#and our section is mixed in with those who are lagging behind in hopes of us helping them are we babysitters??

[dccomicsnews]

Now that Arrow has concluded an incredible eight-season run, I couldn’t help reflecting on more than what happened on the show itself during that timespan. It wasn’t just enough to reminisce on what happened to the Emerald Archer on the small screen, but also to look back on what transpired in my own life over that period.

The more I got to thinking, this game-changing TV series was running parallel to my career as a writer. Although Arrow got things started by premiering in October 2012, I wasn’t lagging too far behind when I began as a volunteer contributor at Comic Book Movie in July 2013. As the show grew, I did likewise as a person and a writer – and there was more than a little overlap.

From this point on, I’ll sum up the finer points of my journey so that you can see the affect an inspiring work of fiction such as Arrow can have on a real person. I hope you all enjoy this piece, and you’re more than welcome to share your own stories in the comments section. Our own Damian Fasciani recently wrote a retrospective of his own, so click here if you would like to check out that as well.

My Name Is Oliver Queen, I Mean, Eric Joseph

Like I said, my time as a writer pretty much ran parallel to Arrow as it grew from a standalone superhero show/crime drama into something that birthed an entire universe of comic book adaptations on television. I didn’t stick around at the aforementioned CBM for too long, later making my way to Dark Knight News (2014-17) and We Got This Covered (2015-19).

Along the way, I had the chance to meet various cast members at different points during the series’ lifespan, thereby lending multiple perspectives on the tale as it grew. Some of them them I merely met at conventions, while others I actually got to interview.

Motor City Comic Con (you’re going to see that one referenced a lot) was often the means I had of making this all possible. In 2014 alone, I was able to shake hands with Katie Cassidy (Laurel Lance), John Barrowman (Malcolm Merlyn) and Robert Knepper (Clock King). Cool as that was, it prepared me for the interview opportunity I’d get with Michael Rowe (Deadshot) in 2015.

2016 was a mixed bag, as I met – but didn’t interview – Katrina Law (Nyssa al Ghul), though I did get to speak with Echo Kellum (Mister Terrific) over the phone. I won’t forget either of those experiences, but I’m holding out hope that Kellum will roll through Detroit as some point so that I may actually meet him face-to-face.

If you’re keeping track, these encounters went down near the conclusions of seasons 2, 3 and 4, respectively, with the Echo Kellum phoner happening right before the “Invasion!” crossover. Dedicated fans of Arrow shouldn’t have to strain themselves remembering what each of these characters were going through at those times, and what it must’ve been like to hear, say, Katie Cassidy tease the inevitable Black Canary reveal, or how Kellum’s Curtis Holt may deal with Dominators.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Cosplay

It’s at this time I’ll discuss the cosplay element. This is a field to which I’m certainly no stranger, and I always wanted to own an awesome-looking superhero costume. Seeing as how Batman is my favorite character, he’d be a no-brainer, right?

Well, if you’ve looked around at gear online, then you know how Batman costumes that don’t look like crap are quite expensive. This was key in my motivation for instead laying down money on a replica of the Green Arrow suit worn by Stephen Amell in seasons 5-7. For an affordable price, I felt every bit as badass as my onscreen hero, and the compliments from fellow convention attendees never cease whenever I choose to suit up. Heck, I’ve even worn that thing to a cosplay beach party!

Although I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at the Dark Knight at some point, there’s something inherently altruistic I’ve noticed about guys cosplaying as Batman that I don’t think I share. But Oliver Queen (at least The CW’s version) is flawed. He’s made mistakes unlike those of Bruce Wayne’s. He’s done stuff he’s not particularly proud of – but he never stops trying to better himself. That, I found relatable, and it occurs to me when I flip up that hood.

All that said, you couldn’t believe how elated I was when Stephen Amell himself shared a DC group cosplay photo taken at Youmacon 2017 (above) on his Facebook page for one of his “Fan Art Fridays.” Yes, I was the one who submitted it, but to see the man himself deeming myself and the accompanying DC enthusiasts worthy of sharing with his fanbase at large was truly touching.

Which brings me to…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Main Event

If I have to single out my favorite event ever attended, that honor will probably go to Motor City Comic Con 2018. Should you have been there as well, then you’ll recall how that particular show was an embarrassment of riches when it came to booking actors from superhero shows – and where I finally met Stephen Amell himself.

Hey, he may have not been doing interviews for that weekend, but getting a photo with him and attending his panel meant the world to me. Despite him being only a few years older in age, that doesn’t mean I can’t look to him as a positive example.  I mean, the guy is known for having an incredible connection with his fans, doing charity work, and has even appeared on American Ninja Warrior.

Speaking of which, a lot of praise could be thrown Kirk Acevedo’s way as well. The man responsible for bringing the inhumane Ricardo Diaz to life is actually an awesome person himself. I actually did get to interview him during that weekend, as we discussed what was next for “The Dragon” in season 6.

Before I move on, I’d like to give an honorable mention to one Cress Williams. Black Lightning may have not been part of the Arrowverse at the time, but it sure is now. I likewise interviewed him on behalf of WGTC, as he was just cooling off after a spectacular debut season.

Fadeout

If there’s any impression I’d like this article to leave on you, the reader, it’s that you shouldn’t let anyone tell you it’s silly to say a TV show can impact you. Arrow, The Flash, Black Lightning and countless others can be a driving force in inspiring ourselves to become better people. To Stephen Amell, his co-stars and crew, I thank you all for eight years of phenomenal storytelling – and I hope to once again meet the people mentioned above.

You helped me become someone else…something else.

Reflecting On A Personal Journey Through Arrow's World Now that Arrow has concluded an incredible eight-season run, I couldn't help reflecting on more than what happened on the show itself during that timespan.

[heavenwheel]

Marginal losses: the hidden reason your SEO performance is lagging

Without a structured testing program, our experience shows that it’s very likely that most SEO efforts are at best taking two steps forward and one step back by routinely deploying changes that make things worse.

This is true even when the thinking behind a change is solid, is based on correct data, and is part of a well-thought-out strategy. The problem is not that all the changes are bad in theory - it’s that many changes come with inevitable trade-offs, and without testing, it’s impossible to tell whether multiple small downsides outweigh a single large upside or vice versa.

For example: who among us has carried out keyword research into the different ways people search for key content across a site section, determined that there is a form of words that has a better combination of volume vs competitiveness and made a recommendation to update keyword targeting across that site section?

