#from one dev to another across the language barrier

[hugefangs]

I never felt particularly tempted to get tiktok but I am strangely compelled by red note. I want to play cultural exchange toooooo

[silver-wield]

I want to know what your thoughts are on the optional Aerith resolution scene? Particularly around the time where Aerith says the "love" line?

Awww man, you're gonna make me watch that? Lol

Ok let's do this then.

Ok, spoiler warning for ppl who haven’t played – do I still need to do this? Eh ok, (I tag FF7R spoilers as final fantasy 7 remake spoilers) and it’s gonna be reasonably long.

Also, this is one person’s interpretation of the scene, so if you disagree that’s cool and we’ll agree to disagree.

You’re also gonna have to excuse the janky quality on some of the screens, I’m grabbing them from Youtube and it’s frustrating af trying to get the exact moment I want.

Other analyses if anyone’s interested.

Shinra HQ vision scene (Cloti/plot analysis) 

Chapter 3 (Cloti reblog) 

Tifa character analysis 

Aerith Resolution (plot analysis/theory – I should probably update this since I’ve had other ideas since then) 

Train graveyard (not really an analysis, but I got some sweet screenshots of Cloti) 

Clotiscrew tunnel analysis 

Cloti reunion analysis 

The Promise Analysis 

Andrea’s approval (Cloti ask response) 

Leslie analysis (not mine, but a good read) 

Cloti action touching 

Aerti friendship analysis 

Cloti body language chapter 3 

Cloti healthy disagreement 

Cloti post heliboss battle (chapter 15) 

Clerith playground scene 

Cloti body language plate fall 

Cloud and Barret friendship 

Now, strap in and enjoy the ride.

Recap time!

So, Aerith's been taken by Shinra and the group is still feeling the after effects of the plate fall. Everyone's pretty demoralised and after they visit deep ground and Cloud gets the aborted flashback of himself inside a chamber being experimented on, he says to Elmyra they should go save Aerith before the same fate befalls her.

Elmyra asks they sleep on it.

During the night Cloud “wakes up” to see a ghostly Aerith heading downstairs. He follows her outside and they talk on the hill top where the lifestream can be seen glowing in the background.

It’s important to note that Cloud has literally just gone through both the train graveyard and seen a bunch of ghosts and the plate collapse where he’s seen a load of people he cares about die. 

Cloud looks surprised. Hmm I wonder why....

Yeah, this is a no brainer opening. Aerith shouldn't be there and he doesn't think he's asleep at this moment. He looks around and figures out it's a dream, but isn't totally sure because how often does anyone have cognisant dreams?

You can see the doubt about if she’s a ghost or not and she doesn’t clear that up, so Cloud’s left wondering if Aerith’s dead already. The following conversation doesn’t reassure him.

Aerith's “Maybe. You tell me,” doesn't actually help here. If Cloud's having doubts about how real it is – and she's aware of his fake persona and wants to know the real him – then causing further doubt in his mind seems counterproductive. It's like she's implying an illusory nature to their relationship. It also feels like foreshadowing the moment Cloud thinks he’s not real. 

She's also not looking at him when she says it, so even if it was a teasing moment between them, she's automatically set a distance between them. Because eye contact matters, remember? When someone can't meet your eye it's for a reason, whether they're uncomfortable or hiding something or whatever. Eye contact is a conscious connection between two people. Deliberately not making eye contact has meaning too.

Aerith exposition. Lots of fidgeting. No eye contact. She seems like she's making small talk to avoid something. Even when Cloud faces her head on she quickly turns away again to stare off into the distance. Cloud remains in her peripheral vision only. When Aerith does turn to reassure Cloud, he looks away.

And after is the immortal line “Don't be silly” in response to Cloud's sarcasm. I mean, isn't she supposed to be the sweet one? So wouldn't her saying silly fit with her vocabulary? Or should she have said something like “Cloud, don't be a fucking moron” because she swore that one time and everyone erupted into cheers over it? Let's say it is a callback to Claudia, who somehow had a prophetic vision of Aerith being “the one”. Aerith didn't say “silly goose” which was the exact line Claudia said, so technically Aerith's only half of what Claudia suggested. If Tifa says “goose” at some point does that validate her being in the running too?

Yes, I'm being facetious. Point is, unlike the promise between Cloud and Tifa when it was Tifa reusing her own words, this relies on Aerith having meta knowledge of what Claudia said to Cloud when he was 16 and Aerith was with Zack. So, with that in mind, why would Aerith care what Claudia had to say about some other guy she doesn't even know when she's already got a boyfriend? The implication of this is that Aerith already knew everything that would happen to Zack and she'd already moved on from him to Cloud before they ever met and yet she kept writing letters to Zack the whole time.

But then after meeting Cloud she decided to take him up on the slide and talk about her dead boyfriend...as a way to let him know she's single?

This is Cloud's face when Aerith says in a perky voice “You worried about me?” This is the bit where he says “Of course.” It's a very neutral expression tbf. There's not anything being given away and the way he says the line is very simple too. Nothing suggests he's revealing a big secret to her or that he's embarrassed by his concern. I'd say it's SOLDIER!Cloud at rest since we know from the devs that Cloud still puts on a front with Aerith because he doesn't know how to deal with her. Which is typical for Cloud since he's emotionally 16 and never dealt with girls.

That perky persona visibly drains from Aerith's face and body language. Her posture sags, she breaks eye contact, she looks sad. This is the image of someone who isn't happy to hear that Cloud's worried about her. Now, if she was into the whole ship wouldn't she be happier to hear that line from him? She's regretful and turns away again, using her body as a barrier to any possible intimacy.

I'm sure people disagree, so imma explain. If she'd turned her back that would be an outright rejection. She'd be fully closing herself off. By turning away, she's indicating the conversation isn't over, but her degree of attention on Cloud is less than if she'd face him head on. If she stayed facing him, then that builds intimacy since face to face is open body language which can have several interpretations – some of which I've mentioned before like confrontational when Cloud steps up to Rude. When it's between a couple, it's suggestive of building intimacy and trust.

And when Cloud takes a step towards Aerith, she steps away again, towards the lifestream in the distance. Not permitting the closing of distance is a sign she doesn't want to encourage intimacy with him. That she walks towards where the lifestream is means that's where her attention and focus is. Whether that's an overarching plot reason or from a “Zack is there” reason is up to your interpretation.

Another immortal line. Considering Aerith just stepped towards where we can see the lifestream and that she's taking up her priestess pose we can reasonably assume she's thinking of Zack, unless you're once again subscribing to the theory that she's meta!Aerith aware of her own death and speaking of that. In which case, yall need to make up your minds whether she's one or the other because you can't swap between the two when it suits you just to justify your arguments.

