The USA is so far behind in bandwidth, in China They Offer FREE WifI on Buses

More than 10,000 buses in Beijing will offer Wi-Fi service by the end of 2013, Beijing Morning Post reported Friday.

The service followed a deal signed in April last year between China Mobile and Beijing Bus Transportation Group, which operates Beijing's bus system and will provide coverage on all routes within the Fourth Ring Road.

More than 1,800 buses have wireless Internet access so far, allowing passengers with Wi-Fi enabled devices to connect to the Internet through China Mobile's network.

Beijing has the broadest Wi-Fi coverage on buses in the country.

China Mobile will offer 20-hours a month free before June 30.

Article: http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-03/22/content_16336260.htm

Study: 72% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations

Study: 72% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations

The findings of this year’s Local Consumer Review Survey (2012) show a positive shift in consumer trust and appreciation of online reviews.

Approximately 72% of consumers surveyed said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 52% said that positive online reviews make them more likely to use a local business.

About The Local Consumer Review Survey 2012

This online survey was conducted between 15th January – 1st March 2012. A set of 18 questions were put to a survey panel of 4,500 local consumers located in US, Canada and UK. We received 2,862 respondents.

This is the 2nd wave of the Local Consumer Review Survey. The 1st wave of this survey was conducted in late 2010/early 2011. We compared results between the 2 waves (2010-2012) to determine any change in consumer attitudes and behaviour.*

The following results and charts are taken from Part 1 of the survey; Parts 2 & 3 will be released subsequently (expected: April-May 2012).

*2010 survey had 2,012 participants from US & UK, but not Canada.

 

Part 1: Consumer Attitudes & Consumption Of Online Reviews

Q1: How many times have you used the Internet to find a local business in the last 12 months?

There has been a significant jump in the number of consumers using the Internet to find local businesses, and the regularity of their ‘searches’ has also increased.

Key Findings:

Only 15% of consumers said that they had not used the Internet t0 find a local business (vs. 21% in 2010)

16% of consumers said they used the Internet every week to find local businesses (vs. 9% in 2010)

Q2: Do you read online customer reviews to determine whether a local business is a good business?

More consumers are reading online reviews now than 15 months ago, with 27% regularly reading online reviews when looking for a local business to use.

Key Findings:

27% of consumers regularly use online reviews to determine which local business to use (vs. 22% in 2010)

24% of consumers never use online reviews. (vs. 29% in 2010)

Q3: How many online reviews & ratings do you need to read before you feel that you can trust that business?

This year’s survey shows a decline in the number of reviews being read by consumers. Consumers are forming opinions faster and trusting reviews more, leading to lower consumption of reviews.

Key Findings:

65% of consumers read between 2-10 reviews (vs.58% in 2010)

Just 7% of consumers read more than 20 reviews (vs. 12% in 2010)

Note:  the total quantity of reviews a business has remains important. Having a high number of reviews gives users more confidence in star ratings (represent an avg. across all reviews) and allow users to feel more confident in the fewer reviews which they do actually read.

Q4: How do online customer reviews affect your opinion of a local business?

More consumers are reading online reviews and using them to form an opinion about local businesses. Positive reviews can establish greater trust in a local business.

Key Findings:

58% of consumers trust a business which has positive online reviews (vs. 55% in 2010)

Q5: How do online customer reviews influence your decision to use/select a local business?

More local consumers are now taking notice of online reviews and online reviews are an important factor in deciding which local business to use. Consumers appear to bess swayed by location and price which don’t represent any guarantee of quality or reliability.

Key Findings:

52% of consumers are more likely to use a local business if they have positive reviews

Just 28% of consumers cite location &/or price as main decision making factor (vs. 28% in 2010)

Q6: Do you trust online customer reviews as much as personal recommendations?

Appreciation and value of online reviews is growing as more consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Key Findings:

72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

Key Takeaways

The importance and value of online reviews is on the way up!

Local consumers are becoming more familiar with online reviews and therefore placing more value and trust in them.

Online reviews give users quick access to information which helps them make informed decisions faster and more easily than ever before. This growing trust means that users are prepared to make decisions based on fewer reviews.

The continued growth of mobile Internet usage (cell phones & tablets) means that more and more consumers will be searching and finding local businesses online.

The availability of clear and easy to consume review/star-rating content will become even more important to consumers and extremely valuable to local business owners.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

About The Author: Myles Anderson is Founder & CEO of BrightLocal.com. BrightLocal provides local SEO tools for local businesses; see their Research section for the latest findings about the local search market. 