Everyone. Every single SEO has done this. And there’s a good chance you’ve made things worse at least some of the time.

You see, we know that we are modelling the real world when we do this kind of research, and we know we have leaky abstractions in there. When we know that 20-25% of all the queries that Google sees are brand new and never-before-seen, we know that keyword research is never going to capture the whole picture. When we know that the long tail of rarely-searched-for variants adds up to more than the highly-competitive head keywords, we know that no data source is going to represent the whole truth.

So even if we execute the change perfectly we know that we are trading off performance across a certain set of keywords for better performance on a different set - but we don’t know which tail is longer, nor can we model competitiveness perfectly, and nor can we capture all the ways people might search tomorrow.

Without testing, we put it out there and hope. We imagine that we will see if it was a bad idea - because we’ll see the drop and roll it back. While that may be true if we manage a -27% variant (yes, we’ve seen this in the wild with a seemingly-sensible change), there is a lot going on with large sites and even a large drop in performance in a sub-section can be missed until months after the fact, at which point it’s hard to reverse engineer what the change was. The drop has already cost real money, the downside might be obscured by seasonality, and just figuring it all out can take large amounts of valuable analysis time. When the drop is 5%, are you still sure you’re going to catch it?

And what if the change isn’t perfect?

The more black-box-like the Google algorithm becomes, the more we have no choice but to see how our ideas perform in the real world when tested against the actual competition. It’s quite possible that our “updated keyword targeting” version loses existing rankings but fails to gain the desired new ones.

Not only that, but rankings are only a part of the question (see: why you can’t judge SEO tests using only ranking data). A large part of PPC management involves testing advert variations to find versions with better clickthrough rates (CTR). What makes you think you can just rattle off a set of updated meta information that correctly weights ranking against CTR?

Our testing bets that you can’t. My colleague, Dominic Woodman discussed our ODN successes and failures at Inbound 2018, and highlighted just how easy it can be to dodge a bullet, if you're testing SEO changes.

What I learned From Split Testing - Inbound 2018 Snippet from Distilled

We’re talking about small drops here though, right?

Well firstly, no. We have seen updated meta information that looked sensible and was based on real-world keyword data result in a -30% organic traffic drop.

But anyway, small drops can be even more dangerous. As I argued above, big drops are quite likely to be spotted and rolled back. But what about the little ones? If you miss those, are they really that damaging?

Our experience is that a lot of technical and on-page SEO work is all about marginal gains. Of course on large sites with major issues, you can see positive step-changes, but the reality of much of the work is that we are stringing together many small improvements to get significant year-over-year growth via the wonders of compounding.

And in just the same way that friction in financial compounding craters the expected gains (from this article of the effect of fees on investment returns):

If you’re rolling out a combination of small wins and small losses and not testing to understand which are which to roll back the losers, you are going to take a big hit on the compounded benefit, and may even find your traffic flatlining or even declining year over year.

You can’t eyeball this stuff - we are finding that it’s hard enough to tell apart small uplifts and small drops in the mix of noisy, seasonal data surrounded by competitors who are also changing things measured against a moving target of Google algorithm changes. So you need to be testing.

No but it won’t happen to me

Well firstly, I think it will. In classroom experiments, we have found that even experienced SEOs can be no better than a coin flip in telling which of two variants will rank better for a specific keyword.  Add in the unknown query space, the hard-to-predict human factor of CTR, and I’m going to bet you are getting this wrong.

Still don’t believe me? Here are some sensible-sounding changes we have rolled out and discovered resulted in significant organic traffic drops:

Updating on-page targeting to focus on higher-searched-for variants (the example above)

Using higher-CTR copy from AdWords in meta information for organic results

Removed boilerplate copy from large numbers of pages

Added boilerplate copy to large numbers of pages

Want to start finding your own marginal gains? Click the button below to find out more about ODN and how we are helping clients find their own winners and losers.

CONTACT US TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ODN

from Digital https://www.distilled.net/resources/marginal-losses-the-hidden-reason-your-seo-performance-is-lagging/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[donnafmae]

Marginal losses: the hidden reason your SEO performance is lagging

Without a structured testing program, our experience shows that it’s very likely that most SEO efforts are at best taking two steps forward and one step back by routinely deploying changes that make things worse.

This is true even when the thinking behind a change is solid, is based on correct data, and is part of a well-thought-out strategy. The problem is not that all the changes are bad in theory - it’s that many changes come with inevitable trade-offs, and without testing, it’s impossible to tell whether multiple small downsides outweigh a single large upside or vice versa.

For example: who among us has carried out keyword research into the different ways people search for key content across a site section, determined that there is a form of words that has a better combination of volume vs competitiveness and made a recommendation to update keyword targeting across that site section?

Everyone. Every single SEO has done this. And there’s a good chance you’ve made things worse at least some of the time.

You see, we know that we are modelling the real world when we do this kind of research, and we know we have leaky abstractions in there. When we know that 20-25% of all the queries that Google sees are brand new and never-before-seen, we know that keyword research is never going to capture the whole picture. When we know that the long tail of rarely-searched-for variants adds up to more than the highly-competitive head keywords, we know that no data source is going to represent the whole truth.

So even if we execute the change perfectly we know that we are trading off performance across a certain set of keywords for better performance on a different set - but we don’t know which tail is longer, nor can we model competitiveness perfectly, and nor can we capture all the ways people might search tomorrow.

Without testing, we put it out there and hope. We imagine that we will see if it was a bad idea - because we’ll see the drop and roll it back. While that may be true if we manage a -27% variant (yes, we’ve seen this in the wild with a seemingly-sensible change), there is a lot going on with large sites and even a large drop in performance in a sub-section can be missed until months after the fact, at which point it’s hard to reverse engineer what the change was. The drop has already cost real money, the downside might be obscured by seasonality, and just figuring it all out can take large amounts of valuable analysis time. When the drop is 5%, are you still sure you’re going to catch it?

And what if the change isn’t perfect?

The more black-box-like the Google algorithm becomes, the more we have no choice but to see how our ideas perform in the real world when tested against the actual competition. It’s quite possible that our “updated keyword targeting” version loses existing rankings but fails to gain the desired new ones.

Not only that, but rankings are only a part of the question (see: why you can’t judge SEO tests using only ranking data). A large part of PPC management involves testing advert variations to find versions with better clickthrough rates (CTR). What makes you think you can just rattle off a set of updated meta information that correctly weights ranking against CTR?

