World Hour or so: thousands and thousands get ready to change journey signals with switced off

Thousands of cities and towns across the world, including major landmarks, to turn off lights to show concern for the environment.

The lights are turned off on The Houses of Parliament in central London, to mark 'Earth Hour' on March 31, 2012 in London, England. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Earth Hour is here again, and WWF is calling on hundreds of millions of people in thousands of cities and towns around the world to switch off their lights for an hour at 8.30pm local time on Saturday 23 March to show their concern for the environment.
Last year saw the lights go out in homes and businesses in more than 6,950 cities and towns. The campaign even went into space when astronauts reduced power on the International Space Station. This year, more than 150 countries and territories are expected to participate, with Palestine, Tunisia, Galapagos, Suriname, French Guyana, St Helena and Rwanda joining the movement for the first time.
Some of the key landmarks that will mark the event include the Sydney opera house and Harbour bridge, Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore's Marina Bay Sands, Tokyo tower, Taipei 101, the Bird's Nest in Beijing, the Gateway of India, the world's tallest building the Burj Khalifa, the Ancient Citadel of Erbil in Kurdistan, Table Mountain, the Bosphorus Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, the UK Houses of Parliament, Buckingham palace, the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls and Los Angeles airport. Landmarks switching their lights off for the first time for Earth Hour this year include Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue and Florence's Statue of David.
At the global media launch for Earth Hour 2013 in Singapore last month, CEO and co-founder, Andy Ridley, highlighted the grassroots nature of the movement:

"People from all walks of life, from all nations around the world, are the lifeblood of the Earth Hour interconnected global community. They have proven time and time again that if you believe in something strongly enough, you can achieve amazing things. These stories aren't unique, this is happening all over the world."

Earth Hour has its share of critics, who say it symbolises environmentalism as living in the dark. Author George Marshall wrote in 2009:

"Asking people to sit in the dark plays very well to a widely held prejudice that 'the greens' want us all to go back to living in caves."

This year, Prof Bjorn Lomborg, a prominent critic of the economic cost of dealing with climate change, has warned the gesture will do little to help the planet and gives people the wrong impression about how to address climate issues:

"Global warming is a real problem, but Earth Hour is not the answer. Taken to its logical conclusion, if switching the lights off for one hour is a good idea, why not for all the other 8,759 hours of the year?

Some energy experts have also said that Earth Hour could result in an increase in carbon emissions and place great strain on electricity grids. Fossil-fuelled power stations could be required to fire up quickly when everyone turns their lights back on, "rendering all good intentions useless at a flick of a switch".
But WWF maintains Earth Hour is not about saving energy but raising awareness. Part of this year's campaign is "I Will If You Will" – where you can pledge to take action beyond Earth Hour and get your friends, family and colleagues involved. WWF also wants to spread the word using social media.

Earth Hour events around the world

The Indian subcontinent will switch off the Gateway of India lights at the same time as four villages in Madhya Pradesh receive solar lanterns, the first form of energy they will ever use.

