "Hey, what do you want to see on the site?" And like, yeah, I like the content, but I don't want to be forced to read through a ton of stuff that at the time. I don't have the time to really digest. I want to just get down to the meat of things.
Table of content works very similar to that. So Google also creates these jump to sections in search, and you can use a plugin or a table of contents plugin to create what are called anchor links.
Shelly: If we are building our website, we need to take into consideration the experience that people are having on our website. If they are having a poor experience, then they are just not going to come back. So yes, when we add these jump to link, you might see a decline in your ad revenue.
However, I feel like, in the long run, it is going to work to your benefit. As you build that brand experience with people, they recognize that they have a great experience on your website, and they come back to you and that is what it is all about and then ultimately, if that happens, you are going to make more money in the long run, so for me, that is kind of my experience coming both from trying not to objectively stand outside of that.
Shelly: I always recommend that we noindex our tags because people tend to go tag happy. They are there for usability purposes. We want to try to prevent that duplicate content that can happen. I have also seen with categories; for instance, if you find that you are putting a post in multiple categories, and it is always like the same posts that are always going in multiple categories, I feel like that might potentially be an issue with duplicate content, as well.
Casey: So with regards to the tags and the categories, I look at it this way. Tags are great for onsite search; they are not a great way to hierarchically order a lot of content. I find that the categories work better on that. Now I find that the category pages can absolutely send very noticeable levels of traffic.
And to do that, though, you have to optimize the category pages. I have seen some blogs who are very finite in their categories: 12 categories. I have other blogs that are 50 or 60 categories. The secret behind categories is understanding that you need to fill them out with content. It makes no sense to have 50 categories if you only have two or three posts in each category.
It would be better for you to have less categories and more content in those categories, then it would be to go to the other spectrum. And then, of course, again, if you are on Genesis or some of these other themes, you have the ability to add an on page H1, add a couple paragraphs of above the fold content, you can even crosslink the categories to some of the other, you know, some top recipes and then we can always link to the category pages within our content.
Arsen: We have had audits where we have had more category pages than actual posts on a website. We have had 800 to 900 categories on a blog that had 300 posts. And when you do a crawl of that, it looks really weird because a big chunk of your site is paginated because of that. So there is a myriad of issues that kind of work out as a byproduct of mishandling your categories and not setting them up properly.
Casey: What about recipes that fall into three or four categories? Totally fine. Here is the secret, though; you need to be choosing a featured category for every recipe. So as you go into your recipes, you should go on your right-hand side, especially if you are on a Genesis framework or any, most blogs do this, there is an option to choose a featured category. That should be the featured category, the main category for that recipe.
Now the reason this is important is also for the generation of breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are to me, mandatory. If you are on the call and you don't have breadcrumbs on your site, to me, I believe that that is a substantial disservice to your users. It is a user-first optimization. Breadcrumbs also allow you to generate an increased rich snippet in Google.
So by choosing your featured category, that is the category that is going to be populated in your breadcrumbs on the pages so be aware of that.
Arsen: Yup and then always make sure that the breadcrumbs have markup and they are properly positioned within the head of the page.
Shelly: I agree. Having the proper schema with that, those breadcrumbs can allow you to generate those pretty breadcrumbs in Google search, so those are so useful when those appear, so absolutely.
Casey: Well, any time you update a post, you are going to run the risk of upsetting the apple cart. You are going to run the risk of, any time you change anything; you have the chance that it is going to rise and you have the chance that it is going to drop.
I basically tell people, especially in my audits, update and republishing content is the secret to long-term success. If you have got 70% of your content, and it is just not generating much traffic, after we have audited it and decided, "Okay, I'm going to keep this", then we work on a checklist and say, okay, here is what we need to do the make that content better and then we are going to schedule it out.
Now if you are already in the top three for a post, I will be honest with you, I wouldn't touch it. There is just no real long-term benefit for that unless you previously were at the position zero and you lost your position zero or your featured snippet.
Maybe you have a post that is generating you five, ten, twenty thousand sessions or clicks a month in Google Search Console; it is one of your big recipes. I would hate for that to fall too much because you are going to notice that drop considerably and I have had audits where I have audited sites where 60% of their traffic is two or three recipes. That is not a good situation to be in. So what we want to try to do is get more of their content to take up the slack from these larger posts, and try to insulate those from large ranking changes.