A new wonder material can generate hydrogen, produce clean water and even create energy

A new wonder material can generate hydrogen, produce clean water and even create energy

Science fiction? Hardly, and there's more -- It can also desalinate water, be used as flexible water filtration membranes, help recover energy from desalination waste brine, be made into flexible solar cells and can also double the lifespan of lithium ion batteries. With its superior bacteria-killing capabilities, it can also be used to develop a new type of antibacterial bandage.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, led by Associate Professor Darren Sun have succeeded in developing a single, revolutionary nanomaterial that can do all the above and at very low cost compared to existing technology.

This breakthrough which has taken Prof Sun five years to develop is dubbed the Multi-use Titanium Dioxide (TiO2). It is formed by turning titanium dioxide crystals into patented nanofibres, which can then be easily fabricated into patented flexible filter membranes which include a combination of carbon, copper, zinc or tin, depending on the specific end product needed.

 

Read the article: 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130320094856.htm

Benefit from the nature of currency restructuring

Written by Bluwolf, March 13, 2013 on Dinar Recaps ......

I've been promising this piece for several days, and finally have a few minutes to get this posted.

We've been talking about Basel III (The Global Currency Reset [GCR]) for several weeks, and the fact that there are some 168 currencies due to undergo restructuring of one kind or another. A fair number of these currencies are going to revalue -- some rather significantly -- in the coming weeks and months, and a fair number will devalue (some quite significantly).

Within the last couple of weeks, Christine Lagarde (Managing Director of the IMF) announced a basket of some 15 currencies that would be restructuring within the immediate future. One of the aspects of this GCR that is significant, in my opinion, is the transition away from debt management to asset management.

It is a complete reversal of the kind of banking management and protocols we have seen during the past decades. This requires -- in part -- that the central banks of the participating nations derive their currency values based on the relative asset base of each country.

In a recent report by Ernst & Young (the same financial firm that does the audits for the Central Bank of Iraq) published late in 2012, they state that many international firms which have moved abroad (in order to avoid negative consequences) are returning to their home countries in order to tap new funding sources and retail banking because of Basel III implementation.

These new funding sources and retail banking opportunities are/and will be the product of revalued national currencies.

We've been investigating the possibility of buying some banks here in the U.S. -- one here in the northwest, and one in the southeast -- in order to take advantage of the increased flexibility needed as a result of the IQD opportunity (and other RVing currencies). A conversation with FDIC officials in the past couple of weeks was quite revealing as we discussed the takeover of one bank in particular.

Their questioning was still based on the old premise of "debt management" and not "asset management." My answer to the questions was framed like this, "We are not debt managers; we are asset managers." The difference between the two positions philosophically is that we simply don't think in "fractional banking" terms, or the creation of what I call "funny money" -- fiat currency without any hard asset to back it.

The answer seems to have satisfied these officials and we continue to move forward toward our acquisitions.

So what am I getting at? Currencies world-wide must now have some solid asset to back whatever funds are expended by the nations and by the banks that conduct business in those nations. Gold, silver, various precious metals, minerals, diamonds, oil, natural gas, water (in the ME especially), agricultural produce, dairy, etc., are all examples of assets each nation may or may not have to back its currency.

The more assets a nation has vs. its population base, the greater the value of its currency. In some cases, a nation will increase its asset base by acquiring other, more valuable, currencies and holding them in reserve to back their own currency.

The U.S., for example, holds an astonishing amount of IQD in the Treasury. Why? Because the IQD is easily the most valuable currency in the world. Once the RV has been announced (and it is upon us, literally!) the Treasury will have a 100%-gold backed currency in its reserves to stand behind the USD.

But it is more than that. Iraq doesn't just have gold, it has some of the largest oil reserves in the world; it has some of the best producing diamond sources; its supply of sulfur, for example, is beyond belief; it has vast amounts of clean, pure water the ME desperately needs; and we could go on and on!

Ernst & Young's audit of their resources at the end of 2011 put Iraq's asset value at $76 Trillion -- and that doesn't count the resources and reserves they've discovered since. What I'm saying is that the IQD becomes a very formidable asset all by itself, a reserve currency for other nations to hang onto to support their own currency value.

Many folks have asked me how they can determine what currency or currencies are likely to become good investments. Let me provide you with a methodology you can follow to do your own research and make your own determination.

First, check on FOREX to see what the current exchange rate is of whatever currency you are considering so that you have a reference point for its current value.

Secondly, if you will enter the name of the country in question into a search engine, then select the link that takes you to Wikipedia, it will provide you with a fairly detailed analysis of each country's economy, the asset base from which it operates, and (in some cases) a historical picture of where its currency has been.