Organisers in the United Kingdom hope to break the record of 7 million people who took part last year. Landmarks that will turn off their lights include Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, BFI Imax, the London Eye, the Gherkin, Edinburgh castle, Brighton Pier, Westminster abbey, Durham cathedral, Old Trafford, Canterbury cathedral, Windsor Castle and Tewkesbury abbey. WWF-UK is hosting a night at the Southbank in London that will stream live content from around the world and feature a live acoustic performance by the band McFly, who have done the Harlem Shake in panda onesies to launch the campaign. Celebrity chefs including Raymond Blanc, Gordon Ramsay and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have created special recipes for families to prepare and eat by candlelight, and WWF has teamed up with a Kevin McCloud, Miranda Richardson and Alistair McGowan, who have recorded readings of Rudyard Kipling's famous Just So stories.
Earth Hour organisers and WWF affiliate Fundación Vida Silvestre is encouraging participants in Argentina to support a senate bill to make Banco Namuncurá (Burdwood) a marine protected area. If passed, the 34,000-km sq area will raise the protected area of Argentina's seas from 1% to 4%.
In 2007, 2.2 million people took part in the first Earth Hour in Sydney. This year, some of Australia's most famous landmarks will glow green to symbolise their commitment to renewable energy. Sydney Opera House, the Arts Centre in Melbourne and Council House in Perth will be all be powered by 100% clean energy and organisers are asking Australians to "switch off for good by switching on to renewable energy". Towns and suburbs with the highest number of pledges will win solar power systems for their councils from Sungevity. Community events are also being planned, from stargazing Sydney to night runs in Queensland and BBQ bushwalk in Canberra.
In Botswana, former president Festus Mogae has marked a four-year commitment to plant 1 million indigenous trees with the planting of 100,000 trees in Goodhope, a severely degraded area in southern Botswana.
The CN Tower in Toronto, Canada will dim its lights for the sixth year running – the city was the second ever to back the campaign. Vancouver was named this week as the winner of the Earth Hour city challenge, for its "overall holistic and strategic approach to climate action". It beat 16 other finalists including Sydney, New Dehli, San Francisco and Olso.
WWF says Earth Hour will be the first piece of environmental action taking place in Palestine since its UN recognition as a state. Earth Hour is being coordinated from both Gaza and the West Bank, with switch-off events taking place at Al-Jundi and Palestine squares, in Gaza City, and the cities of Nablus, Bethlehem, and Ramallah.
Russia will switch off the lights at around 100 landmarks across 50 cities and towns. Following a successful petition last year that was instrumental in the passing of a law to protect the seas from oil pollution, this year WWF Earth Hour Russia is turning its attention to forest protection. Organisers are on their way to securing more than 100,000 signatures for a petition to change forest legislation. The amendments would reinstate a ban on industrial logging and protect almost 18% of all Russian forests – equal to an area of land twice the size of France.
In Tunisia, which is taking part in Earth Hour for the first time this year, 11 cities and towns will turn their lights off, with the main event taking place at Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the site of the initial protests that sparked the Arab Spring. It will be attended by Tunisia's president, Moncef Marzouki.
In Uganda, where 6,000 hectares of deforestation occurs every month, WWF Uganda is aiming to fill close to 2,700 hectares of degraded land with at least 500,000 indigenous trees as part of Earth Hour 2013.
In the United States, New York city landmarks taking place include Times Square, the Rockefeller centre and the Empire State Building. The bright lights of the Las Vegas strip will also go dark for the hour, as well as Los Angeles airport and Niagara Falls.

Link Building's 11 Ways To Generate Real Treffic

Are you tired of building links the old school way? You know, the methods that require you to send out emails to thousands of webmasters begging for links. Don’t get me wrong, they still work well, but they get boring after a while.
So what other ways can you build links?
Well, there are a handful of creative strategies out there. Here are 11 fun ways you can build links without burning yourself out:

Strategy #1: April fools

April fools is coming up soon, so why don’t you leverage it to build links. You shouldn’t do an April fools joke that’s obvious, instead you should take a page out of TechCrunch’s book and follow their strategy.
They wrote a blog post on March 31^st a few years ago on Richard Rosenblatt’s yacht, which was called “The AdSense”. A lot of people believed the post was real and over 600 people tweeted about it and some even linked to it.
The key to creating a good April fools joke is to make it realistic. Do something the day before April 1st and go above and beyond to make it seem realistic. TechCrunch got Rosenblatt to record his voice talking about the post, which made it seem more realistic.
If you want your April fools idea to build links, it has to be good. You can’t do something mediocre.

Strategy #2: Interview experts

One of the easiest ways to build links is to interview experts. If you email someone on how great they are and how you want to interview them, it’s rare that they will say no.
I myself get asked to do around 4 interviews each week and I never say no. I’ve also emailed dozens of other people to interview them and it’s also rare that they say no… this even worked when my blog wasn’t popular.
So how do you build links when you interview an expert? Well most experts have a website, so once you interview them you can ask them to share it with their readers or even tweet and post it on Facebook.
I’ve found that over 90% of the time people will at least share the interview on Twitter and Facebook and over 40% of the time people will link to it from their website. One trick to boosting your link percentage chance is to look and see if people have a press page before you ask them for an interview. If they have one, the chance of them linking to your interview is over 95%.

