Sixxac

2011 is the year for gold, and that’s not a good thing. People tend to demand gold when their economy is in trouble. Why have all your money tied up in a potentially unstable currency like the Euro when you can invest in gold that holds its value globally? This is the essential driver behind demand for gold and therefore the price of gold.

Since the financial crisis of 07/08, gold has become a highly sort after commodity. Economies were crashing and currency values were fluctuating heavily. Things had began to settle down towards the end of 2010; but it all kicked off again when Greece looked like it was going to default. Many economists have expected a complete Eurozone collapse with countries returning to their pre-Euro currencies; this has left many people concerned about storing fiat money as the value may plummet at any time. Understandably they have invested in something far more secure – gold. Of course gold prices cannot continue to increase in this way and their value will most likely fall once the Euro crisis has been avoided or realised. However, it certainly isn’t a bad time to consider selling your scrap gold for cash.

A helpdesk service will allow your employees or system users to report faults and problems to your maintenance teams. Your maintenance teams will then be able to prioritise these problems using the helpdesk service and order their workloads accordingly.

The NEUQs free help desk software can be provided to both internal and external clients for help with a wide number of queries and problems. The system can be used from the registry of a problem right through to the resolution. This helps to ensure that the problem is trackable and that nothing gets overlooked.

NEUQs allows call data to be registered in a quick and efficient way with a simple drag and drop system.  There is an integrated scheduling and reminder system which can be used to plan follow work or follow up calls. You can specify who can see what data depending on their roles. This provides a high level of security and data protection, something which businesses need to be conscious of these days.  The help desk software also has the capacity to add attachments, such as screen shots, to your emails and correspondence both with your internal teams and you external customers.

All calls are fully trackable and can be viewed by your supervisors or management teams at any time. This is useful for reviewing response times and the general handling of the problem throughout its duration.

NEUQs is an excellent helpdesk system that is free to download. It was developed by people who actively use the system on a daily basis and who therefore understand what is required to make the best help desk software.

 

Getting things done for free is great but what if you could get things done for free and done well? Below is a guide to analysing keyword competition in a ton of detail without having to pay a penny.

Before you start reading about free keyword competition analysis you probably want to get some keywords to analyse. If you already know what keywords to target then go ahead and skip that part.

The Case Study

Our new website sells a wide range of novelty hats but we have no idea if SEO is an option. From the keyword research that we did, we found that ‘funny hats’, ‘silly hats’, ‘novelty hats’ and possibly even ‘stupid hats’ (this one might not convert so well) were worth going for.

The traffic numbers aren’t huge but, for the sake of this post and being able to stick with the funny hat idea, the price of our hats start at £1,000 each – meaning that low traffic equals big bucks!

Analysis Tools

There is a limit to how much you can analyse just by doing things manually. The two tools below will help you to follow this guide and it’ll make your life a whole lot easier too.

SEO Quake

Majestic SEO

If you’re not too familiar with SEO then SEO Quake is probably going to melt your mind. Not all of the numbers that pop up are particularly useful but below are the few that are and what they stand for (click the image to expand).

Where to Look & What to Analyse

The above image is a pretty huge generalisation but not a bad place to start. If the first page of results is full of PR 0-4 sites that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, but would definitely warrant a closer look.

Let’s go back to the case study. I’ve made a quick query on Google.co.uk for ‘funny hats’ and the first result (including magical annotations) is:

• The most important on page element, the title, is the exact match of what we want to rank for. Already we know that there is a degree of competition but how much?
• The domain is old but this isn’t necessarily an issue. If our domain (the one that we’re optimising) is more than a few years old it’s not going to matter. A newer site would need to think about spending more time optimising.
• This website is huge. With over 20,000 indexed pages we need to have a quick look at the substance (content) of the pages and whether they are scraping (copying) content from other websites. Sites that scrape large amounts of content are known as content farms and their days are numbered. It turns out though, that this website is legitimately massive.
• Page URL isn’t exact match /funny-costumes-funny-hats.html is not ideal if they wanted to target just ‘funny hats’. It turns out they’re not ranking anywhere for ‘funny costumes’ – the URL is not optimised.
• With just 14 links to the page, we know that they are not doing any off-page SEO for this particular URL.

So why is this page ranking so high?

Almost all the authority for this page is pretty much coming from the root level (homepage). So now it’s time to take a look at that. First of all, let’s see if they’re actively perusing an SEO campaign.

Queue Majestic SEO.