Our testing bets that you can’t. My colleague, Dominic Woodman discussed our ODN successes and failures at Inbound 2018, and highlighted just how easy it can be to dodge a bullet, if you're testing SEO changes.

What I learned From Split Testing - Inbound 2018 Snippet from Distilled

We’re talking about small drops here though, right?

Well firstly, no. We have seen updated meta information that looked sensible and was based on real-world keyword data result in a -30% organic traffic drop.

But anyway, small drops can be even more dangerous. As I argued above, big drops are quite likely to be spotted and rolled back. But what about the little ones? If you miss those, are they really that damaging?

Our experience is that a lot of technical and on-page SEO work is all about marginal gains. Of course on large sites with major issues, you can see positive step-changes, but the reality of much of the work is that we are stringing together many small improvements to get significant year-over-year growth via the wonders of compounding.

And in just the same way that friction in financial compounding craters the expected gains (from this article of the effect of fees on investment returns):

If you’re rolling out a combination of small wins and small losses and not testing to understand which are which to roll back the losers, you are going to take a big hit on the compounded benefit, and may even find your traffic flatlining or even declining year over year.

You can’t eyeball this stuff - we are finding that it’s hard enough to tell apart small uplifts and small drops in the mix of noisy, seasonal data surrounded by competitors who are also changing things measured against a moving target of Google algorithm changes. So you need to be testing.

No but it won’t happen to me

Well firstly, I think it will. In classroom experiments, we have found that even experienced SEOs can be no better than a coin flip in telling which of two variants will rank better for a specific keyword.  Add in the unknown query space, the hard-to-predict human factor of CTR, and I’m going to bet you are getting this wrong.

Still don’t believe me? Here are some sensible-sounding changes we have rolled out and discovered resulted in significant organic traffic drops:

Updating on-page targeting to focus on higher-searched-for variants (the example above)

Using higher-CTR copy from AdWords in meta information for organic results

Removed boilerplate copy from large numbers of pages

Added boilerplate copy to large numbers of pages

Want to start finding your own marginal gains? Click the button below to find out more about ODN and how we are helping clients find their own winners and losers.

CONTACT US TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ODN

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/marginal-losses-the-hidden-reason-your-seo-performance-is-lagging/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[dillenwaeraa]

Marginal losses: the hidden reason your SEO performance is lagging

Without a structured testing program, our experience shows that it’s very likely that most SEO efforts are at best taking two steps forward and one step back by routinely deploying changes that make things worse.

This is true even when the thinking behind a change is solid, is based on correct data, and is part of a well-thought-out strategy. The problem is not that all the changes are bad in theory - it’s that many changes come with inevitable trade-offs, and without testing, it’s impossible to tell whether multiple small downsides outweigh a single large upside or vice versa.

For example: who among us has carried out keyword research into the different ways people search for key content across a site section, determined that there is a form of words that has a better combination of volume vs competitiveness and made a recommendation to update keyword targeting across that site section?

Everyone. Every single SEO has done this. And there’s a good chance you’ve made things worse at least some of the time.

You see, we know that we are modelling the real world when we do this kind of research, and we know we have leaky abstractions in there. When we know that 20-25% of all the queries that Google sees are brand new and never-before-seen, we know that keyword research is never going to capture the whole picture. When we know that the long tail of rarely-searched-for variants adds up to more than the highly-competitive head keywords, we know that no data source is going to represent the whole truth.

So even if we execute the change perfectly we know that we are trading off performance across a certain set of keywords for better performance on a different set - but we don’t know which tail is longer, nor can we model competitiveness perfectly, and nor can we capture all the ways people might search tomorrow.

Without testing, we put it out there and hope. We imagine that we will see if it was a bad idea - because we’ll see the drop and roll it back. While that may be true if we manage a -27% variant (yes, we’ve seen this in the wild with a seemingly-sensible change), there is a lot going on with large sites and even a large drop in performance in a sub-section can be missed until months after the fact, at which point it’s hard to reverse engineer what the change was. The drop has already cost real money, the downside might be obscured by seasonality, and just figuring it all out can take large amounts of valuable analysis time. When the drop is 5%, are you still sure you’re going to catch it?

And what if the change isn’t perfect?

The more black-box-like the Google algorithm becomes, the more we have no choice but to see how our ideas perform in the real world when tested against the actual competition. It’s quite possible that our “updated keyword targeting” version loses existing rankings but fails to gain the desired new ones.

Not only that, but rankings are only a part of the question (see: why you can’t judge SEO tests using only ranking data). A large part of PPC management involves testing advert variations to find versions with better clickthrough rates (CTR). What makes you think you can just rattle off a set of updated meta information that correctly weights ranking against CTR?

Our testing bets that you can’t. My colleague, Dominic Woodman discussed our ODN successes and failures at Inbound 2018, and highlighted just how easy it can be to dodge a bullet, if you're testing SEO changes.

What I learned From Split Testing - Inbound 2018 Snippet from Distilled

We’re talking about small drops here though, right?

Well firstly, no. We have seen updated meta information that looked sensible and was based on real-world keyword data result in a -30% organic traffic drop.

But anyway, small drops can be even more dangerous. As I argued above, big drops are quite likely to be spotted and rolled back. But what about the little ones? If you miss those, are they really that damaging?

Our experience is that a lot of technical and on-page SEO work is all about marginal gains. Of course on large sites with major issues, you can see positive step-changes, but the reality of much of the work is that we are stringing together many small improvements to get significant year-over-year growth via the wonders of compounding.

And in just the same way that friction in financial compounding craters the expected gains (from this article of the effect of fees on investment returns):

If you’re rolling out a combination of small wins and small losses and not testing to understand which are which to roll back the losers, you are going to take a big hit on the compounded benefit, and may even find your traffic flatlining or even declining year over year.

You can’t eyeball this stuff - we are finding that it’s hard enough to tell apart small uplifts and small drops in the mix of noisy, seasonal data surrounded by competitors who are also changing things measured against a moving target of Google algorithm changes. So you need to be testing.

No but it won’t happen to me

Well firstly, I think it will. In classroom experiments, we have found that even experienced SEOs can be no better than a coin flip in telling which of two variants will rank better for a specific keyword.  Add in the unknown query space, the hard-to-predict human factor of CTR, and I’m going to bet you are getting this wrong.