Strategy #3: Infographics

This is my favorite method of building links, as I love making complex data easy to understand. Mint used this strategy heavily in their early days, in which they made complex financial data easy to understand through beautiful graphics.
We also do this at KISSmetrics as our infographics have received over 3741 links.
So what’s the key to generating links from your infographics? Well you first need to have an embed code at the bottom of each infographic so people can link back and secondly you should follow the promotion strategies in this blog post.

Strategy #4: Quizzes

You may know Matt Inman as the guy behind the Oatmeal, but most of us SEOs know him as the master of quizzes. He got his start at SEOmoz in the early days and then the started getting into link creation through linkbait.
He ranked Mingle2 for all of the online dating terms by creating viral quizzes such as: how many 5 year olds can you take in a fight. He then took that same strategy and got a payday loan site ranked for all of the payday loan related keywords.
Matt currently has quizzes on The Oatmeal and you should consider replicating the strategy if you want to build thousand of links. Just be careful as both his dating site and payday loan site got dinged by Google, but you shouldn’t have that problem if you follow these rules though:

1. The quiz needs to be related to your website – don’t try to create a quiz about fighting 5 year olds if you run a dating website.
2. Don’t use rich anchor text – at the end of each quiz is an embeddable badge that shows off your score, that badge shouldn’t contain rich anchor text. The anchor text should be the name of the quiz.
3. Link to your quiz page – don’t have the badges link to your homepage, they should link back to the quiz.

Strategy #5: Personalized videos

Do you remember Elf Yourself? JibJab created that campaign for OfficeMax and hundreds of thousands of people Elf’d themselves. In which they uploaded a picture of their face and JibJab created an Elf video out of it.
At the end of the video, you were given a link that you can share with others or post on your blog.
According to Open Site Explorer, Elf Yourself has over 10,000 links. Not too shabby for a Christmas promotional video.
If you can come up with a creative video concept that allows people to personalize the video, you can leverage it to build links. People love sharing funny personalized videos.

Strategy #6: Sponsor an event

One of the simplest ways to build links is to sponsor an event. Conference sites list out each and every single sponsor and in most cases they link back to their sponsors.
This may not seem like a fun idea or creative link building strategy, but just think about this… you’ll be able to go to the conference.
If you work in the corporate world you may get a bit tired of working in the office, so it will be a nice for you to get a break by attending a conference. Plus, you’ll get a link out of it.
When getting links from conference sites, keep in mind that they maybe taken down in the future, which means you will have to continue to sponsor the event each year. The cost can quickly add up if you are a small company, but it’s fun to go to conferences.

Strategy #7: Sponsor a non-profit

I love the non-profit world because it’s a great way for you to give back to the rest of the world. If you sponsor a non-profit in many cases you can get a link back.
When I used to own KISSinsights we used to give away our product for free to non-profits and they would link back to us. We came up with this concept when a non-profit asked us for a free account in exchange for press on their blog.
The beautiful part about this strategy is that it doesn’t require an exchange of cash. You can volunteer your time, your products, or even services for a link. Whatever it maybe, I’ve found that non-profits are open to almost anything as they don’t have a big spending budget.

Strategy #8: Take some pictures

There are always people looking for images, especially high quality stock photography images. I myself don’t mind paying for images, but it can get expensive really fast.
If you have a really good digital camera, such as an SLR, you can go out there and take high quality photos of anything related to your industry. Then pop them up on a page on your website and let people know that they are royalty free images. Just make it a requirement that people need to link back to you if they decide to use any of your images.
The cool part about this strategy is that you are going to get highly relevant links, as people in your industry are most likely to use them.

Strategy #9: Scholarships

Ross Hudgens is an SEO that’s known for building tons of high quality EDU links. And he is doing so without spending much money… so how does he do it?
Well he creates scholarships related to your company. It’s a great way for you to give back and get links at the same time. For example, if you are a marketing agency, you could create a digital marketing scholarship in which you give 1 student $1000 a year.
Once Ross creates the scholarship, such as a marketing one, he would notify all colleges that have a marketing department about the scholarship. The end result is hundreds of EDU links as colleges will put it on their website to notify students.
The one thing you have to do if you want to create a scholarship is make it a “real one”. SEOs are trying to create them just to build links. Make sure it is legitimate; you have to give money away each year, and if possible try to help the winner of the scholarship out. For example, if I created a marketing scholarship, I would give away money and even provide the winner with a paid internship.

