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If you’re anything like us you’ll struggle to remember what you had for dinner last night, but now scientists have managed to unearth the last meal eaten by a creature that died a staggering 200 million years ago.
The team were studying the fossilised remains of the ’Ichthyosaurus Communis’ – one of the first species of a group of sea-going reptiles that lived in the late Triassic and early Jurassic period in Europe and Asia.
The find was remarkable, firstly because it was the only example of a newborn ichthyosaurus ever to be found by humans, and secondly because it had a stomach full of prehistoric squid.
University of Manchester/Julian Kiely
The ‘Ichthyosaurus Communis’ lived in Belgium, England, Germany, Switzerland and Indonesia, and has been known to science for nearly 200 years, but this is the first time the team have uncovered such detail.
Paleontologist Dean Lomax, who worked on the study, said: “It is amazing to think we know what a creature that is nearly 200 million years old ate for its last meal.”
Measuring in at a total length of approximately 70cm (adult relatives normally grow up to 3.3 metres in length), the team at the University of Manchester, used a CT-scanner to create a 3D model of the animal.
Lomax said: “We then found many tiny hook-like structures preserved between the ribs. These are from the arms of prehistoric squid. So, we know this animal’s last meal before it died was squid.”
This also lead the team to conclude that younger examples of the species “fed exclusively on fish” and had a totally different prey-preference to their parents and other elders.
First discovered and recognised by science in 1821, with many uncovered by Victorian paleontologist, Mary Anning, along the coast at Lyme Regis, Dorset, the ichthyosaurus is one of the most common Early Jurassic fossil reptiles in the UK.
Despite this, there are few examples of complete or well-preserved fossils, making this find even more exceptional: “This specimen is practically complete and is exceptional. It is the first newborn Ichthyosaurus Communis to be found, which is surprising…”
It was initially believed that Ichthyosaurus laid eggs on land, but now fossil evidence shows that in fact the females gave birth to live young, and were born tail first to stop them from drowning in the water.
14 ways to get smarter with your content and SEO
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Despite the many ways Google has changed the search game over the last five years, one truth remains: content is the vehicle that drives your consumer interactions, engagements, experiences and, ultimately, conversions.
However, only 41 percent of marketers think their organization is clear on what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI).
Marketers aren’t just lacking confidence in their efforts; these are real and measurable deficits. In fact, only 20 percent of B2C and 50 percent of B2B content earns any engagement at all, my company’s research has found.
That’s a lot of wasted effort and resources invested in content that ends up just floating around the web, winning zero business benefit for its creators.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at content through the SMART lens. SMART is a goal-setting framework in which S stands for Specific, M for measurable, A for achievable, R for relevant and T for timely.
Below is my variation that explains how to apply search engine optimization (SEO) to your content within a SMART framework, giving you 14 concrete ways to make your marketing more effective and to win you more business.
S — Specific content wins every time
Content is not about what your marketing team wants to say. It is about providing insight and information that your audience actually wants to hear.
SMART content is designed for a specific audience, based on your understanding of their needs, preferences and intent.
- Get to know your audiences.
There’s much more to this than keyword research. Where do your consumers live online? What’s their intent when performing certain types of searches or engaging your brand in social? What action are they most likely to take at that point? Understanding the audience you’re writing for is the foundation on which SMART content is built.
- Discover opportunities through topical research.
How well do you understand the competitive environment in the verticals for which you’re creating content? Today, you’re competing for eyes and clicks. Your competitors may be other companies, but you could be competing for space in the SERPs against media brands, bloggers, influencers and more. Without that bigger-picture, bird’s-eye view of relevant search and social spaces, you’re flying blind.
Evaluating the content gaps not covered by your competition provides you with opportunities to create engaging content that speaks to people in the key moments that matter.
- Choose content formats wisely.
Which media will you incorporate to best illustrate your message, engage your audience and reach people across platforms?
Don’t limit yourself; a single piece of content can incorporate several types of media, including socially shareable images, quick video clips and embedded media, like SlideShares.