Still don’t believe me? Here are some sensible-sounding changes we have rolled out and discovered resulted in significant organic traffic drops:

Updating on-page targeting to focus on higher-searched-for variants (the example above)

Using higher-CTR copy from AdWords in meta information for organic results

Removed boilerplate copy from large numbers of pages

Added boilerplate copy to large numbers of pages

Want to start finding your own marginal gains? Click the button below to find out more about ODN and how we are helping clients find their own winners and losers.

CONTACT US TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ODN

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/marginal-losses-the-hidden-reason-your-seo-performance-is-lagging/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[anthonykrierion]

Marginal losses: the hidden reason your SEO performance is lagging

Without a structured testing program, our experience shows that it’s very likely that most SEO efforts are at best taking two steps forward and one step back by routinely deploying changes that make things worse.

This is true even when the thinking behind a change is solid, is based on correct data, and is part of a well-thought-out strategy. The problem is not that all the changes are bad in theory - it’s that many changes come with inevitable trade-offs, and without testing, it’s impossible to tell whether multiple small downsides outweigh a single large upside or vice versa.

For example: who among us has carried out keyword research into the different ways people search for key content across a site section, determined that there is a form of words that has a better combination of volume vs competitiveness and made a recommendation to update keyword targeting across that site section?

Everyone. Every single SEO has done this. And there’s a good chance you’ve made things worse at least some of the time.

You see, we know that we are modelling the real world when we do this kind of research, and we know we have leaky abstractions in there. When we know that 20-25% of all the queries that Google sees are brand new and never-before-seen, we know that keyword research is never going to capture the whole picture. When we know that the long tail of rarely-searched-for variants adds up to more than the highly-competitive head keywords, we know that no data source is going to represent the whole truth.

So even if we execute the change perfectly we know that we are trading off performance across a certain set of keywords for better performance on a different set - but we don’t know which tail is longer, nor can we model competitiveness perfectly, and nor can we capture all the ways people might search tomorrow.

Without testing, we put it out there and hope. We imagine that we will see if it was a bad idea - because we’ll see the drop and roll it back. While that may be true if we manage a -27% variant (yes, we’ve seen this in the wild with a seemingly-sensible change), there is a lot going on with large sites and even a large drop in performance in a sub-section can be missed until months after the fact, at which point it’s hard to reverse engineer what the change was. The drop has already cost real money, the downside might be obscured by seasonality, and just figuring it all out can take large amounts of valuable analysis time. When the drop is 5%, are you still sure you’re going to catch it?

And what if the change isn’t perfect?

The more black-box-like the Google algorithm becomes, the more we have no choice but to see how our ideas perform in the real world when tested against the actual competition. It’s quite possible that our “updated keyword targeting” version loses existing rankings but fails to gain the desired new ones.

Not only that, but rankings are only a part of the question (see: why you can’t judge SEO tests using only ranking data). A large part of PPC management involves testing advert variations to find versions with better clickthrough rates (CTR). What makes you think you can just rattle off a set of updated meta information that correctly weights ranking against CTR?

Our testing bets that you can’t. My colleague, Dominic Woodman discussed our ODN successes and failures at Inbound 2018, and highlighted just how easy it can be to dodge a bullet, if you're testing SEO changes.

What I learned From Split Testing - Inbound 2018 Snippet from Distilled

We’re talking about small drops here though, right?

Well firstly, no. We have seen updated meta information that looked sensible and was based on real-world keyword data result in a -30% organic traffic drop.

But anyway, small drops can be even more dangerous. As I argued above, big drops are quite likely to be spotted and rolled back. But what about the little ones? If you miss those, are they really that damaging?

Our experience is that a lot of technical and on-page SEO work is all about marginal gains. Of course on large sites with major issues, you can see positive step-changes, but the reality of much of the work is that we are stringing together many small improvements to get significant year-over-year growth via the wonders of compounding.

And in just the same way that friction in financial compounding craters the expected gains (from this article of the effect of fees on investment returns):

If you’re rolling out a combination of small wins and small losses and not testing to understand which are which to roll back the losers, you are going to take a big hit on the compounded benefit, and may even find your traffic flatlining or even declining year over year.

You can’t eyeball this stuff - we are finding that it’s hard enough to tell apart small uplifts and small drops in the mix of noisy, seasonal data surrounded by competitors who are also changing things measured against a moving target of Google algorithm changes. So you need to be testing.

No but it won’t happen to me

Well firstly, I think it will. In classroom experiments, we have found that even experienced SEOs can be no better than a coin flip in telling which of two variants will rank better for a specific keyword.  Add in the unknown query space, the hard-to-predict human factor of CTR, and I’m going to bet you are getting this wrong.

Still don’t believe me? Here are some sensible-sounding changes we have rolled out and discovered resulted in significant organic traffic drops:

Updating on-page targeting to focus on higher-searched-for variants (the example above)

Using higher-CTR copy from AdWords in meta information for organic results

Removed boilerplate copy from large numbers of pages

Added boilerplate copy to large numbers of pages

Want to start finding your own marginal gains? Click the button below to find out more about ODN and how we are helping clients find their own winners and losers.

CONTACT US TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ODN

Marginal losses: the hidden reason your SEO performance is lagging was originally posted by Video And Blog Marketing

[ozsaill]

Guests on a boat: how our friends nailed it

“Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” When Benjamin Franklin said this, he wasn’t thinking about fitting two families – a total of nine adult-sized humans  – into a 47’ boat that technically sleeps six, for ten days. So why did things go so well when our friends visited Totem in Panama a few months ago? Partly because we already knew how well we clicked, individually and as a group. But also because the Waters family (or to fellow boaters, the Calypso family, because you are known by your boat name) groks sharing small spaces. They’ve cruised on a 28’ Bristol Channel Cutter. They GET it. (pictured above at a historic fort in Panama: our two families plus the crew of Utopia.)

Disclaimer: I’m not going to provide a packing list here. Yes, we do have a standard document for guests coming aboard Totem. It’s partly a checklist directing prospective guests as to how to pack what they’ll need, what to leave behind. It also previews what to anticipate about boat life for everyone to be comfortable on board. (Spoiler: never ever turn on the faucet unless you are using every drop that comes out! THE HORROR of water wasted stuns us all into speechlessness.) Because the packing directions vary based on where we are, what season it is, and what kind of sailing (or not sailing) is expected – the content is customized every time. As I edited our Totem Guest Prep file for the Waters family I kept cracking up while deleting whole sections about life aboard, because thanks to their prior years of experience living aboard and cruising there was very little orientation needed. So, sorry, no checklist: this is about how to be a good guest on a boat.