Strategy #10: Get press

The side effect of getting press is that you’ll build more links to your website. It’s rare that a site like Forbes would write about your company and then not link to it.
That’s just not user friendly, which is why reporters always link to you when they cover you or your company. If you want to build links, why not get press for your business or your entrepreneurial success?
Hit up your local PR agency and see what they can do for you. Or if you don’t have a ton of cash, learn how to get your own press or just use sites like Help a Reporter Out.
I myself just hire PR agencies like PRserve in which they run a pay per performance model. If they get you press, you pay. If not, you don’t pay a dime.

Strategy #11: Give away swag

Some people love free stuff. It doesn’t matter if it is expensive or cheap stuff, people love getting gifts. One person who talks about all of the free stuff he gets is Shoemoney.
Every Friday he takes a picture of him wearing a new t-shirt that someone gave him. He then blogs about the shirt and links back to the company who gave him the shirt.
Get creative and start giving bloggers swag. From shirts to hats, to items, to anything else that is related to your brand, just start giving things away. Not only will bloggers love you, but they will start blogging about your company and linking back to your website.

Conclusion

The possibilities of link building are endless. You can build links in many different ways, you just have to be creative. What I’ve learned over the years is the best link builders are the creative ones.
Just look at Matt Inman, no one would have thought that he would rank a site for online dating, but he was able to do it in a matter of months because of how he built links.
All you have to do is think outside the box as the list above is just scrapping the surface. What other creative ways are you building links?

Think Like Google To Get Rank

With billions of searches happening every day, and over 65% of the search market, it’s a obvious that you should be paying attention to Google.  Knowing how the search engine works, what it looks for, and how it plans to evolve are all important to understand if you want to stay ahead of your competition.
By thinking like Google, you will not only learn what makes the world’s largest search engine tick, but how to improve your site for higher rankings as well.
But before we get into that, you need to first understand how search engines work:

How searches work

When you do a search, you may not realize that in the background, thousands of channels, programs and scripts are working to get you the answer within milliseconds.
Google has prepared a great interactive infographic that simplifies and explains how search works. Of course, many changes have been made to this formula over the years, especially as some sites try to game the system and artificially inflate key factors that Google looks at, such as: back links, domain age, and social marketing efforts.
Although no one but Google knows exactly what’s in each algorithm or even how many there are that make a site rank where it does, you can find some good information by looking at what Google has done previously.
It’s important to remember that Google is only as good as the service it provides.  If people make billions of searches, but don’t find what they’re looking for, they’re far less likely to trust them or even worse, use them again.  So it’s in Google’s best interest to give people what they want.

Clues from the past

One way to tell where Google’s going is to look at where it has been. SEOmoz has a list of Google’s algorithm changes since 2000, in which they note all of the minor and major changes in the search engine’s indexing and ranking changes. There are a few common threads that you’ll notice:

• Google is always trying to think one step ahead of spammers and scammers by identifying sites known to harbor malware and devaluing sites that use outdated techniques such as keyword stuffing, doorway pages and invisible text. This shows that you shouldn’t jut avoid these tactics, but also other spammy tactics as they won’t last long. Any quick solution that you can use to boost your rankings probably isn’t wise because Google’s history has shown, that it won’t work forever.
• Google has always felt that content is king, but over the years people have tried to game the system by producing mediocre content. From fighting duplicate content to useless content, Google continues to promote content rich sites that provide readers value and they eventually push down sites that don’t have great content. Your goal shouldn’t be to write tons of content, but instead you need to focus on higher quality content, as those pieces tend to gain more backlinks and rank higher throughout their algorithm updates.
• Links have always been a huge part of rankings and it seems that it will continue to be that way. Over time webmasters have figured out how to build links, but the ones that are still hard to game, are links from relevant authority sites. If you are planning on building links, go for quality and not quantity. As long as your links are relevant, they aren’t keyword rich you should do well in the longrun. The concept of links is also changing… links from social media sites, such as tweets can help. Co-citations may also help your rankings in the longrun.
• When you’re serving billions of pages a day, there’s a clear focus on speed.  Not only has Google’s index updated quicker with the introduction of updates such as Suggest and Caffeine, but sites speed is a major factor that affects the relevancy and conversion rate of your site.  Site speed is just one of 200+ known algorithmic factors that Google takes into account when ranking your site. If you want to boost your rankings, consider optimizing your load time. Just look at how I doubled my traffic by improving my load time.