When Cloud says “I'll remember that” in response to Aerith's advice that “every moment matters” it definitely comes across as one of those character building life lessons that Cloud's had over the course of the game. He got one from Barret about how not everyone has a choice to run away, one from Marle about listening to others and caring and now he's got one from Aerith about making the time they have count. These are mentor moments.

But more importantly, look who Aerith's looking at when she says that line. It's not Cloud, not the lifestream. Us. The players. She is talking to us. This isn't just wisdom for Cloud, it's for us, too.

After a 9 second pause from Aerith, in which she looks at the ground, Cloud offers a suggestion of what she wants to say next. She seems very lost in thought during this time, and almost reluctant to speak. Considering she always seems to know what to say in any given situation, this is off. This very long pause is the longest she's been silent in the whole game. It's notable. She almost seems to be warring with herself as her eyes narrow and she subtly shifts from side to side.

I may well be wrong about the length of time she’s silent. It could be 7 seconds in a callback to the 7 seconds it took for Sephiroth to drop and kill her in OG. 

I'm one of those who does subscribe to the whole OG!Aerith vs meta!Aerith theories – which I stick to throughout every scene involving her so don't even try and @ me and say I'm a liar – and to me, this looks like OG Aerith trying to assert dominance over the situation, while meta Aerith wants to refuse.

When Cloud speaks, Aerith looks grateful for the cut in. It pulls her out of that warring state, while he's trying to look cool and mature still lol (dork)

Okay, so that whole speech she gives about thanking him is definitely coming off like she's aware of things she shouldn't know yet. This may be what OG!Aerith was trying to prevent her from saying. This isn’t something that Cloud should know yet, after all.

After some physical humming and hawing, eyes downcast, then glancing away and we get a shot of her feet – remember all of this is intentional to build a story here – she looks up and we get this line that's making certain people freak out with joy.

Quick lesson on intonation.

Intonation is the rise and fall – the pitch – of how you say certain words. The way you say them gives them their meaning. You can say the same words in many different ways to convey different meanings and/or emotions.

I've previously focused on Aerith's choice of the word “can't” here because this is the key word in the phrase.

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how certain people are interpreting this line to turn it into a positive. The word “can't” is synonymous with an impossibility. It means “there are specific reasons why this isn't possible.”

Aerith didn't say “Don't” as in “you shouldn't”. She said “can't” as in “not able to”. She is telling Cloud that he's not able to love her. The specific intonation on the word “can't” supports this evidence. If yall wanna examine it more closely then I suggest you turn the sound down slightly so it's actually harder to hear the whole sentence and see which words have more emphasis. Can't has specific emphasis, which wouldn't be there if she wasn't stressing the word.

As for her facial expression. I mean, this doesn't look like the earlier one where she's sad or regretful. This is matter of fact. She's telling him this as a kindness because he's not yet aware of the reasons that she is.

(Note: I didn't say which specific reasons because some of yall say it's her death and others say it's Tifa, so that's up to you. There's reasons, is my point).

So up until she said that, Cloud was actually looking at her. But this made him turn away in dismissal. Not with embarrassment. He's not caught out and flustered. He's SOLDIER!Cloud, remember? He's all front and super cool facade.

This isn't the first time a girl has thrown herself at him. Jessie did it too, only more ott. Cloud's used to brushing off girls and does it without effort.

I'm sure up to this point some people have been screaming about how biased I've been and unfair and this is so cloti (excuse me while I roll my eyes).

So, if I'm biased why am I about to point out that the above screen is real!Cloud popping in for a visit? This is him overriding the SOLDIER persona to question if Aerith might have a point. But not about her. About Tifa. Because within the previous few hours, Cloud and Tifa shared an intimate moment. And it wasn’t soldier Cloud who did that. It was real Cloud. Aerith is calling attention to real Cloud’s feelings for Tifa, which makes him look to the house where Tifa is sleeping. He gets soft eyed and starts to smile, but then seems to want to question himself, which we know isn’t a good idea. Real Cloud and Soldier Cloud aren’t ready to meet yet.

And while real!Cloud is busy debating with SOLDIER!Cloud about Aerith's words, she's approached completely silently – because, ykno, she's not actually there – and he's caught sight of her hand in his peripheral vision. The second she touches him he jerks back looking surprised. This wasn't a telegraphed move where he saw it coming from 10 feet away and chose to do nothing.

I also question that if he can feel her hand here then it's solid, but when he goes to grab her it's not? So, she chose to let him feel the first touch, but then rejected him grabbing her? Or is it more likely that having caught sight of her hand in his peripheral vision he didn't actually feel her touch his face then or the time after because Aerith's not there. There's no actual physical interaction between them.

This is pity. Not much else to say about it. Meta!Aerith knows Cloud's future and that by introducing these future concepts to him, she's causing confusion ahead of the time it should happen. She feels bad about that and probably about her OG behaviour that she had no control over thanks to the Whispers forcing her to go against her real nature.

Well, I was going to say that Cloud going to grab her wrist – not her hand – is just further proof of her intangible presence. She isn't someone he can hold onto. But having grabbed this screen it's clear he wouldn't have grabbed her wrist at all either. His hand is open and aimed at her forearm and already passing through her well before he tries to close it.

And the reason why goes back to the ghost thing. Cloud thought she wasn’t there in person, that she might be dead or it’s a dream, but then she touched him. So he wants to grab her the same way he did Jessie in the pillar, to try and keep her alive. But his hand goes through her and he’s left looking confused again.

“Do I get a say in all this?”

Well now. That's a bit different. I'm sure like everyone else we've all been convinced that Cloud said “Don't I get a say in this?” like he's arguing with Aerith's decision. That he's admitting he's already in love with her.

“Do I get a say in all this?” is a totally different kettle of fish.

Don't connotates a confrontational tone. It's argumentative. It's rejecting whatever previous statement was made.

Do is a question. It's inquisitive. Placid. Neutral. It's neither confirming, nor denying the previous statement. It's merely asking for more information.

Funny how those little word replacements some people use end up twisting the narrative.

Cloud’s not just speaking about Aerith’s most recent statement either. He’s talking about the whole conversation they just had. The possibility that she’s dead or dying and he doesn’t get any choice about it. This is a throwback to the OG theme of life and death and how the dying get to say goodbye and decide how to leave, while the living don’t and have to figure out how to move on from it afterwards. 

Anyway, Cloud has his back to us, so we don't even know if that's coming from SOLDIER!Cloud or real!Cloud, so that's up for debate and I won't even bother since he's got his back to us and we can't see either way.