So, what makes a good guest on a boat?

Mindful of scarce resources

Utilities and the basics of everyday life readily taken for granted on shore (power, water, internet, the ability to refill the snack bin) are constrained resources on Totem. Space, too, is in limited supply. Constrained resources are a big deal on a boat and can be a big challenge for non-boaty visitors. Orientation to what we have (and what we don’t) is in an advance letter to help them prepare for those divergences from everyday life, like the Navy Shower.

I may have thwacked down a faucet turned on to full flow once, which frankly I have to do with my own teens too. But that’s about it. The Calypsos integrated easily because they had awareness, respect, and the needed dose of flexibility to keep things smooth.

Me, Karen (Utopia) and Nica (Calypso)… photobomb by Nica’s son Julian, Niall wondering what the heck we are doing…

Courier service!

Isn’t it amazing how you can have a need, order what you need online, and have it at your door in lickety-split time? I guess it is, but that’s NOT our reality! We may go (many) months. It’s one of the ways in which cruising is good for practicing gratitude and minimalism: when you have to wait six months for that Shiny Thing, you are either VERY appreciative of it when it arrives, or find it wasn’t necessary and skip ordering it altogether.

When visitors come aboard, the understood quid pro quo is that they’re bringing things for us. Possibly a lot of things. I’m pretty sure we told our crew Ty that it was one duffle bag for him, and one for the boat when he last flew to meet Totem in Namibia! Nica and family arrived four months since our last access to “stuff” and the shopping list included everything from quality sketch pads to books to shampoo (one lone bottle thwarted their goal of traveling all carry-on but they didn’t flinch).

Minimizing our cost

We live on a thin budget. When we invite guests, we take care of them, but that’s within the limits of our very frugal life. Gotta go somewhere? Hoofing it or public transport. Eating in a restaurant? An extravagance not to anticipate. We expect to take care of our guests, and we expect them to be OK with the way we live. If we make plans to do anything on shore, we assume we’re doing Dutch and everyone pays their way.

Nica and family went one better. We walked together to find a grocery store near where they met us in Puerto Lindo, Panama, that would cover us during their stay. It was a good leg stretch, with good company, and helping hands to carry provisions back to the boat – and, it turned out, a friend who didn’t let me pay for any of it. Chipping in to cover your part is welcome. Subsidizing the whole grocery stock-up is awesome! Later in San Blas it was lobster from passing dugouts, produce from a visiting boat. They didn’t just cover their share, they lightened the whole burden. This gets you invited back!

Nica in Totem’s cockpit, underway in Guna Yala

Remembering who is on holiday

Our visitors understood that while they’re on vacation, we’re not. (Because cruising looks good, but we still have things to keep up with: beyond everyday maintenance, Jamie’s advising customers about new sails, we have coaching clients to connect and respond to, etc.). Our choice of destination some days had to be Where The Cell Tower Was, not necessarily where the most awesome beach or snorkeling reef or interesting village was.

Nica, Jeremy and family didn’t expect us to be cruise directors with a planned social schedule. We definitely had a more relaxed everyday routine, which was great all around. Their presence ensured seeking out experiences we might have passed on were they not on board. And much of the time they’d figure out a bunch of their own entertainment, whether it was going for a swim, working out on the bow, or reading a book in the cockpit. They had some of their own keeping up to do as well: Nica filmed for her Tasty Thursday YouTube channel I got to peek over her shoulder to learn about the video editing process.

Bee takes time out to paint on Totem’s bow in Portobelo, Panama.

Getting involved

Being an active participant instead of a cockpit potato is a corollary of remembering we’re not on holiday. When there’s something to be done, good guests pitch in. The Waters family helped prepare meals. They did a lot of dishes. They kept our (snug) berth spaces tidy. We shared the everyday load more like one big family than two families stuffed together. When our neighbor had trouble with the watermaker on board, Jeremy went with Jamie to help troubleshoot. They hung swimsuits on the lifelines, kept shoes out of the way (who am I kidding that was easy, we barely wore shoes the whole 10 days!), and were always ready to lend a hand.

Jamie and Jeremy checking sail trim as we sail west from Guna Yala

Being flexible

Our cruising mentors would tell their hopeful visitors: “you can choose the date, or the place, but not both.” This actually isn’t too far from the truth, especially for any longer-range planning. We can hone in pretty well as a date approaches, but often it’s just hard to know where we can be: weather plays with our ability to control planning. Our mentors’ guide is a truism ameliorated with a mix of planning, flexibility, and the weather gods.

Nica and Jeremy’s ideal was to transit the Panama Canal on Totem, a preview for their intentions to bring Calypso through to the Pacific in the future. But as their arrival date approached, it was peak season at the canal and the lag to confirm a transit spot did not match well with the dates on their plane tickets.

We called them with our Iridium GO (yes, you can make calls with it) from a remote corner of San Blas with the news, and some options. They took it in stride, and plans were revised. They weren’t able to go through the canal, but we had a great time cruising around the idyllic San Blas islands instead.

Flexibility is an everyday need, too. Nica sent me a beautiful thank you note after they got back to Virginia. She felt what I did: that despite the fact we believed our odds were good, there was always some chance that packing us all in a small space for a week and a half would eventually create some strain…yet didn’t. She catches the vibe perfectly:

I keep trying to put a finger on what made it so incredible, and it comes back to a couple of things. First of all was the pace. The way we went through the week felt like just the way we like to cruise. Hang out a while, move on when we want to. No need to race somewhere else just because we’d already seen where we are. Need internet? Stay where we are an extra day or two. Want a better anchorage? Pick up and move. Want to see a village, or get onions, or get to access to town? Move. Check weather, make sure we’re not in for horrendousness, and go accordingly.