Another way to keep your finger on the pulse of the search giant is to take a closer look at what it’s currently involved in.  SEO by the Sea highlights interesting features and information from Google’s patent filings.  From Google glasses to leveraging rich snippets, you can learn a lot about the future of Google from these posts.

Likes and Dislikes

I’ve already shared a few notable things that Google dislikes: spam (comment and otherwise), malware, duplicate content, low quality inbound links, a high number of outbound links and so forth.  But what about what Google likes?

• Authoritative content – not just good content, but content with backlinks from relevant authority sites and reviews from peers. An easy way to build links to your content is to follow the steps in this blog post. Also content that contains at least 2000 words tends to rank higher than content that is shorter.
• Cornerstone content – this is information that serves as an often-linked-to resource from other sites. It’s content that doesn’t need to change often because it’s so complete and so relevant that it only need minimal maintenance to stay that way. The Advanced Guide to SEO is a good example of this and it will continually get more and more traffic each day, as it is the most thorough guide to SEO online.
• Social signals – Google measures social networks differently and pays attention to diverse signals.  Votes (likes), shares, posts and bookmarks are just a few of the criteria Google looks for. The more social shares your content gets, the higher you will rank. This is especially going to be more important as Google spends more time and money on Google Plus.
• Personalized experiences – a big trend Google is going after is personalizing their search and product experience to each user. From mobile devices, in which their investing billions of dollars in, to personalized search, Google wants users to receive experiences tailored to their needs. If you can adapt your website to the needs of users, you are likely to rank higher in the longrun. From using responsive design, to tailoring the experience based on history, like Yelp does, it’s all about offering a unique experience to each user.

If Google is so smart, why does _______ still work?

Your search engine ranking may be below a site that you’re 100% certain uses black hat and other underhanded techniques to rank where it does.  This begs the question, if Google is so smart and so advanced, why do some of these techniques still work?
The answer is because Google’s index is delicate.  They don’t want to mistakenly sandbox quality sites or generate false-positives as they did when they declared the whole internet to be full of malware in 2009.
Google’s engineers are hard at work trying to figure out how to maintain a balance of quality results without the changes wrongly affecting sites who have done nothing wrong. So instead of stooping to your competitions’ level, if you use ethical white hat tactics, you’re likely to rank higher in the long run.
From what I’ve seen over the years, sites using unethical tactics may rank high for a few months or even a year or two, but eventually they get caught. If you focus on producing high quality content, and building legitimate links, you’ll eventually rank higher than the people who are taking the quick and easy route. I myself used to take the quick and easy route and ranked for terms like “web hosting” or even “online poker” really high, but eventually Google caught up to me and others and penalized us over time.
Slow and steady really does win the race in the game of “Google”.

Tools of the trade

Another way to get more insights about Google is to use the tools they provide. One of the most important ones to checkout is Webmaster Tools. Here are some of the things Webmaster Tools can tell you, which should give you insights on how Google thinks:

• Page speed – Google used to have page speed data in Webmaster Tools. They now send you to their PageSpeed program, which shows you that they feel load time is important. The reason Google feels page speed being important because they noticed a correlation in which when they rank sites that load slowly, people use Google less frequently.
• Errors – no search engine likes sending people to a site with errors. Google lists out all of the errors they find on your site that you should fix in Webmaster Tools.
• Search queries – if you are trying to figure out a trend on if your traffic is going to go up or down, just look at how many search query impressions you receive. The more you get, the more traffic you should receive. So if you make changes to your marketing strategy and the number of impressions go up, you should do more of it. If the number of impressions goes down, you should do less of it.
• Valuable content – through the use of sitemaps Google will tell you how many pages they are indexing on your site. This should show you what the search giant thinks of your content. If they are indexing a lot of your content they probably feel it is more valuable compared to if you only have very few pages indexed.
• Messages – this is my favorite feature in Webmaster Tools is the messages area. Google will tell you what they see wrong with your website and this is where they will be sending you warnings as well.