And then we've got the cool SOLDIER!Cloud (screen) telling Aerith he's gonna save her. We already know that Cloud does his best to sound cool and confident when talking to Aerith because he doesn't know how to be himself around her. This is the kind of line you'd expect to hear from him.

She replies, “If that's what you want.” which is also very non-specific. It's a neutral statement that leaves things up to Cloud. It could imply an answer to the previous question he asked, since the two do stand beside each other and make sense. However, the interjected “It's almost morning” line breaks this up and makes it less of an impactful statement from her. She's done her upmost to neutralise any romantic context from this scene.

Conclusion

If yall saw romance then okay, you must be right.

I sure af didn't. I saw a regretful Aerith telling Cloud things he shouldn't be aware of yet, feeling more regretful for confusing someone who's already suffering from mental illness and then making non-committal statements that neither reject or encourage his attention.

Maybe she's regretful for her own sake as well, knowing what she does about him and still doing this to push some future narrative only she's aware of, but I wouldn't say this is romantic. It's clearly some kind of goodbye from her. Cloud, for his part, looks confused and guarded through most of the scene. There's one moment when his real self peeks out to question Aerith's meaning, but then he's gone again. We can't say for any certainty that his question was asked by his true self or his SOLDIER persona and without visual context I won't speculate.

[sethqmgv414]

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

UNDERSTANDING YOUR USERS IS PART OF WHAT HIGHER-LEVEL LANGUAGES, AND TWO ARE STILL UNIQUE TO LISP

I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. Good hackers insist on control. Overloading, for example, have been around 7-10x.1 Hard to say exactly, but wherever it is, but the fear of missing out. I couldn't talk to them. Over time, the default language, embodied in a succession of popular languages, has gradually evolved toward Lisp. There will of course come a point where there is just too much to keep in your head in order to conceive of the program, and so on. A complex macro may have to save many times its own length to be justified.

If you're not threatening, you're probably not doing anything new, except the names and places, in most news about things going wrong. Economically, this is a sign of an underlying lack of resourcefulness. So being cheap is almost interchangeable with iterating rapidly. And when you look at what they're doing on that computer, you'll find the most general truths. There are plenty of other areas that are just as valuable as positive ones. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people working on them discover a new kind of organization that combined the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable. Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what you get by default when organization isn't possible. But this way of keeping them out is gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers. But don't wait till you've burned through your last round of funding to start approaching them.

It was presumably many thousands of years between when people first started describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked what is heat? The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. And the project starts small because the idea is small at first; he just has some cool hack he wants to try out. Apple's competitors now know better. Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. If you want ideas for startups, but it didn't help Thinking Machines or Xerox. But hackers can't watch themselves at work. As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is say one word to them, at least.

Curiously, however, the works they produced continued to attract new readers. It's true that a restaurant with mediocre food can sometimes attract customers through gimmicks. How tech-saturated Silicon Valley is where it is.2 Which usually means that you have to declare the type of every variable, and can't tell one programming language from another, and work well together.3 If you think you're 85% of the way into Lisp, they could probably do it. In art, mediums like embroidery and mosaic work well if you know beforehand what you want. And now Wall Street is collectively kicking itself.4 There is actually some data out there about that. Some may even deliberately stall, because they enjoy it. I didn't realize that when we were raising money. Like a parent saying to a child, I bet you can't clean up your whole room in ten minutes, a good manager can sometimes redefine a problem as a more interesting one.

It won't seem so preposterous in 10,000 years. It's not something you work despite.5 In such situations it's helpful to have working democracies and multiple sovereign countries. It always was cool. Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time.6 Getting money from an investor than an employer. I've learned so much from working on it. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a restatement of the first. A better way to get one loaded into your head. We didn't just give canned presentations at trade shows. It wouldn't be a compliment in most organizations to call someone scrappy. Garbage-collection.

So startup culture may not merely be different in the way we do. If that's what's on the other side of the mountain is a nice gradual slope. Bill Gates knows this. Programs composed of expressions. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Sometimes when you return to it. If you're the sort of founders about whom we'd say they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of dying. This growth rate is a bit uglier. Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money.

Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. If it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an encouraging thought. And the bigger you are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. It helped us to have Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this. The fourth advantage of ramen profitability is a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep the sense of being very short, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company with a valuation any lower. If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do there than how much they get paid for it. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to invest two years in something that is industry best practice actually gets you is not the long but mistaken argument, but the most I've ever been able to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of wealth that can be created. For example, the corporate site that says the company makes enterprise content management solutions for business that enable organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership.7 And so while you needed expressions for math to work, and if you get demoralized, don't give up on your dreams.8 Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is show, don't tell.

Notes

The CPU weighed 3150 pounds, and b the second wave extends applications across the web have sucked—A Spam Classification Organization Program. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the war had been with their company for more of the crown, and that modern corporate executives were, we should remember this when he received an invitation to travel aboard the HMS Beagle as a collection itself.

It would have a precise measure of the court. The kind of bug to find out why investors who say no for introductions to other knowledge. Many people have told me they do on the way and run the programs on the software business, and in a way to predict precisely what would our competitors hate most? Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential acquirers.

Plus ca change. Philosophy is like math's ne'er-do-well brother. MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.

Common Lisp for, but I took so long. Digg is notorious for its shares will inevitably be something you need to learn to acknowledge as well as a result a lot better to get kids into better colleges, I mean efforts to manipulate them. The meanings of these people. You can get it, is that the Internet into situations where a great reputation and they're clearly working fast to get the money, but a big change from what it would be a good problem to have been fooled by the government to take a long thread are rarely seen, when Subject foo degenerates to just foo, what that means is we hope visited mostly by people like them—people who need the money.

Spices are also exempt. There are still, has one booked for them.

4%, and made more that year from stock options than any other company has ever been. Unfortunately the constraint probably has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's because of the company will either be a founder; and with that additional constraint, you usually have to pass so slowly for them, and that modern corporate executives were, they'd be proportionately more effective, leaving the area around city hall a bleak wasteland, but the route to that mystery is that the government had little effect on what you call the market.

In technology, so they had that we should work like casual conversation.

A rolling close usually prevents this. We consciously optimize for this essay talks about the other hand, launching something small and use whatever advantages that brings. That makes some rich people move, and mostly in Perl, and the valuation of the most recent version of this desirable company, but I took so long to send them the final whistle, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev guys should be deprived of their time and became the twin centers from which they don't yet have any of the word that means having type II startups won't get you type I. Good and bad luck.