Kids… going accordingly, off a picture-postcard island in Guna Yala (San Blas)

Lasting reminders

The Calypso crew surprised us with some excellent treats, picked out with thoughtfulness and care for what our crew would appreciate. First, understand that outside North America, maple syrup might as well be liquid gold (I saw 250 ml in the grocery store here – a surprise itself – for $10. That’s not even one breakfast for this crew!). They know we love it and have Vermont hookups. They brought so much we have it in quantity that doesn’t require RATIONING! That’s been YEARS! And chocolate… oh, the chocolate. Many bags of chocolate chips. Nica, I confess to you here, I might have hidden some of the really good stuff for midnight treats while standing watch between Panama and Baja. We have one bag of chocolate chips left (with less than two weeks until haulout time, when the food stores must be depleted before we leave Totem). PERFECT.

We’ve lacked good music on board Totem for a while, and I might have complained about how Hamilton sounds through laptop speakers (not good). They brought (and left) and AWESOME bluetooth speaker which has been a great way to bring music and cockpit movie nights back to Totem. Just about every day I use or benefit from something that they brought and smile remembering their visit.

Totem + Calypso teens digging the April’s Maple… excellent Vermont maple syrup! Photo: Nica Waters

We hope the Calypso family comes back. But even more I think we hope they SAIL CALYPSO this way, and come share an anchorage with us. South Pacific plans may be brewing, and that’s all I’m going to say on that.

You can also read about the Calypso’s experience aboard Totem on Nica’s blog, Fit2Sail!

from Sailing Totem https://ift.tt/2sWE1yr via IFTTT

[southerneveryday-blog]

A song, a kiss and a hug

Well, let me begin by saying there is a good reason people need to look at written-down recipes when they share them with friends. Like me. I may have gotten the ingredients right (all both of them) but I should have double checked the oven temperature. I gave you the wrong one and I apologize. Thanks to my friend who texted me to double check biscuits baking at 285 degrees! Hopefully no one has tried to make the biscuits yet because I bet you are still waiting for them to get to that “golden brown”.  The correct temperature is 385 degrees.  Now, go try that recipe!

Since I’ve started the week asking for forgiveness, it seems like an appropriate time to talk about “church ladies.”  I don’t mean “talk about” them, as in gossip or, you know, be mean.  I just want to share with you some of the more colorful ladies with whom I have attended church over my life, women who simply by being themselves delighted my soul.

The first such lady I remember is a woman in the congregation where I grew up and whose name I don’t remember at all. I’m sorry about that. But I remember where this lady sat every Sunday – to my right on the other side of the aisle about three rows behind the pew where my grandmother and I sat every Sunday. The Body of Believers with whom I have always worshiped sing hymns accapella (without instruments), therefore we all sing out with gusto whether we can carry a tune or not. We figure the Good Lord overlooks our more tone-deaf members and hears our hearts. At least, I hope He does!

Anyway, this wonderful lady must have had some theatrical training, possibly even for the opera. Her soprano voice was strong and clear and came from deep within her diaphragm. It was also loud and about half a beat behind the rest of the congregation. As a child, this intrigued me. Never once did I think she lagged behind the rest of us on purpose or to show out her Carnegie Hall vocal chords. I just thought she had a lot of voice to offer and it was hard for her to keep up with the tempo of the rest of the congregation. I was in awe of this church-lady’s voice….not because it was so pretty but because there was just so much of it!  The lesson I learned as a little girl and carry with me to this day was that we all praise God in our own ways with the unique gifts He gives us. And boy, did He gift that lady!

When Harold and I were newlyweds we lived in Biloxi, Mississippi, a choice made for us by the U.S. Air Force. I was scared. I had never lived this far from home. Biloxi had been hit by Hurricane Camille the previous year and still showed scars of that deadly storm.

The congregation with whom we worshiped in Biloxi was an interesting mix of military that regularly filtered in-and-out as assignments changed and life-long Gulf-coast residents.  Among the life residents with whom we worshiped was a family of three elderly people, two sisters and their brother. I loved this family because their joy in being “in church” was sincere and infectious. The brother, Robert E. Lee, (no joke) always had a smile on his face coupled with a word of encouragement for everyone. One of the two sisters took Paul’s instruction in Romans 16:16 quite literally, “Greet one other with a holy kiss.” And she did! I never knew whether to embrace this lady’s heart-felt desire to give each of us a peck on the cheek every Sunday or to hide in the ladies restroom until services began. I chose to welcome those kisses given by a lady who truly loved the Lord. The lesson I learned as a young married far from home was God’s love sometimes shows itself in ways I may not be expecting, like a kiss on the cheek from an elderly lady I barely knew. But little affections, freely given from pure hearts, can fill in the cracks of a frightened young home-sick soul. Welcome them!

Then we settled in Athens to raise our family here and this is where my life was touched by an angel in the form of the incomparable church-lady, Miss Lillie. What my Biloxi church-lady did with a kiss on the cheek, Miss Lillie does with a hug. Lillie has to have an extra chamber in her heart that opens itself to engulf every person she meets with love, love, love. Miss Lillie’s hugs are legendary – they are that good. Whether you are in the church parking lot, sitting in a pew on Sunday or looking for a sale on Breyer’s ice cream in the frozen food section of the grocery, Miss Lillie will open up her arms when she sees you, draw you into her loving embrace and fill you with a warmth you didn’t know you needed. The lesson I have learned from Miss Lillie is the healing power of a hug given with unconditional love. I’m glad Miss Lillie is in my corner and if she gets to heaven before I go, I want her standing just inside the Pearly gates waiting for me with one of those hugs!

I have been blessed to know these “church ladies” and to be on the receiving end of their special gifts. I want to be a church lady like that one day!

[feathery-dreamer]

Digger quotes

This took me way too long (two hours) solely due to tumblr lagging so much, but I feel it’s largely worth the trouble.

Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels (including offscreen narration)

(to the shadow child asking about what evil is) "Okay, morality in a nutshell. Don’t hurt people if you can avoid it. Don’t steal stuff unless you’re starving or it’s really, really important. Work hard. Pay your bills. Try to help others. Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved. If you screwed it up, you need to see it gets fixed. And don’t eat anything that talks. If it doesn’t fall under one of those categories, just do the best you can.”

“Listen, Grim Eyes, it’s real nice of you to come warn me about those things, but you will keep a civil tongue in your head when you talk to my friend, or so help me, I’ll march you back to that bridge and kick you off myself!”

I admit, I felt a little guilty about the squash. I mean, sure, they were just vegetables, but they moved and growled and they’d saved out lives. On the other hand, judging by the smell, most of them had started to rot anyway. Maybe if you’re an evil vampire vegetable, you’re happy to go out in the act of bludgeoning someone to death.