One other avenue to explore is to go to the nation's own website -- the one it uses to attract tourism and travel interest. You can get some interesting pictures of the country that way.

Let's take Vietnam as an example, since the VND is one of the upcoming currencies to revalue (and very significantly) in the GCR.

Without getting into unnecessary detail, Wikipedia tells us that Goldman Sachs projected in a 2005 economic forecast Vietnam to become the 17th largest economy in the world by the year 2025. PriceWaterhouseCoopers' 2008 report says that Vietnam may well be the fastest-growing among the world's emerging economies. A few months ago, HSBC predicted that Vietnam's total GDP would surpass the combined total of Norway, Singapore and Portugal within the coming decades.

One key piece of information provided on the Wikipedia website informs us that the VND was devalued three times in 2010 because of high inflation brought on by the global recession. We know from that piece of information that the currency is at an abnormal low in comparison to its previous value. To deal with this problem, Vietnam encouraged international manufacturing companies, IT and high-tech industries to move to the country. Oil companies began to expand their development of the huge quantity of oil in the Gulf of Tonkin, and by the end of 2011, the country was the third-largest oil producer in Southeast Asia.

We also learn from Wikipedia that at the end of 2012, unemployment in Vietnam stood at 4.4%. (Wouldn't we like to see the U.S. return to such levels?! We haven't seen unemployment numbers like that since the Bush era!) Agriculture, which suffered enormous losses during the Vietnam War, has rebounded and the nation now has become a major exporter of rice being second only to Thailand; it has become the world's largest exporter of cashew nuts with a one-third global share; it is the largest producer of black pepper in the world, providing (again) one-third of the world's black pepper; and it also is a major exporter of coffee, tea and rubber.

Juxtapose all of that against the fact that the currency is worth less than $30/M against the USD. In other words, if you could purchase its currency direct from Vietnam's Central Bank, you would pay less than $30 for every million Dong. Factoring in profit margins and costs of acquisition, consider the fact that Wells Fargo currently sells the VND (in small quantities) for $57.80/M.

Were you to purchase a million VND and spend $57.80, and it revalued at 10 cents, your $57.80 investment would produce $100,000.00. The projected RV, by the way, of the Dong is much higher than ten cents, so one doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that this is a spectacular investment -- far better than the IQD, in fact!

Anyway, family, you get the general idea. If you follow these simple steps and know what you're looking for, you'll have a good grasp on how the currency is going to revalue (or devalue, as the case may be) and whether it makes a good potential investment. The GCR has been designed to restructure things so that currencies more nearly reflect their actual asset-backed values. It is only a temporary fix, but it will last long enough for us to accomplish what the Lord has designed in terms of this last great harvest! Let's take advantage of the opportunity.

Google Trends: Easy SEO Tool To Examine Key Words/Phrases

Google Trends is a simple, free, SEO tool that web site owners can use to complete a quick data view on what key words and key phrases have been used over time.

Say for example you are a miner and what to see which of the following phrases is used most often:

- placer mining
- gold mining
- gold prospecting

The graph above shows the trend of those three phrases. Great quick time data. 

Goole just completed adding youtube history back to 2008 to the mix. Any search you preform can include Google and YouTube or either one of those.

YouTube is a powerful search engine all by its self. If you aren't using videos on your side you may want to consider adding them.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com

One Woman's Mission To Create A Peaceful World

Empowered Living! 

Kristina Jansz

Life, in all its grandeur is made up of experiences. In fact, it boggles the mind to even try to compute how many experiences you will have in the course of your lifetime. Some of these experiences will be what you desire, dream about and work towards and certainly, they will bring you great satisfaction and joy. With equal certainty you can expect that some of the things that happen in your life will be other that what you would like. Frustration, anger, bitterness, powerlessness and apathy are often the emotional residue of such experiences.

Nobody could blame you for feeling like a little cork bobbing on the surface of the ocean, subjected to whatever the whims of the weather. Sometimes it’s peaceful and beautiful and at other times it feels like you’re fighting for your life. It’s hard not to feel powerless when it seems as though you have no say in the matter and it’s even harder not to feel overwhelmed when, moment to moment, you’re just trying to survive whatever is being thrown at you.

When you’ve experienced hurtful and disappointing experiences, and in particular, when it seems as though you’ve experienced so many of them, without even knowing it, you may have made an unconscious decision to frame your experiences in a negative context. The instant your pain and fears are triggered, or you think there’s a chance that they may be triggered, you relinquish power over your life and default to a cornucopia of fear- based defense mechanisms, low self-esteem, low expectations and hopelessness all of which allow you to believe that you are powerless in your own life.