[urukyra]

Min’atoa Station Post Mortem

Min’atoa Station, my 6-month capstone project for my Game Development course at Yoobee Colleges, in which I fall down a rabbit hole, drown in a pool of tears and learn to make magic.  Or, less poetically, scope too big, lose and remake multiple assets multiple times, and launch a game that falls well short of my goal - yet shows a glimpse of a potentially amazing experience. 

My aim was a linear 3D narrative game - think Gone Home in a Myst type setting with a terrorist theme.. I reckon I got halfway, so there’s only 90% left to go. 

Team vs Solo 

Tutors urged us to push our boundaries, and in my Goodest Boi team I stretched my wings into new areas and thrived. In other teams (whether real or not) I’d felt held back by low expectations. My mantra was ‘play big’. I love to learn, and that means embracing looking stupid, stumbling before you can walk. I chose a solo project, so I’d be propelled to shine, and I was pleased I did. The gasps of surprise from the class even at my prototype were validating. A teacher once said more learners rust out than burn out - having a tutor that believed in me created its own empowerment magic.

New Idea vs Darling 

I was torn between:

A new game, designed for addictive game-play loops, replayability, marketing hooks, commercial 

Min’atoa - unknown market, unproven gameplay, not replayable, huge scope, high risk. 

The gamedev mantra “kill your darlings” echoed in my head. I brainstormed great alternatives that I loved. And yet, YOLO, carpe diem. I left a ‘safe’ life doing what I was told for this. The window was open - now or never.  I’d never “finish” Min’atoa left to my own devices. It needed a structure for existence - the force-field of deadlines, accountability, of expert help. I knew it was too big, so I ‘maimed’ my darling - reduce scope, use existing assets, basic textures, no puzzles - just a story game. That seemed do-able (cue evil laughter). So I talked myself into ‘story-only-Min’atoa.’ Call me crazy, but I don’t regret it.

Tools

I got overwhelmed.comparing narrative tools: Inkle, Twine, Yarnspinner, Ren’Py, Ink. Prairie, Fungus, Novel-software, Scrivener. My author friend Peter cut through my angst by wryly observing that Shakespeare used a quill pen. For my Myst-type story - linear, non-branching, no dialogue - Google docs was fine!  

Writers Block

Although I had a plot, I couldn’t start. Tutor Matt P got me to put story beats in linear time order, then rearrange them into the order the story needed. Write short  ‘memory joggers’ of each plot movement onto Post-It notes. This simple process broke the writer’s block. 

Later, I found myself blocked again, and dedicated an entire week turning these brief notes into strings of story.

Story gating

Player autonomy is a key feature of game design. In game writing, each story elements has to stand on its own in whatever order players come across them, and the plot still has to make sense.  So story games build artificial ‘gates’ to order key story elements (eg in locked rooms), to achieve greater dramatic tension and plot cohesion,  

I fit the plot into the game’s natural gates: portal, balcony, room, and controller balcony, and Arrivals (and later,,Departures) desk drawers; Doors opened with buttons, and crystal docks.. I felt clever making drawer locks, and hiding keys and crystals. The gates were not infallible, but ‘good enough’ in playtesting. 

The downside was, the story game became a puzzle game. It changed how players played, from a slow pace that encouraged reading, to active, testing interactable objects to see what they did. In retrospect, i wish I’d deliberately designed for the slower game feel of Gone Home, where players interact with passive objects whose function was to add atmosphere.

Story Element Workflow

There were 25 notices and 21 letters, each with two gameObjects - players click on a 3D object in the scene, to bring up UI with its matching 2D readable. This meant 92 assets whose materials change when I edit their words. A simple workflow was essential. 

Playtesters noted the 25 notices were easily legible; that removed 25 UI assets. 

For the 21 letters, I felt clever about my idea of stationery. I made stationery (paper, design and font) for each character (Tris, S’tiel, Priestess and Council). Each in-game letter automatically populated its UI stationery with a text string. Instead of 21 UI assets, I only needed four.

I was smug about this at first - I’d polish text; and the UI automatically updated. But for beta, for the first time I had to have textures on all 46 3D documents. It was an awful workflow. I’d play through, click on each letter or notice, bring up UI stationery with its unique string, snip it, create 46 materials from the snips, and tile these to fit each gameObject. 

It was so tedious to change materials, it created a mental barrier to improving the text, even if it was way too long, or made me cringe. I deleted eight noticeboard posters that were too embarrassing. I left “Lorem Ipsum” text on most letters. I wish I’d fixed these. I did find ways to automate this process, but events overtook (see refactoring section) so I didn’t get time to code this.  

Localisation

The more words, the more difficult and expensive is localisation, reducing the potential market, if I were doing it again, I would aim to 

reduce word count dramatically, and use more images

have illegible 3D textures (see for example Zelda, Breath of the Wild) or develop an alien text / symbols

retain the process of populating 2D UI assets with strings, so that it would be easy to populate strings in different languages.

Prioritise Your Intuition

Sam Fleury, Runaway Play gave an NZGDC talk on prioritising your intuition to reduce burnout and improve personal effectiveness. He noted that our tendency to try to ‘push through’ a wall was often driven by feeling unworthy. It often led to bad code (or other work) that had to be redone. 

When I noticed my brain clearly saw the chains of logic, I coded quickly and cleanly When my ‘programming mind’ lost it’s edge, went ‘fuzzy’, if I continued to push I wrote bad code, and felt burnt out. I found it took an active decision to resist the ‘imposter syndrome’ urge to push on. I’d step back, take a rest, or pivot to a task that used another part of the brain (art or story).  

I took note of sunshine, various foods, coffee and rest affected my focus and set up the right environment. Dancing barefoot on the grass is great therapy.

More often than not, when I came back I’d see a bigger picture, and pivot to a different priority, or to a fresh, cleaner approach. I’d never pivot when I was nose to the grindstone. 

I heartily recommend this practice. It was vital for a solo dev on a big scope game.  Pacing myself was not costly, I wrote better code in less time with less stress. And it might seem obvious, but burnt out, tired devs don’t make games that are fun, intriguing, and delightful,

Attributions  

I wanted assets that left the option open to allow commercial use. This hugely limited choice for the game’s many imported assets: ~20 sound effects, music,  five fonts, five paper textures and plugins, . 

I recommend designing a good filing system for attributions. I did record them as I went, but not in one place. Finding them months later cost time I’d rather spend on my game. 

Brian and I made most of the images and icons from scratch. But right at the end I realised an image used fan art I’d made for #Myst25 from Riven, a game by Cyan Worlds, Commercial use violated their very generous terms for fan art.

I wrote to Cyan, saying I’d remove it, but it’d be a lovely Easter egg for Myst fans. Hannah Gamiel, Director of Development, Cyan Inc immediately wrote back to give permission to use it, which was typical of the lovely Cyan approach to their fans. 