“Grim Eyes, this is Murai. Be nice to her. The ladder goes all the way to the bottom of the mine shaft, but there are no landings, if you get what I mean.”

I could have wished for a lot of things, not having fallen into the crevasse among them, but if wishes were ingots, beggars would smelt, as great-aunt Ironbit used to say.

(about ghosts) “They say the chief designer of the Great Warren comes by occasionally to check how the trusses are holding up. Mind you, there’s a family legend that if you leave dishes in the sink for more than a week, the spirit of great-great-grandmother Rakefast manifests to yell at you.”

I hoped she [Murai] wasn’t too upset that we’d upstaged her glorious destiny speech. I mean, glorious destinies don’t do anybody any good. But if you’re expecting one... well...

“There really aren’t that many evil men out there. It’s mostly just good men working at cross-purposes.”

Ganesh statue

“Without the mad, we would be deprived of many fine saints and holy men.”

“The Earth is so old, and home to so many strange things, that there is hardly an inch of ground that was never home to a shrine, or a god, or a battle, or some magical oddity. Even under the ground, you yourself have said, there are old gods, old prophecies, old lost things. It is not odd that this bound god should be here, in this place. If anything, it is odd that we are not constantly hip-deep in such magical echoes of the past.”

“Good morning, burrower. I am both impressed and alarmed by your ability to circumvent the Veiled guards.”

“I do not think that the burrower would thank us for the prayer, my child, nor would it help. We have been given a task to which gods are unequal, and so it is left for mortals to see to the end.”

“Hold for as long as you can, but the gods do not doubt your courage and they do not require your death.”

“You are angry, burrower, that the gods would so disrupt a life for so little? Well, perhaps you are right to be. But consider... Murai is young. She has all her life ahead of her, and she is still a hero. The hour may come when she stands astride the fulcrum of the world, and it will be the courage learned in that doorway - or the good sense learned traveling with a wombat! - that tells her where to push.”

The village hag

“Listen, you pea-brained idiot, I don’t care if Jhalm’s tapdancing naked on a griddle, you are not waking my patient up!”

“Ha! I’m a hag. I’m the next best thing to untouchable. They may not like it, but no god in a hundred miles looks kindly on hassling healers.”

“Reattach parts? Sure. Although one in ten go mad and try to kill their owners. It’s not a big deal if it’s just an ear, mind you - best they can do is homicidal wiggling - but a rogue arm can do a lot of damage. And there was a suicidal big toe two villages over, always stubbing itself-”

Surka the bridge ‘troll’

"I’m not [leprous]. They wanted a captain who wouldn’t fall apart under pressure!”

“Oh, aye, y’got t’defend your lads! Anybody spoke ill ‘o the Rotting Dogs, I’d ave their lungs for a ‘ammock!”

“Fine lads, trolls. ‘Earts ‘o gold and brains ‘o granite. Practically pirates.”

Boneclaw Mother

“Now, I do not quite believe that you have nothing to hide. I smell secrets on you, Little Mother, and some of them are familiar. There are people you are protecting. Even so, I smell no malice in you. A shame, really. Malice might help to cushion you from things to come.”

“When you’re blind, daylight’s only good for sunburns. Besides, we’re both too old to waste what’s left of our lives on sleep.”

“Look, I could give you some claptrap about gods and ancestors and righting ancient wrongs and doing one’s part as a good citizen of the mythological cosmos, but it all boils down to ‘because I said so.’ So get tracking.”

“Grim Eyes, I do love you, but you don’t have the brains the gods gave an eggplant. The thing only works on people you’ve lived with for years who think their motivations are a lot better hidden than they really are.”

“Let’s not waste both our time, son. You’re going to keep saying ‘I’m busy, come back later’ in as many ways as you can, in hopes of finally making the senile old savage understand what you’re saying. Eventually you’ll figure out that I understand perfectly well what you’re saying - savage I am, but senile I’m not - and then you’ll move on to diplomatically phrased threats, in hopes that we’ll go away.”

“I see a warrior with an army at his back preparing to kill one brave, half-mad girl with a broken arm. I would think that would be the concern of any decent creature.”

“I know exactly what is at stake, captain. You are trying to convince yourself that whatever cause you follow is worth that girl’s death. (..) I know all about gods, captain. I know that a god that demands a child’s life is not a god worth saving.”

“Daughter, given what you had to work with, I think you probably did the best that could be done. There was a great deal of fate involved here, and you cannot defeat fate with scaffolding. And I never let anybody use fate as an excuse for incompetence, so take what comfort you can.”

(about convincing Jhalm to leave) “Nine times out of ten, you just have to rub their nose in what they’re actually doing. People get carried away with their own righteousness and tend to gloss over the consequences. show them they’re about to run off a cliff and... well... And just in case, I had Owl Caller mix up a couple of his best poisons and paint them on the claws of my left hand. (...) Well, if he’d been one of the real crazies, I figured I could get one good swipe in, and that would’ve ended the matter. Might’ve taken a couple of hours to kill him and probably we would have all died, but you take out people like that as soon as you can, before they start raising armies and sacking continents and so forth.”

Grim Eyes

“There is no dishonor in an honorable madness.”

(about wombat mating rituals, with Digger’s corrections) “...Okay, let me get this straight. You go to the camp of your beloved- (Burrow.) -and you take your blushing lover in your arms- (Well not in public.) -and you whisper in his ear, ‘my darling, my carrion-scented flower, you gnaw my liver- (Definitely not.) -let us enter into a binding legal contract together until the stars fall from the sky, as determined by subparagraph F, section 12- (Blood and shale, no.)”

“I am amazed that a species with so little romance in its soul manages to reproduce at all.”

“I’m a hunt leader. It’s not all sticking animals with sharp objects, you know. I realize you have this strange notion that you are the only competent individual in the world, earth rat-”

Murai

“It is nothing, honored Digger. After the first moment, the pain is merely excruciating.”

“Perhaps there are many destinies, honored Digger, waiting for whoever stumbles into them. I do not know. But this needs doing now, and that, I think, you understand.”

Misc

Ed: “Evil is having reason. Always, many and many. If hunter beats mate, has reason, always. Mate is lazy, burning food, is stupid, is speaking on and on. [...] Is punishing world for not being... like in head. Is always reason. World should be different, is reason. Is only good is not having reason. Little one hugs, no reason. Digger-mousie giving name to nameless, say ‘Ed’, no reason. Skin-painter paints skin on child, no reason. Just is.”