For example, I tell people, if I could improve the recipe card, for example, if I can fully enhance the recipe card, I might have them do that. If I know that the photos didn't have alt tags, I might go in and add some alt tags correctly. I might make small changes, and then I will wait.
Now many of you have heard the term Google dance. It is absolutely a real thing. Google even has an algorithm, a patent for it, where they basically will penalize you when you have made changes. So if you do something on a page and you make a lot of changes and all of a sudden, the post drops like a rock, Google's trying to scare you into reversing the changes that you made so you don't have enough time to understand if you did anything correctly.
So as I tell people, and I know Arsen and Shelly have seen this as well, we just have to be patient. You are going to have to wait a couple of weeks. Usually, you will start to see the posts slowly climb back up, but that is just something to be aware of. You will know that based upon experience, as you work through this.
Arsen: You can also like send external signals to the posts once you have made the changes to help it start bumping up a little bit more. External signals could be backlinks to the post.
Casey: Right. So just to let you guys know, that is a site-specific recommendation in the case of the site that we were talking about, she had an excessive dom node issue. DOMs are Document Object Models. And a node is basically, it is simply an HTML element and nodes make up the regular pages on a site.
Google would like the Dom node size of the page to be less than 1500 nodes, so if you are using the new Google page read insights tool, there's a big red warning now that says, "Hey, warning. Your dom node size is excessive." So in this blogger's case, the Instagram widget was generating an extra 300 or 400 nodes that had no benefit for her. Users were not clicking on that, which is why you want to use something like Hotjar so that you can use heat mapping to see what is being clicked on your pages and what is not.
Now, most of you maybe are running ads, maybe not running ads. You should be aware that one of the biggest issues we are seeing right now is the disappearing of rich snippets in search. This is happening because of excessive dom node generation because of sites on WordPress that are running ads, running a lot of built-in widgets, running a lot of excessive elements on the page,and/or not paginating their comments.
Okay? If you got a page that is generating two thousand, three thousand, four thousand nodes, it could easily cause you issues because if Google can't crawl the page, they can't parse and render the page. And when they can't render a page, you lose rich snippets. So be aware of this, okay? Go into the new Google PageSpeed Insights. Scroll down and take a look at pages.
Also, go back and look at the resources we have recommended today. Look at using the best plug-ins. Short pixel or Imagify for image optimization. WP Rocket for caching. Use Cloudflare for your CDN because it works great with WP Rocket. Use some of the quick link optimization plug-ins that we have shared. Paginate your comments.
Now, this is a funny one because...if you go into WordPress and you paginate your comments, Yoast will give you a warning; this is why you need to not worry too much about plug-ins because Yoast is just idiotic in this aspect.
One of the fastest and easiest ways for you to make a page faster is to only show a certain amount of comments on a page. We call that pagination. So you can go in and choose maybe 20 comments and 20 follow-ups or whatever to show on the page. Yoast doesn't like that because it causes these extra comment 1 and comment 2 pages; Google is great at ignoring those. You will be fine, and the bottom line benefit is you will be faster, and when you are faster, you are going to generate more traffic because you will have more users interact with your content every minute. In audits, I can just dramatically increase page speed, and the traffic goes through the roof.
Arsen: So there is, to follow up with what Casey was saying about the comments. We have had situations where the total amount of comments on the page was outweighing the actual content that is on the recipe or the blog post. And over time as that post became more popular and more comments were being added, they started diluting the overall focus for that page. So the blogger started seeing a decrease in rankings.
So that comment pagination, especially if you are a very popular blog that gets a lot of traction, a lot of engagement on your post levels — post-level engagement — doing that pagination is super important. You also want to make sure that the pagination is properly set up, without any confusion of canonical signals in the realm of next prev, because if the signals are confusing those pages will be indexed and will be picked up into search. Read all the documentation of your theme, or use a third party to help you with that.