After signing up and using the free backlink history tool we can begin to analyse whether they have ever actively built links. You will see two graphs; backlink discovery and referring domains discovery. We use the referring domains discovery because (in its simplest sense) 1000 links from one website is no where near as powerful as 1000 links from 1000 websites.

The above graph is not too promising for us. While the last month’s data is extrapolated, the few months previous to that have shown a clear break from the norm. It’s pretty likely that there has been some kind of active link building campaign.

HOWEVER the page that we’re trying to beat is not the homepage (otherwise we’d be in desperate need of an SEO company!) and so all is not lost. We need to take a look at how well the root domain is passing PageRank (through internal links) to the /funny-costumes-funny-hats.html page! Load up SEO Quake, enable it and head over to our competitor’s homepage. At the top a whole bunch of stuff will load and we want to see how many links are pointing further into the website (internal links). Take a look at the internal/external link ratio at the far right – it looks like this:

That’s 283 internal links (pointing deeper into the same website) and 9 outbound links (3 are nofollow). The fact that there are 283 internal links means that the homepage PR is being split up between all of them. More links pointing to the page that we are trying to beat will mean more PR is passed, but there is only 1. And it’s positioned far far down the page in some content that is not the main navigation.

Does this Analysis mean we can Rank #1?

Based on this basic keyword competition analysis we can say yes. There are some holes in the on-page SEO of our competitor and any page specific SEO is pretty much non-existent. While we’re looking at competing with a website that has a huge amount of authority for its domain, we are in a position to out rank them in time.

But how much time? To find out would require expensive SEO software, dedicated resources and an expert understanding. Or, if you’re serious about SEO, you could just get some internet marketing experts to do it for you for free.

Just about everyone you see nowadays has a mobile phone. Even in the far reaches of the most remote territory you may find some villager hewing a wooden boat from a palm tree whilst chatting away on a cell phone. These devices are of such an essential part of our lives that we seem to not be able to do without them and that’s why mobile phone insurance protects your valuables.

Your investment in a mobile phone may be low priced or even more costly. It depends on the make and model as well as the functionality of the mobile phone. These devices deliver more than just an ability to call friends, family, and businesses, they also perform such tasks as checking the weather, surfing the internet, GPS, activating remote devices at the home or office and more. They also capture pictures and video and connect to valuable civic and municipality networks that warn of weather or catastrophe. You can’t afford to be without these mobile phones and that’s why mobile phone insurance is an essential part of protection your phone and its contents.

Should a mishap such as a fall or drop damage your mobile phone, you’ll certainly want mobile phone insurance so that you can replace the device and get back to your daily routine. To be without your phone puts you at jeopardy of losing a job or not being able to keep an eye on you family and possessions. A thief might even take great liberties to run up exorbitant bills and you just cannot tolerate such and that’s another reason why mobile phone insurance is a necessity you should not ignore. The value of your mobile phone is in its costs and its contents. You want them protected and with just a few dollars a month you can do quite well.

So don’t go without mobile phone insurance in order to protect yourself. It’s far cheaper than buying new devices and you’ll feel much more secure knowing that your insurance representatives are there to protect your valuables 24/7.

Lean manufacturing is aimed at creating a greater profit for the company. This is worked at two angles: reducing overhead costs, and raising the actual revenue or profit of the company. When the philosophy of lean thinking has gone full circle, everyone, the company, the employee and the customer, come out ahead.

Lean manufacturing is a real a set of tools that helps to identify and eliminate waste, the end result being that quality is improved, while time and cost are reduced. The core philosophy of lean thinking is preserving value with less work, and it is to this end that lean thinking is applied. There are seven types of waste that lean aims to identify and eliminate in a production process. When these seven types of waste are monitored, it becomes easy to spot waste as it begins to find a solution. Lean aims at catching a problem right at its onset.

One of the outstanding ways that lean manufacturing leads to greater productivity is the way that it encourages even the lowest level employees to take ownership of their work. It teaches employees how to evaluate work time with production, and production with quality. The goal is to improve methods and cycles to achieve the highest results with the least expenditure of time, money and efforts. Employees that take ownership of their work have more motivation to think in this way and to push themselves for better results. Part of lean thinking is that those closest to production have the best understanding of how a production system should function.

Lean manufacturing can quickly put you ahead of the game by increasing production quality, while at the same time, reducing manufacturing costs. Lean principles have been applied to many different kinds of work, such as customer service, airports and other high volume functioning operations, with dramatic results.