And it doesn’t stop there! In a gesture of self-preservation, you may have even gone so far as to expect your future experiences to be hurtful and disappointing, never measuring up to what you want. Lower the bar, don’t expect much, and you can’t get hurt, right?

Read Entire Article: http://kristinajansz.com/articles/Empowered-Living.pdf

Does Elvis Live? Gotta watch this video, it will leave you scratching your head in wonder ......

It's Friday, time to break off from the serious and explore the fun and oh so mind bogglin topics ... like is Elvis really alive? I have watched this video, which deems it worthwhile to post here. Yes, it's long but you decide for yourself - does Elvis live?

Will you be able to get past the "facts" you saw with your eyes and heard with your ears to listen to this independent of that material?

Three Easy Steps To Measure Your Organic SEO Traffic; a secret to internet marketing

Three Easy Steps To Measure Your Organic SEO Traffic; a secret to internet marketing

Organic liks are the bread and butter to expanding your web site traffic. They are not a quick fix like the golden arches, but the rewards are very significant.

Organic linking is the development of hypertext links between web sites with or without an explicit agreement to exchange links. Organic links are more likely to appear in a context relevant to the subject of the target document, which makes them useful for search engines like Google search that rank pages according to their links.

In my opinion, one of the best ways to measure to overall success of your SEO campaign is to look at your organic SEO traffic. Rank just isn’t a good SEO metric for a variety of reasons including the increased personalization of search, the impact of social signals on the search results, the effect of local SEO on search results and more. A site’s rank changes too frequently to be a viable method of measuring your long tern SEO success. Looking at your organic SEO traffic, however, can give you a much better idea of what is going on.

How do you measure your organic SEO traffic that is a direct result of your SEO efforts?

1. Start with a traffic overview.

Using your analytics tool (I prefer Google Analytics because you may as well get the data directly from the horse’s mouth), start with an overview of all the traffic that has come to your site in a given period including SEO traffic, PPC traffic, direct traffic, branded traffic and so forth. This number is the total amount of visitors that have come to your site. Google Analytics does a good job of breaking it down into traffic sources so you can see exactly which sources are sending the most visitors to your site.

2. Segment down to organic traffic.

Now the trick is to weed out all the non-organic SEO traffic, so the next report you should pull should be strictly search traffic. It’s important to make sure that you are only looking at non-paid traffic so you aren’t lumping PPC visitors in with your SEO visitors.

3. Remove branded keywords.

At least in Google Analytics, when you zero in on the SEO traffic, the report also pulls a list (up to 500) of the most used keywords to find your website. You can export this data into an Excel spreadsheet and organize it alphabetically by keyword. In order to determine your true organic SEO traffic, it’s important to remove any and all branded keywords from your list. While SEO can definitely help build your online brand and introduce it to whole new audiences, pure SEO traffic comes from non-branded keywords that drive visitors who have never heard of/interacted with your site before over.

The keywords and numbers you are left with are your organic SEO traffic numbers! In order to determine if your SEO is working, you can compare these keywords/numbers to the same time period in the previous year before you launched your SEO campaign. In addition to sheer percentage growth, it’s also worth comparing your keyword lists. What new keywords, either ones directly targeted on the site or long-tail variations of them, are popping up in the new data that weren’t there last year? Every new keyword that drives visitors is a results of your SEO efforts.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com

Internet Marketing, five reasons videos are hottest internet marketing technique

Internet Marketing, five reasons videos are hottest internet marketing technique

Online video is becoming a first stop for many customers, it's an excellent method of internet marketing.  Because this technique is fairly new, its' development is comparable to where web pages were a decade ago — something that can give early adopters an edge over competitors. It gives them a channel to talk directly to customers in ways previously accessible only to large companies that could afford TV advertisements. According to Website Magazine, video is a driver of consumer confidence. Consumers are willing to watch videos 60% of the time they are found.