Shelly: One of the things I see are the themes clients are using, or customer layouts are causing layouts. Perhaps how the home page is set up. And we need to address mobile. The analytics and data I am seeing for food blogs is 80-90% mobile. Google has been pushing that we are in a mobile-first world. I see the point of having a beautiful site, but on mobile, you are not going to see all that. What are some of the things you think are super important when choosing a theme or design for our website?
Casey: So one of the biggest issues that I see is a desire for people to, again, I totally understand designing for mobile-first, but if you take that mobile-first design and you look at it on a desktop, oh, my god, it is so ugly.
You are always going to have a percentage of people who are going to choose to navigate on desktop and tablet. One of the things that I see a lot recently and it is just terrible advice is people eliminating elements on sidebars. Now the thing about the sidebar is this, it is one of the fastest and easiest ways for you to generate internal linking. Internal linking is an extremely underutilized way to drive authority to your top content.
I have heard this often; "Casey, I had a redesign. My traffic dropped 20%. My traffic dropped 40%." What happened? The designer took the sidebar away. They took the sidebar away, they eliminated internal links, they eliminated user-first optimizations all because they were trying to optimize for mobile as much as possible.
Well, if you are using responsive design, don't lose any sleep over it. Those items on the sidebar, as Shelly will tell you, will just be pushed to the bottom of the page. They are not going to be a huge issue for you.
A sidebar is very important. You should be using that sidebar to reflect a nice above-the-fold photo of you whatever possible because that reinforces E-A-T, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
You should also be using it to show your demonstrated expertise. If you have good creator expertise, maybe you have been featured on big sites like Reader's Digest or the Cooking Channel or Buzzfeed or any of these other very common links, Good Housekeeping. Country Living is another one.
We want to show that demonstrated expertise right smack on your site. So I tend to have that on your sidebar, as a small graphic and I tend to have that as a footer, as well. And if you have got a competent webmaster, they can code those in and make sure that they are covered by lazy loading. And so, you are not going to have any impact with regards to bottom line page speed heads.
So when I am looking on a site, one of the first things I am looking at is when I am auditing the site on desktop, can I see a nice section of their trending recipes? Maybe five or six of their top recipes, most popular recipes, because by putting there, I am reinforcing through internal sitewide linking, my top content.
If you did nothing but that, many times you are going to get traffic increases because you provided a strong signal to Google, this is my best content. I am linking to it from every page. It is super easy for users to find and of course, they are also going a to be easier for them to click, which is why you want to use something like Hotjar again, so that you can track how users are navigating your site before you optimize your sidebar and how users are navigating your site after you optimize your sidebar. It is mind-blowing. So something to think about. Yeah.
Shelly: We have some questions about does a sidebar need to be the home page, but also snippets on the home page. Some people for design reasons might remove the snippets. How many words need to be there or should we just have pretty pictures that people can click on.
Casey Markee: Well, you know what? That is a good question, and I will tell you, if you go into Google Search Console and you look at your top pages report, most of you will find that your home page doesn't generate a ton of traffic, even though it is the strongest page on your domain. I always look at that as a red flag.
It is usually because you haven't included enough indexable content on the home page itself for Google to fully algorithmically score the content, which is why again, I don't like to see a whole home page with nothing but thumbnails. Or ads. Thumbnails and ads.
I would like to see maybe a nice little sidebar. Maybe your featured posts with a nice summary, a little bit of a summary. It doesn't have to be four or five pages long. It doesn't have to have a six or seven-page scroll on mobile, but it should feature your top content. It should show your most recent content, and yeah, I think an optimized sidebar on your homepage is just smart.
Shelly: I can't tell you how many times I still see home as a title tag on the home page, which is such a waste so, for sure.
Arsen: One thing I am going to say, and I think we can all agree on this, and there is a lot of this information out there about this, WordPress is not SEO-ready out of the box. Absolutely, and anyone that is saying that is doing a disadvantage to you.
Casey: No. Again, there are a lot of podcasts, even people associated with ad companies who will tell you don't need an audit or WordPress is okay out of the box. Hey, you know what? I think we have shown today, that is not the case. We really want you to be as successful as possible so thanks so much for your time today.
Shelly: Thank you. Thank you all for coming out. Bye-bye.
US Personality of the Year 2017 Winner, SEMrush Blog Editor, and Pubcon Community Manager.