Shadebones: “Forgive our manners, little creature - that we may well kill and eat you is no excuse for rudeness.”

Shadow child: “Anyway, the slug said that you had to take me with you, and if you didn’t, there’d be a terrible catastrophe and we’d all be salted and dipped in beer. (...) He also said that you were a pig-headed vertebrate and you probably deserved whatever happened to you, but he wouldn’t send an earwig to a fate like that, and anyway, if you all got salted then everybody’d get salted eventually. What’s salted mean, anyway?”

Hegi: “Sulk? Sulk?! A thousand years I’ve been working on that glorious destiny speech, and no, it has to be wombats. No dignity, no glory, just - wombats!”

Descending-Helix: “By tradition, Quartzclaw, I should probably have some wise old elder words for a youngster off on their mission to save the world, but I don’t think the world’s in any real danger, and you seem to have been doing just fine on your own. So I’ll just tell you what I told my own boys when I sent them off - Do your best, try not to screw it up, and remember that your mother worries if you don’t write.”

Herne: “That priest girl’s nice enough, and nobody can accuse her of being a whiner, but she’s dragging destiny around behind her like a screaming toddler. That sort of thing is dangerous. Destiny’s rough on innocent bystanders. Sure, I’m a little curious about how it all works out... but I’m a lot more curious about what living to a ripe old age will feel like. If you and the hyena had a bit of sense, you’d shove her through the door of her temple and then get as far away as possible before things start to explode.”

Veiled patrols: “I had a slug cuss at me the other day. Said I stepped on a leaf he was reading. - What did you do? - What could I do? I apologized and got him another leaf!”

[heavenwheel]

Marginal losses: the hidden reason your SEO performance is lagging

Without a structured testing program, our experience shows that it’s very likely that most SEO efforts are at best taking two steps forward and one step back by routinely deploying changes that make things worse.

This is true even when the thinking behind a change is solid, is based on correct data, and is part of a well-thought-out strategy. The problem is not that all the changes are bad in theory - it’s that many changes come with inevitable trade-offs, and without testing, it’s impossible to tell whether multiple small downsides outweigh a single large upside or vice versa.

For example: who among us has carried out keyword research into the different ways people search for key content across a site section, determined that there is a form of words that has a better combination of volume vs competitiveness and made a recommendation to update keyword targeting across that site section?

Everyone. Every single SEO has done this. And there’s a good chance you’ve made things worse at least some of the time.

You see, we know that we are modelling the real world when we do this kind of research, and we know we have leaky abstractions in there. When we know that 20-25% of all the queries that Google sees are brand new and never-before-seen, we know that keyword research is never going to capture the whole picture. When we know that the long tail of rarely-searched-for variants adds up to more than the highly-competitive head keywords, we know that no data source is going to represent the whole truth.

So even if we execute the change perfectly we know that we are trading off performance across a certain set of keywords for better performance on a different set - but we don’t know which tail is longer, nor can we model competitiveness perfectly, and nor can we capture all the ways people might search tomorrow.

Without testing, we put it out there and hope. We imagine that we will see if it was a bad idea - because we’ll see the drop and roll it back. While that may be true if we manage a -27% variant (yes, we’ve seen this in the wild with a seemingly-sensible change), there is a lot going on with large sites and even a large drop in performance in a sub-section can be missed until months after the fact, at which point it’s hard to reverse engineer what the change was. The drop has already cost real money, the downside might be obscured by seasonality, and just figuring it all out can take large amounts of valuable analysis time. When the drop is 5%, are you still sure you’re going to catch it?

And what if the change isn’t perfect?

The more black-box-like the Google algorithm becomes, the more we have no choice but to see how our ideas perform in the real world when tested against the actual competition. It’s quite possible that our “updated keyword targeting” version loses existing rankings but fails to gain the desired new ones.

Not only that, but rankings are only a part of the question (see: why you can’t judge SEO tests using only ranking data). A large part of PPC management involves testing advert variations to find versions with better clickthrough rates (CTR). What makes you think you can just rattle off a set of updated meta information that correctly weights ranking against CTR?

Our testing bets that you can’t. My colleague, Dominic Woodman discussed our ODN successes and failures at Inbound 2018, and highlighted just how easy it can be to dodge a bullet, if you're testing SEO changes.

What I learned From Split Testing - Inbound 2018 Snippet from Distilled

We’re talking about small drops here though, right?

Well firstly, no. We have seen updated meta information that looked sensible and was based on real-world keyword data result in a -30% organic traffic drop.

But anyway, small drops can be even more dangerous. As I argued above, big drops are quite likely to be spotted and rolled back. But what about the little ones? If you miss those, are they really that damaging?

Our experience is that a lot of technical and on-page SEO work is all about marginal gains. Of course on large sites with major issues, you can see positive step-changes, but the reality of much of the work is that we are stringing together many small improvements to get significant year-over-year growth via the wonders of compounding.

And in just the same way that friction in financial compounding craters the expected gains (from this article of the effect of fees on investment returns):

If you’re rolling out a combination of small wins and small losses and not testing to understand which are which to roll back the losers, you are going to take a big hit on the compounded benefit, and may even find your traffic flatlining or even declining year over year.

You can’t eyeball this stuff - we are finding that it’s hard enough to tell apart small uplifts and small drops in the mix of noisy, seasonal data surrounded by competitors who are also changing things measured against a moving target of Google algorithm changes. So you need to be testing.

No but it won’t happen to me

Well firstly, I think it will. In classroom experiments, we have found that even experienced SEOs can be no better than a coin flip in telling which of two variants will rank better for a specific keyword.  Add in the unknown query space, the hard-to-predict human factor of CTR, and I’m going to bet you are getting this wrong.

Still don’t believe me? Here are some sensible-sounding changes we have rolled out and discovered resulted in significant organic traffic drops:

Updating on-page targeting to focus on higher-searched-for variants (the example above)

Using higher-CTR copy from AdWords in meta information for organic results

Removed boilerplate copy from large numbers of pages

Added boilerplate copy to large numbers of pages

Want to start finding your own marginal gains? Click the button below to find out more about ODN and how we are helping clients find their own winners and losers.

CONTACT US TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ODN

from Digital https://www.distilled.net/resources/marginal-losses-the-hidden-reason-your-seo-performance-is-lagging/ via http://www.rssmix.com/