If you want to get an understanding of where Google is going and how to adapt with their changes, it is essential that you use Webmaster Tools.

What’s next for the search giant?

Using the programs and services above, as well as other features like Google+, you can get a good understanding of where Google is moving towards. Facebook has been slowly trying to take a bit of Google’s market share by going after search and rolling out their own ad network, but Google continues to adapt and fight back.
You may look at Google Plus and consider it a nice try, but a failure on their part.  But that’s only because you maybe comparing it to Facebook in terms of popularity.  Google Plus is becoming more and more integrated with the things we use every day, similar to Facebook’s universal login.  Recently, they started promoting brands’ Plus pages and showcasing their +1 buttons as a way to encourage more companies to embrace Google Plus.
Beyond Google+, there’s also the Knowledge Graph, Google’s answer to Facebook’s long reach in the social sphere.  The Knowledge Graph collects and connects the who, what, where, when and how of social with search.

Combine this information with the social community and Google Maps, and you get Google Now, a personal assistant for Android smart phones that hopes to “make you a local, anywhere” by giving you the right information at the right time.  This includes sports scores from your favorite teams as they’re playing, the latest train schedule while you’re standing on the platform, and flight details from the moment you reach the gate.  The more Google Now knows about you, the better its recommendations.

jaden smith in a new look hair style

Jada Pinkett-Smith took to her Facebook page to pen a very inspiring who-really-cares letter to her daughter’s hair critics. Before we really knew her cute little 12 year-old even owned a set of pipes and could really sing, we were all gawking over what Willow Smith would do next to her tresses. Willow has been bald, rocked a buzz cut, and has most certainly tried every single color known to any variation of a bag of Skittles.
Is Willow Smith A Poster Child For Individuality Or Is She A Child Rebel?
Will and Jada have both held a strong “it’s nobody’s business” position when it comes to raising their children. So it was quite refreshing when Jada actually spoke out about Willow’s hair:

This subject is old but I have never answered it in its entirety. And even with this post it will remain incomplete.
The question why I would LET Willow cut her hair. First the LET must be challenged. This is a world where women,girls are constantly reminded that they don’t belong to themselves; that their bodies are not their own, nor their power or self determination. I made a promise to endow my little girl with the power to always know that her body, spirit and her mind are HER domain. Willow cut her hair because her beauty, her value, her worth is not measured by the length of her hair. It’s also a statement that claims that even little girls have the RIGHT to own themselves and should not be a slave to even their mother’s deepest insecurities, hopes and desires. Even little girls should not be a slave to the preconceived ideas of what a culture believes a little girl should be. More to come. Another day.

Can you imagine the world of wonderful women we could build if we taught young people to make their own choices? It took me so long to grasp that concept. You know that the notion that my beauty is not defined by what my hair looks like, or how long it was, or even what color it was.
The rule growing up in my house was: No hair cut until I turned 18 years old. And guess what I did on my 18th birthday–I chopped it all off. My parents thought I was being rebellious. But to me, I was snatching my freedom back and showing them I was an actually person. So naturally I completely agree with Jada and I kinda wish that I grew up like Willow.
What do you think of Jada’s response? Do you agree that children should have the freedom to express and style themselves?

Beautiful Alia Bhatt

Alia Bhatt, who is on the cover of the December 2012 issue of Grazia, unveiled the magazine’s party edition at an event recently. I think she looks lovely in these pictures – I really like that she kept her look young and fun, and of course it doesn’t hurt that she’s smiling for pictures a lot more now! I gotta say though, posting new pictures of her really makes me nostalgic for that period of my life where I felt like I was only blogging pictures from the Student of the Year promotion rounds. *lol* Not that I was complaining, those three made for some very good eyecandy… but for now, at least, have a look at more pix of Alia from this event! 

http://www.missmalini.com/2012/12/07/photos-alia-bhatt-unveils-grazia-party-edition/