Refactoring

We’d planned for Brian being away for 3 months OE, but didn’t factor in a month to reinstate his melted server and hospital with pneumonia. Since Yoobee had only Unity 2018, I’d coded the prototype, Sabotage, from scratch in 3 weeks. 

Once Yoobee got Unity 2019, I reverted to Min’atoa with Brian’s code, which was robust and elegantly effective, But since we were both new to Unity it used unusual approaches - event signals, listeners via parented assets, and master controllers with enums. After painfully watching me struggle, my tutor Woody spelt out the stark choice: strip out Brian’s code and he’d help me rebuild it, or struggle on alone. 

I chose to strip it out. I really wanted to step up at coding, and Woody was brilliant at it. Although Min’atoa would not be finished to the level I wanted in other areas, I could do the writing and art later.  

Deleting two years of scripts left 416 fatal errors; removing ‘missing scripts’ from assets took hours. It would be an enormous task to rebuild. I brutally trimmed my asset list of Brian’s features (a fully functional inventory, and putting items down). and features I’d planned (writing, art, animations, codes and puzzles). 

Then I got intensive tutoring from Woody. I learned: 

keep it simple - add complexity only as required 

use prefabs - get one asset completely right, then 20 others work 

get the essentials (story gates) working - doors, drawers, lifts and locks. .. 

Within a month, most of the functions worked again. My crowning achievement was replacing Brian’s inventory with a scroll-selectable list that appears on hover (over a lock that takes multiple items) and shows what carried items fit in. 

I was also pleased to get different endings working (including one that pivots the whole scene).  I’ll never know what Min’atoa would be if I’d made the other decision, but I do know I would not have learned as much as I did.

The biggest code drawback was no inventory for the 21 letters,they’re just lost . The player can’t refer back to any letter they’d collected. Woody had shown me how to do it, but I spent the remaining time fixing bugs I had, and improving art and gameplay. This is such a major drawback that if I get time, I’d like to issue a patch for it, and I (think) I now know enough to do it. . 

Result 

I launched a game that I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, I have another game in my public itch.io portfolio. Overall, for pretty much a solo game made in a limited time, it showcases my capabilities and adds to my credibility as a  game developer. 

On the other hand, I wish it were more fun, that the story was better, the puzzles more difficult, the game design was more complete. The main failing with the game was the story. I have so much to learn and I plan to fully engage with expert writing mentors next year to learn to

create empathy and connection with the main characters 

reveal through what’s not said, rather than tell

reduce word count (strict 140 character limit per item) 

use environmental storytelling.

Given the need to limit scope, I only included very basic puzzles, that were not at the level of complexity or engagement of good competitors, like Aporia or Eastshade. Brian and I had designed more complex puzzles, but specifically removed those for scope reasons. If I were to do it again, I would prioritise adding to the puzzle component in simple ways such as:

embed hidden clues, codes and hints

add images, sketches and drawings . 

Not having clues to choose different endings is a major omission. For much of the development, I placed puzzle items to make life easy for me, rather than for the player’s satisfaction, The player finds them in obvious places, one after the other repetitively, instead of having to use deductive reasoning.

I would put more time into thinking about how to make it fun for the player to discover hidden items, work out lore-logical places for them, and hint at their location rather than make it so obvious. 

Conclusion

There are definitely things I want to improve in Min’atoa Station, but for now, the game is out ‘as is’. 

Next time I’d invest time early to “find the fun”. Find the fun in the story, puzzles, and gameplay from the player’s perspective as early as possible and build from a solid base of a proven enjoyable gameplay experience. 

At the end, my measure is not even the game. but instead what I have learned. I'm a person with new skills. Looking back my progress seems humbling and miraculous. In 2017, I first clumsily opened Photoshop, my first ever digital tool. In 2019, I made Min’atoa Station, a credible 3D game. Without diminishing Brian’s enormous contribution, or that of my tutors, it was ‘my game’. I designed the world, characters, story, gameplay, modeled and textured 3D assets, 2D assets, the menus, animations, lighting, audio, did the voice acting,  used many plugins and more..I ended up coding everything, I listened and learnt, I asked for help and got lots, I struggled and fought and.. Lo. 

As I reflect on the end of my time at Yoobee, my journey as a game developer has been, and I hope will continue to be, intense and exhilarating. To me, it’s been an incredible privilege to learn to make worlds from my imagination come to life. 

[faizrashis1995]

WHY DOCKER CONTAINERS WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD

Migrating apps to the cloud

Moving existing workloads to the cloud used to be a choice between IaaS and PaaS. The PaaS option means matching the requirements of your app to the product catalogue of your chosen cloud, and adopting a new architecture with components which are all managed services:

 This is good for operational costs and efficiency, but it takes a project to make it happen – you’ll need to change code and run full regression test suites. And when you go live, you’re only running on one cloud, so if you want to go multi-cloud or hybrid, it’s going to take another project.

 The alternative is IaaS which means renting VMs in the cloud. It takes less initial effort as you just need to spin up a suite of VMs and use your existing deployment artifacts and tools to deploy your apps:

 But copying your VM landscape from the datacenter to the cloud just means copying over all your operational and infrastructure inefficiencies. You still have to manage all your VMs, and they’re still massively under-utilised, but now you have a monthly bill showing you how inefficient it all is.

 The new way is to move your apps to containers first and then run them in the cloud. You can use your existing deployment artifacts to build Docker container images, so you don’t need to change code. You can containerize pretty much anything if you can script the deployment into a Dockerfile – it could be a 15-year-old .NET 2.0 app or last year’s Node.js app:

Dockerized apps run in the same way everywhere, so developers can run the whole stack locally using Docker Desktop. You can run them in the datacentre or the cloud using Docker Enterprise or choose your cloud provider’s container service. These apps are now portable, run far more efficiently than they did on VMs and use the latest operating systems, so it’s a great way to move off Windows Server 2003 and 2008, which is soon to be out of support.

 Delivering cloud native apps

Everywhere from start-ups to large enterprises, people are seeing the benefits from a new type of application architecture. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) defines these types of apps as having a microservices design, running in containers and dynamically managed by a container platform.

 Cloud native apps run efficiently and scale easily. They’re self-healing, so application and infrastructure issues don’t cause downtime. And they’re designed to support fast, incremental updates. Microservices running in containers can be updated independently, so a change to the product catalogue service can be rolled out without having to test the payment service, because the payment service isn’t changing:

 This architecture is from the microservices-demo sample on GitHub, which is all packaged to run in containers, so you can spin up the whole stack on your laptop. It uses a range of programming languages and databases chosen as the best fit for each component.