Herder of cats. Superman fan. Non-cook.
This is great, I have been away from working on wordpress but coming back into the market what i have found is that wordpress is an environment that has a fast growth of plugins and themes that just keep getting better and better. for example i was working on my own website with a theme then a new theme came out with a page speed of under 2 second and that is on a standard template o no image compression or other plugins that will help speed the site up or a cdn.
First time I've heard of WP Asset Cleanup. I have hours of testing ahead...great tip.
This will surely help new bloggers as well as the existing one. Found it helpful as you covered everything.
I did not participated in that Webinar but the Conversation and Q/A Session is great. I got lots of technical stuff but I want to know that SEO Writing Assistant is free or paid?
Also I want to participate in the next webinar so what are the requirements, timings and etc?
Visit webinar section in SEMrush here is the link - https://www.semrush.com/webinars/ for webinars, you can watch full webinar content if missed, go and find out. SEO writing assistant is paid tool, you can try that in Free Trial or buy Pro subscription.
Are there things you would recommend to appear in the top stories?
This is a great long article for understanding how does the content, alt tags, and new posts affect Search engine optimization. My question is how to optimize the leading pages that are created with the lead pages builder? Can you provide any suggestion if any?
Excellent topics were discussed. Really, it was a great webinar. I like discussion on Image ALT tag optimization.
ALT tag should not be too long. I use same name for image file and ALT tag. I also write image description. Also, use WP Smush plugin to reduce image size.
I had so much fun doing this webinar with these two brilliant SEO's. I am very much looking forward to the next one! If you have any questions you'd love for us to answer next time, be sure to share them with us.
Internal link building is equally as important for SEO in 2019.
Are there any suggestions to increase links towards leading pages created with the help of lead page?
Thanks for all the great info! I didn't hear you mention my favorite plugin (as someone who has a site with 105+ plugins :) )- it's Plugin Organizer, which allows plugins to be conditionally loaded per page. Truly an amazing plugin, and support from the developer is great and it's regularly updated. I find it important to disable plugins per page instead of just not loading js/css/... on the page.
That's actually a very good recommendation Vanessa. We just didn't think think about it. Nothing wrong with that though, very useful for sure.
Thanks for sharing this plugin Vanessa, I'm going to go test it out! I could not agree more about the importance of being able to choose which pages plugins load their scripts and styles on. Nothing drives me more nuts than sitewide loading of files for the functionality of a plugin used on only one page.
A pleasure, and Jeff (the plugin dev) is really awesome and open to feedback. It's a little complex to get into, but once you figure it out it's super powerful!
Holy cow. This is awesome! The piece about DOM nodes and the relationship between that, fast crawlability, and using Instagram embeds is actually an incredible insight that no one is talking about. We're using a lot of Instagram embeds these days because they are quick, easy, we can alter the embed scripts Js to inject a rel="nofollow" (not that it helps much on that front), and it helps to circumvent intellectual property issues for images, BUT... now I am going to audit our site speed on those blog posts to see how this is affecting our DOM loading. Awesome post, awesome insights! Cheers,.
I was always a fan of Instagram embeds from a visual standpoint but they are just so slow so I've had to remove them from client sites. It's just not worth it. Hopefully, before too long, a better solution will be developed that doesn't affect load times a much so we can put that eye-candy back.


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English - Spanish Two Way Program
ENGLISH-SPANISH TWO-WAY DUAL LANGUAGE PROGRAM
The Two-Way language English-Spanish program is based upon a model of Dual language immersion programs that exist nationwide in various different languages. The design of the program is also based upon current research about how children best learn languages.Achievement results of students in such programs also indicate a much higher level of academic performance.The Two-Way program includes English speaking and Spanish speaking students who also serve as models for their peers. Students are seen as language experts for each other in a classroom situation where their second language is the mode of instruction.
The vision of the Two-Way Program is for all students to become Bilingual, Bi-literate and Bi-cultural within the languages of English and Spanish.The Two-Way Dual Language program is a learning community which incorporates students from different cultural backgrounds while promoting the growth of both languages. Students will develop academic, linguistic, social and cultural skills within four language domains (Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking).These skills will help them become active and successful members of our connected global society.