#1 VIDEOS BOOST SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY 

Video results appear in about 70% of the top 100 listings, the type of content most often displayed in universal or blended search results. (Marketingweek, 2011)

#2 EDUCATE PEOPLE ABOUT YOUR PRODUCTS 

Short of getting a customer in the door or sending a salesperson on the road, online video may be the best way to demonstrate a product. Visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not. (Internet Retailer, April 2010)

#3 CREATE AN INTERESTING BLOG 

It is easier to win customers if you give them a reason to tune in. Blog posts incorporating video attract 3 times as many inbound links as blog posts without video. (SEOmoz, October 2009)

#4 ADVERTISE & COMMUNICATE WITH VIDEO 

Use video for creative purposes like your newsletter or your periodic update to clients and customers. More than three out of five consumers will spend at least two minutes watching a video that educates them about a product they plan to purchase, and 37% will watch three for more than three minutes. (MarketingCharts.com, 2012)

#5 OFFER INSTRUCTION Online video makes it easy to follow the adage “Show, don’t tell.” Many businesses have turned to video for instruction manuals and how-to guides.

You can tell somebody over the phone to turn the screw in the top right corner, and they might understand what you mean and they might not. If you show them on a video, they get the point. A recent Cisco survey of US and UK consumers finds that shoppers prefer to research products online prior to making in-store purchases and recommends making video content available in-store by kiosk, touchscreen and smartphone integrations. (Internet Retailer, January 2011)

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/business/smallbusiness/17sbiz.html

http://www.invodo.com/html/resources/video-statistics/

Steu Mann 541 210 4375
EzWebManifesting.com

This article may be reproduced and distributed as long as all content remains intact as it is shown herein.

Matt Cutts Answers, "Do you have to know SEO to get Google to place you well in search results?"

Matt Cutts is the SEO Guru at Google. This short video reinforces the basics of SEO: unique titles on every page, make content crawlable,  minimize embedding content, useful themes related to your content, and well structured URL's.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com.

Is Your SEO (aka Internet Marketing) On Auto Pilot?

Is Your SEO (aka Internet Marketing) On Auto Pilot? 

Let’s be clear, to qualify your site as having an existing online marketing program or internet marketing plan there must be - at a bare minimum - these characteristics:

1. A key word phrase implemented on individual web pages
2. You have an active blogging presence
3. You are regularly posting in social media networks
4. Your pages offer at least one connection opportunity to visitors
5. You provide visitors opportunities to satisfy that “impulse buy” factor with your online store

There are plenty of SEO tools and software programs out there that can help automate some of the aspects of your SEO program, freeing up your valuable time so you can focus more on other SEO-related tasks like content creation and blogger outreach that can’t (and shouldn’t) be automated. I’m all for finding new ways to be more efficient and maximize the return for my time, but site owners need to be careful that they don’t get mistake efficiency for complacency. 

The bottom line is this, you want to streamline your SEO program, but don’t put it on autopilot.

What does SEO auto pilot look like?

1. Only going after easy link exchanges
   Link building is still a valuable component of any SEO program, but Google’s crackdown on web spam in 2012 means good link building isn’t as simple as building links wherever you can find them. Easy links might look nice on a monthly report  but their long-term value usually doesn’t amount to much. 
2. Not updating web page content regularly
   Leaving the same content spread on your pages stagnates your web reputation. In the short term it is good for your search engine results, but even your ranking there will suffer if your content never changes. Whatever your content is, it has to be informative and educational. Of course, making it entertaining is likely to produce some short term interest.
3. Redundant outreach program
   Using the same email to blogs hosts to request guest blog spot is almost something a software program can do. You want to create personal relationships with folks who allow you to do guest posts. By sending the same email to each blog owner there is no personal touch and that is not the web reputation you want to promote.

What are three actions that will stream line your SEO and internet marketing program?

1. Remove all non-relevant links to your on your web pages.
   Only exchange links with sites and blogs that have content matching or aligned with your content. This type of link building takes time but the payoff is BIG in your page rank score and in determining how you will appear in search engine results.
2. Update your web page content regularly.
   Once your site is soaring in the search engines then it’s time to revise the content around different themes (phrases and concepts). This is easily accomplished without losing the rankings from your existing page content. The goal is to attract new visitors and build a consistent stream of reoccurring visitors which is only achieved with fresh content.
3. Create a diverse organic network
   Your material must be located in other places along links back to your site pages. This tells the search engines you are the web and it also gets you in front of new audiences. When you are creating personal relationships with other site owners and blog owners you are building an organic network that is a very powerful tool in
   delivering your message(s) around the globe.

In summary, three essential fundamentals to an outstanding SEO and internet marketing program include 1) building and enhancing your organic network, 2) providing rich content opportunities to educate visitors, and 3) offering multiple connection strategies to your visitors to bond them with you.

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Steu Mann is an SEO Specialist. He has been successfully working with online technology since 1997. Follow him on Twitter at @EzWebManifest. Subscribe to receive Free Web Site Tune Up Tips at ezwebmanifesting.com