 Modernizing traditional apps

You can run your existing applications and your new cloud native applications in Docker containers on the same cluster. It’s also a great platform for evolving legacy applications, so they look and feel more like cloud native apps, and you can do it without a 2-year rearchitecture project. You start by migrating your application to Docker. This example is for a monolithic ASP.NET web app and a SQL Server database:

Now you can start breaking features out of the monolith and running them in separate containers. Version 2 could use a reverse proxy to direct traffic between the existing monolith and a new application homepage running in a separate container:

 This is a simple pattern for breaking down web UIs without having to change code in the original monolith. For the next release you could break out an internal feature of the application and expose it as a REST API running in another container:

These new components are completely independent of the original monolith. You can use whatever tech stack you like. Each feature can have its own release cadence, and you can run each component at the scale it needs.

 Technical innovation: Serverless

By now you’ve got legacy apps, cloud native apps and evolved monoliths all running in Docker containers on the same cluster. You build, package, distribute, run and manage all the components of all the apps in the same way. Your entire application landscape is running on a secure, modern and open platform.

 It doesn’t end there. The same platform can be used to explore technical innovations. Serverless is a promising new deployment model and it’s powered by containers. AWS Lambda and Azure functions are proprietary implementations, but there are plenty of open-source serverless frameworks which you can deploy with Docker in the datacentre or in the cloud:

The CNCF serverless working group has defined the common architecture and pipeline processes of the current options. If you’re interested in the serverless model, but you’re running on-premises or across multiple clouds, then an open framework is a good option to explore. Nuclio is simple to get started with and it runs in Docker containers on the same platform as your other apps.

 Process innovation: DevOps

The next big innovation is DevOps, which is about breaking down the barriers between teams who build software and teams who run software with the goal of getting better quality software to market faster. DevOps is more about culture and process than it is about software, but it’s difficult to make impactful changes if you’re still using the same technologies and tools.

 CALMS is a good framework for understanding the areas to focus on in DevOps transformation. It’s about culture, automation, lean, metrics and sharing as key pieces. It’s much easier to make progress and to quantify success in those areas if you underpin them with technical change. Adopting containers underpins that framework:

It’s much easier to integrate teams together when they’re working with the same tools and speaking the same language – Dockerfiles and Docker Compose files live with the application source code and are jointly owned by Dev and Ops. They provide a common ground to work together.

 Automation is central to Docker. It’s much harder to manually craft a container than it is to automate one with a Dockerfile. Breaking apps into small units supports lean, and you can bake metrics into all those components to give you a consistent way of monitoring different types of apps. Sharing is easy with Docker Hub where there are hundreds of thousands of apps packaged as Docker images.[Source]-https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/it-ops/docker-containers-take-over-world

Beginners & Advanced level Docker Training Course in Mumbai. Asterix Solution's 25 Hour Docker Training gives broad hands-on practicals.

[davidwilblg]

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My dream since I was a tiny kid was supposed to find work for a director in the business. Both are free too My whole life besides my music. Then the world can acquire ugly

Source:http://wieleradvies.com/your-son-or-daughter-will-be-with-different-campers-from-all-around-the-world-which-will-foster-l/

[lawrenceseitz22]

How Local SEO Fits In With What You’re Already Doing

Posted by MiriamEllis

You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.

That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.

And that’s the problem.

If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.

By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.

Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.

The roots of the divide

Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:

1) Early separation of the local and organic algos

Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google’s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.

This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.

2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy

Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.

My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.

3) A lot to take in and on

Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:

Technical website audits

On-site optimization

Linkbuilding

Keyword research

Content dev and promotion

Brand building

Social media marketing

PPC management

UX audits

Conversion optimization

Etc.

Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:

Ongoing citation management

Local on-site SEO

Local landing page dev

Store locator SEO

Review management

Local brand building

Local link building

And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...

And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.

To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:

Sharing is caring

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.

As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.

Before I buy that kayak…

On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?

Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.

I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.

On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.

And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”

Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.

The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.

My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.

After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.

“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.

It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.

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

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[swunlimitednj]

How Local SEO Fits In With What You’re Already Doing

Posted by MiriamEllis

You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.

That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.

And that’s the problem.

If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.

By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.

Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.

The roots of the divide

Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:

1) Early separation of the local and organic algos

Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google’s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.

This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.

2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy

Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.

My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.

3) A lot to take in and on

Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:

Technical website audits

On-site optimization

Linkbuilding

Keyword research

Content dev and promotion

Brand building

Social media marketing

PPC management

UX audits

Conversion optimization

Etc.

Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:

Ongoing citation management

Local on-site SEO

Local landing page dev

Store locator SEO

Review management

Local brand building

Local link building

And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...

And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.

To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:

Sharing is caring

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.

As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.

Before I buy that kayak…

On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?

Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.

I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.

On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.

And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”

Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.

The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.

My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.

After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.

“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.

It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.

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

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2Apphxr via SW Unlimited

[rodneyevesuarywk]

How Local SEO Fits In With What You’re Already Doing

Posted by MiriamEllis

You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.

That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.

And that’s the problem.

If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.

By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.

Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.

The roots of the divide

Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:

1) Early separation of the local and organic algos

Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google’s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.

This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.

2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy

Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.

My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.

3) A lot to take in and on

Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:

Technical website audits

On-site optimization

Linkbuilding

Keyword research

Content dev and promotion

Brand building

Social media marketing

PPC management

UX audits

Conversion optimization

Etc.

Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:

Ongoing citation management

Local on-site SEO

Local landing page dev

Store locator SEO

Review management

Local brand building

Local link building

And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...

And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.

To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:

Sharing is caring

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.

As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.

Before I buy that kayak…

On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?

Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.

I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.

On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.

And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”

Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.

The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.

My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.

After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.

“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.

It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.

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

http://ift.tt/2kkbcey

[byronheeutgm]

How Local SEO Fits In With What You’re Already Doing

Posted by MiriamEllis

You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.

That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.

And that’s the problem.

If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.

By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.

Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.

The roots of the divide

Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:

1) Early separation of the local and organic algos

Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google’s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.

This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.

2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy

Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.

My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.

3) A lot to take in and on

Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:

Technical website audits

On-site optimization

Linkbuilding

Keyword research

Content dev and promotion

Brand building

Social media marketing

PPC management

UX audits

Conversion optimization

Etc.

Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:

Ongoing citation management

Local on-site SEO

Local landing page dev

Store locator SEO

Review management

Local brand building

Local link building

And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...

And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.

To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:

Sharing is caring

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.

As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.

Before I buy that kayak…

On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?

Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.

I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.

On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.