Beginning in Kindergarten through Grade 5 students are in mixed groupings receiving instruction in literacy and all content areas using a 50% English and 50% Spanish time allotment.The goal is to give students sustained and consistent lengths of time in both languages to develop mastery.
The Two Way Dual Language Program is enhanced through the collaborative efforts of the teachers.The teaching teams consist of two teachers, one of which is bilingual.The team works together to plan and design lesson units for the grade level, within the framework of the program and using the districts, state and national required standards for all subject areas.
The role of the parents in the two-way language program is essential in helping the school achieve its goal of bilingual and bicultural students. Parents will be expected to make a commitment when registering their child for the program. The commitment asks parents to be actively involved in their child's education and participate in the school whenever possible. Parents, even if they do not speak the language, can support their child's learning of another language through their positive attitudes.
Goals of the Program
The goals of the two-way language program are the following:
Students will be able to read, write, and speak in English and Spanish.
Students learn the two languages while they learn math, science, and social studies
Students learn from each other about the two languages and the cultures of the people who speak those two languages.
Students and teachers engage in multicultural themes, events and academic topics with goal of becoming global citizens and promote a mindset for college and career readiness.
Student Selection Procedures
Parents interested in having their incoming Kindergarten student attend the Two-Way program will ask for a Lottery Request form at the time of kindergarten registration.These students' names are entered into a lottery if the number of parents/children interested exceed the amount of seats available.This lottery is held in a public forum and is conducted to allow an equal number of boys and girls for both Spanish and English speakers.The initial number of students drawn from the lottery will be screened by the teachers who use the current kindergarten screening, an oral language assessment, and an interview process to determine whether or not this language program is appropriate for the child. Acceptance to this program will be contingent upon the screening and interview process. Parents will receive a letter by mail informing them of their child's status.
If a parent/child successfully wins a seat in the lottery, the child's name will be removed from other lotteries and school choice. However, if a parent is unsuccessful in acquiring a seat in the two-way language program, the child's name will be remain in other lotteries and school choice as requested by the parents.
Parents will be asked to attend an informational orientation session at the school to ask questions and sign a letter of commitment stating that they commit to keep their child in the program up through fifth grade.
Note: Siblings of children already in the program will automatically be screened for the program. However, the sibling must be completely registered before the lottery takes place and the acceptance of the sibling is contingent on the screening and interview process.
For further information or questions, please feel free to call 508-5807508 or email:
Ms. Kellie Jones, Director of Bilingual-ESL Services at kelliemjones@bpsma.org
Ms. Vula Roumis, Dept Head K-8- Bil/ESL Services, Two Way Coordinator at vulakroumis@bpsma.org
Links for Dual Language/Two-way Language Programs
Center for Applied Linguistics' Two Way Programs Link offers a collection of articles and resources online including a database of programs throughout the United States http://www.cal.org/content/search?SearchText=Dual+...
National Clearinghouse for English Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs' Links for Two Way Programs offers another collection of sites offering research on the effectiveness of two-way programs
http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/el/ip/resources.asp
Modern Language Association's brochure, Knowing Other Languages Brings Opportunities, provide a whole host of reasons students benefit from learning a second language.
Massachusetts Educators of English Language Learners(MATSOL) –a teacher's professional state organization devoted to providing professional development, disseminating current research, student, family and teacher advocacy and academic support for language learners and teaching professionals.http://www.matsol.org/
Massachusetts Association of Bilingual Education (MABE)– a nonprofit organization for educators, families, and policy makers.Their mission includes to identify, promote and disseminate research-based programs and practices that support bilingualism and multiculturalism for educational success.http://www.massmabe.org/
Directory of Programs in Massachusetts (see MABE) –
http://www.massmabe.org/Directory-DL-Programs
Massachusetts Foreign Language Association (MaFLA)- a non-profit service organization committed to the professional growth of its members and to the promotion of quality teaching and learning of languages and cultures from kindergarten through the college level and beyond. http://mafla.org/
Please feel free to contact us for further research, articles and current updates about Dual Language Programming.Department of Bilingual/ESL Services at #508-580-7508.
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