And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”

Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.

The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.

My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.

After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.

“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.

It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.

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

http://ift.tt/2kkbcey

[maryhare96]

How Local SEO Fits In With What You’re Already Doing

Posted by MiriamEllis

You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.

That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.

And that’s the problem.

If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.

By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.

Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.

The roots of the divide

Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:

1) Early separation of the local and organic algos

Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google’s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.

This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.

2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy

Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.

My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.

3) A lot to take in and on

Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:

Technical website audits

On-site optimization

Linkbuilding

Keyword research

Content dev and promotion

Brand building

Social media marketing

PPC management

UX audits

Conversion optimization

Etc.

Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:

Ongoing citation management

Local on-site SEO

Local landing page dev

Store locator SEO

Review management

Local brand building

Local link building

And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...

And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.

To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:

Sharing is caring

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.

As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.

Before I buy that kayak…

On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?

Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.

I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.

On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.

And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”

Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.

The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.

My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.

After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.

“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.

It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.

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

http://ift.tt/2kkbcey

[mercedessharonwo1]

How Local SEO Fits In With What You’re Already Doing

Posted by MiriamEllis

You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.

That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.

And that’s the problem.

If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.

By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.

Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.

The roots of the divide

Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:

1) Early separation of the local and organic algos

Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google���s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.

This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.

2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy

Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.

My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.

3) A lot to take in and on

Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:

Technical website audits

On-site optimization

Linkbuilding

Keyword research

Content dev and promotion

Brand building

Social media marketing

PPC management

UX audits

Conversion optimization

Etc.

Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:

Ongoing citation management

Local on-site SEO

Local landing page dev

Store locator SEO

Review management

Local brand building

Local link building

And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...

And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.

To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:

Sharing is caring

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.

As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.

Before I buy that kayak…

On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?

Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.

I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.

On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.

And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”

Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.

The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.

My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.

After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.

“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.

It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.

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

http://ift.tt/2kkbcey

[fairchildlingpo1]

How Local SEO Fits In With What You’re Already Doing

Posted by MiriamEllis

You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.

That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.

And that’s the problem.

If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.

By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.

Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.

The roots of the divide

Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:

1) Early separation of the local and organic algos

Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google’s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.

This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.

2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy

Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.

My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.

3) A lot to take in and on

Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:

Technical website audits

On-site optimization

Linkbuilding

Keyword research

Content dev and promotion

Brand building

Social media marketing

PPC management

UX audits

Conversion optimization

Etc.

Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:

Ongoing citation management

Local on-site SEO

Local landing page dev

Store locator SEO

Review management

Local brand building

Local link building

And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...

And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.

To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:

Sharing is caring

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.

As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.

Before I buy that kayak…

On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?

Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.

I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.

On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.

And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”

Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.

The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.

My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.

After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.

“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.

It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.

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

http://ift.tt/2kkbcey

[faizrashis1995]

Why Docker containers will take over the world

Migrating apps to the cloud

Moving existing workloads to the cloud used to be a choice between IaaS and PaaS. The PaaS option means matching the requirements of your app to the product catalogue of your chosen cloud, and adopting a new architecture with components which are all managed services:

migrating-apps-to-the-cloud

This is good for operational costs and efficiency, but it takes a project to make it happen – you’ll need to change code and run full regression test suites. And when you go live, you’re only running on one cloud, so if you want to go multi-cloud or hybrid, it’s going to take another project.

The alternative is IaaS which means renting VMs in the cloud. It takes less initial effort as you just need to spin up a suite of VMs and use your existing deployment artifacts and tools to deploy your apps:

renting-vms-in- the-cloud

But copying your VM landscape from the datacenter to the cloud just means copying over all your operational and infrastructure inefficiencies. You still have to manage all your VMs, and they’re still massively under-utilised, but now you have a monthly bill showing you how inefficient it all is.

The new way is to move your apps to containers first and then run them in the cloud. You can use your existing deployment artifacts to build Docker container images, so you don’t need to change code. You can containerize pretty much anything if you can script the deployment into a Dockerfile – it could be a 15-year-old .NET 2.0 app or last year’s Node.js app:

script-the-deployment-into-a-Dockerfile

Dockerized apps run in the same way everywhere, so developers can run the whole stack locally using Docker Desktop. You can run them in the datacentre or the cloud using Docker Enterprise or choose your cloud provider’s container service. These apps are now portable, run far more efficiently than they did on VMs and use the latest operating systems, so it’s a great way to move off Windows Server 2003 and 2008, which is soon to be out of support.

Delivering cloud native apps

Everywhere from start-ups to large enterprises, people are seeing the benefits from a new type of application architecture. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) defines these types of apps as having a microservices design, running in containers and dynamically managed by a container platform.

Cloud native apps run efficiently and scale easily. They’re self-healing, so application and infrastructure issues don’t cause downtime. And they’re designed to support fast, incremental updates. Microservices running in containers can be updated independently, so a change to the product catalogue service can be rolled out without having to test the payment service, because the payment service isn’t changing:

microservices-running-in-containers

This architecture is from the microservices-demo sample on GitHub, which is all packaged to run in containers, so you can spin up the whole stack on your laptop. It uses a range of programming languages and databases chosen as the best fit for each component.

Modernizing traditional apps

You can run your existing applications and your new cloud native applications in Docker containers on the same cluster. It’s also a great platform for evolving legacy applications, so they look and feel more like cloud native apps, and you can do it without a 2-year rearchitecture project. You start by migrating your application to Docker. This example is for a monolithic ASP.NET web app and a SQL Server database:

monolithic-aspnet-web-app-and-sql-server

Now you can start breaking features out of the monolith and running them in separate containers. Version 2 could use a reverse proxy to direct traffic between the existing monolith and a new application homepage running in a separate container:

reverse-proxy-to-direct-traffic-between-existing-monolith-and-new-application-homepage-running-in-separate container

This is a simple pattern for breaking down web UIs without having to change code in the original monolith. For the next release you could break out an internal feature of the application and expose it as a REST API running in another container:

rest-api-running-in-another-container

These new components are completely independent of the original monolith. You can use whatever tech stack you like. Each feature can have its own release cadence, and you can run each component at the scale it needs.

Technical innovation: Serverless

By now you’ve got legacy apps, cloud native apps and evolved monoliths all running in Docker containers on the same cluster. You build, package, distribute, run and manage all the components of all the apps in the same way. Your entire application landscape is running on a secure, modern and open platform.

It doesn’t end there. The same platform can be used to explore technical innovations. Serverless is a promising new deployment model and it’s powered by containers. AWS Lambda and Azure functions are proprietary implementations, but there are plenty of open-source serverless frameworks which you can deploy with Docker in the datacentre or in the cloud:

docker-in-datacentre-or-cloud

The CNCF serverless working group has defined the common architecture and pipeline processes of the current options. If you’re interested in the serverless model, but you’re running on-premises or across multiple clouds, then an open framework is a good option to explore. Nuclio is simple to get started with and it runs in Docker containers on the same platform as your other apps.

Process innovation: DevOps

The next big innovation is DevOps, which is about breaking down the barriers between teams who build software and teams who run software with the goal of getting better quality software to market faster. DevOps is more about culture and process than it is about software, but it’s difficult to make impactful changes if you’re still using the same technologies and tools.

CALMS is a good framework for understanding the areas to focus on in DevOps transformation. It’s about culture, automation, lean, metrics and sharing as key pieces. It’s much easier to make progress and to quantify success in those areas if you underpin them with technical change. Adopting containers underpins that framework:

docker-underpins-calms

It’s much easier to integrate teams together when they’re working with the same tools and speaking the same language – Dockerfiles and Docker Compose files live with the application source code and are jointly owned by Dev and Ops. They provide a common ground to work together.

Automation is central to Docker. It’s much harder to manually craft a container than it is to automate one with a Dockerfile. Breaking apps into small units supports lean, and you can bake metrics into all those components to give you a consistent way of monitoring different types of apps. Sharing is easy with Docker Hub where there are hundreds of thousands of apps packaged as Docker images.

Webinar Q&A

We had plenty of questions at the end of the session, and not enough time to answer them all. Here are the questions that got missed.

Q. You said you can run your vote app on your laptop, but it's a mix of Linux and Windows containers. That won't work will it?

A. No, you can’t run a mixture of Linux and Windows containers one a single machine. You need to have a cluster running Docker Swarm with a mixture of Linux and Windows servers to do that. The example voting app has different versions, so it can run in all-Linux, all-Windows or hybrid environments.

Q. Compile [your apps from source using Docker containers] with what? MSBuild in this case?

A. Yes, you write a multi-stage Dockerfile where the first stage compiles your app. That stage uses a Docker image which has your toolset already deployed. Microsoft have .NET Framework SDK images and .NET Core images, and there are official Docker images for other platforms like Go, and Maven for Java. You can build your own SDK image and package whatever tools you need.

Q. How do we maintain sticky sessions with Docker swarm or Kubernetes if legacy application is installed in cluster?

A. You’ll have a load-balancer across your cluster nodes, so traffic could come into any server, and then you could be running multiple containers on that server. Neither Docker Swarm or Kubernetes provide session affinity to containers out of the box, but you can do it by running a reverse proxy like Traefik or a session-aware ingress controller for Kubernetes like Nginx.

Q. How do different OS requirements work when testing on a desktop? (e.g. Some containers need Linux, some need Windows, and a Mac is used for development)

A. Containers are so efficient because they use the underlying OS of the host where they’re running. That means Linux containers need to run on a Linux host and Windows containers on a Windows host. Docker Desktop makes that easy – it provisions and manages a Linux VM for you. Docker Desktop for Mac only lets you run Linux containers, but Docker Desktop for Windows supports Windows and Linux.

Q. How do IDEs fit into Docker (e.g. making sure all dev team members are using compatible IDE configurations)?

A. The beauty of compiling and packaging your apps from source using Docker is that it doesn’t matter what IDEs people are using. When developers test the app locally, they will build and run it using Docker containers with the same build scripts that the CI uses. So the build is consistent, and the team doesn’t need to use the same IDE – people could use Visual Studio, VS Code or Rider on the same project.

Q. How is the best way to orchestrate Windows containers?

A. Right now only Docker Swarm supports Windows nodes in production. You can join several Windows servers together with Docker Swarm or provision a mixed Linux-Windows cluster with Docker Enterprise. Kubernetes support for Windows nodes is expected to GA by the end of 2018.

Q. Do I need a hypervisor to manage the underlying hardware my Docker environment runs on?  Better yet, does using Docker obviate the need for VMware?

A. Docker can run on bare metal or on a VM. A production Docker server just has a minimal OS installed (say Ubuntu Server or Windows Server Core) and Docker running.

Q. Can SQL Server running in a container use Windows authentication?

A. Yes. Containers are not domain-joined by default, but you can run them with a credential spec, which means they can access AD using the credentials of a group-managed service account.

Q. Any advice for Java build/compile inside container...for old Eclipse IDE dependent?

A. You need to get to the point where you can build your app through scripts without any IDE. If you can migrate your build to use Maven (for example), then you can build and package with your Maven setup in the Dockerfile.

Q. So, the server has to have all of the applications that the containers will need? What happens if the server doesn't have some application that the container needs?

A. No, exactly the opposite! The Docker image is the package that has everything the container needs. So, an ASP.NET app in a Docker image will have the .NET Framework, IIS and ASP.NET installed and you don’t need any of those components installed on the server that’s running the container.

Q. If you need multiple technologies to run your application how do you create a Docker image that supports them in a single package? What about if you need a specific tech stack that isn't readily available?

A. Your application image needs all the pre-requisites for the app installed. You can use an existing image if that gives you everything you need or build your own. As long as you can script it, you can put it in a Dockerfile – so a Windows Dockerfile could use Chocolatey to install dependencies.

Q. How does Docker decide as to which libraries/runtime will be part of container? How does it demarcate between OS & other runtime?

A. Docker doesn’t decide that. It’s down to whoever builds the application image. The goal is to make your runtime image as small as possible with only the dependencies your app actually needs. That gives you a smaller surface area for attacks and reduces time for builds and deployments.[Source]-https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/it-ops/docker-containers-take-over-world

Beginners & Advanced level Docker Training Course in Mumbai. Asterix Solution's 25 Hour Docker Training gives broad hands-on practicals.

[conniecogeie]

How Local SEO Fits In With What You’re Already Doing

Posted by MiriamEllis

You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.

That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.

And that’s the problem.

If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.

By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.

Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.

The roots of the divide

Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:

1) Early separation of the local and organic algos

Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google’s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.

This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.

2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy

Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.

My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.

3) A lot to take in and on

Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:

Technical website audits

On-site optimization

Linkbuilding

Keyword research

Content dev and promotion

Brand building

Social media marketing

PPC management

UX audits

Conversion optimization

Etc.

Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:

Ongoing citation management

Local on-site SEO

Local landing page dev

Store locator SEO

Review management

Local brand building

Local link building

And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...

And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.

To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:

Sharing is caring

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.

As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.

Before I buy that kayak…

On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?

Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.

I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.

On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.

And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.

“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”

Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.

The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.

My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.

After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.

“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.

It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.

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