This gives you various ways to convey your message, but it also allows you to appear in different types of search results (like Google Images) and on different search platforms (like YouTube or SlideShare’s internal search), as well.
M — Measurable content delivers on the metrics that matter
Content marketers are getting better at proving the business value of their activities. Just two years ago, only 21 percent of B2B marketing respondents to CMI’s annual content marketing survey said they were successful at tracking ROI. Now, in 2017:
- 72 percent are measuring their content marketing ROI.
- 51 percent are using a measurement plan to provide both insight and progress toward the business goals.
- 79 percent are using analytics tools.
How can you make your content marketing efforts measurable?
- Choose metrics that matter and align with your business goals.
Which KPIs tell the true story of your content’s success? Ideally, you’re going to measure your content’s performance through the entire funnel, right from lead generation and audience-building to nurturing, conversion, sales and right on through post-sales to retention and evangelism.
Site traffic, lead quality, social shares, time on site and conversion rates are among the top metrics used by B2B marketers to determine content success. Priorities are similar for B2C marketers.
- Make search engine optimization a core component of content creation.
Improve your visibility and key metrics like engagement, time on site, sharing and conversions with strategic content optimization.
Apply readability standards and optimize title tags, meta descriptions, subheadings, images and text in line with current SEO standards.
Keep visitors clicking and engaged with smart internal linking that both improves user experience and resurfaces your most popular, highest-converting content.
- Accelerate with automation.
Machine learning is growing in importance in search, especially where data sets are large and dynamic. Identifying patterns in data in real time makes machine learning a great asset to understand changes in your customer base, competitor landscape or the overall market.
Ideally, your content automation system will include reporting to tell you not only how each piece is performing but also make recommendations to help you focus on your most valuable opportunities.
Automation allows you to manage routine tasks with less effort so that you can focus on high-impact activities and accomplish business goals at scale.
A — Actionable content is always on & ready for activation
By actionable content, I mean that which is ready to answers users’ questions but also is valuable way beyond the initial period of promotion after publishing.
- Empower your content creators with technical SEO support.
Last month, I wrote about the importance of balancing technical and non-technical SEO within your organization. If you want your content to perform its best, you need to support your creative team with a technically sound, optimized online presence.
Site structure and hierarchy, meta data, mobile readiness, internal linking, site speed, coding errors and other technical SEO factors can all affect your content’s ability to rank.
Further, they can affect readers’ ability to access and enjoy the content and then take next steps. Get your technical and non-technical SEO in order to set your content team up for success.
- Optimize for activation across multiple channels.
Search engine marketing is the second-most commonly used paid content promotion tactic, next only to social advertising.
Push your content to social channels like Twitter and Facebook, but don’t forget other channels like LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+.
Ideally, you’re going to have some understanding of your audience on each platform and which channels will be most receptive to each new piece. Make sure you’re optimizing your social posts for the platform on which you’re posting — cutting and pasting the same post across all channels doesn’t cut it.
R — Resonate with content promotion in relevant channels
Even if you build it, they will not come until attracted. The competition for eyes and minds is fierce; increase the efficacy of your organic efforts and promotional spend by targeting the right people in the right places at the right time.
- Amplify in social channels for early traction.
Low spend minimums on channels like Twitter and Facebook make it affordable to run experiments against different audience segments and see where your content resonates best.
Plus, that initial boost of activity gives your content authority and appeals to the social networks’ ranking algorithms, helping you get more organic reach.
If you are tracking and measuring correctly, you can see which audiences are not only engaged, but converting. That’s where you want to allocate your content-promotion budget, rather than having some predetermined amount of spend per channel that runs its course regardless of performance for each piece.
- Syndicate and use paid promotion to reach targeted audiences outside your existing network.
Syndication takes content you’ve already published on your site and republishes it elsewhere, exposing you to another publication’s audience. You might be able to find organic syndication opportunities, and there are plenty of paid syndication services like Outbrain, Taboola or Zemanta.
If you’re looking at large-scale syndication, read Danny Sullivan’s caution on using links in syndicated pieces first to stay on the right side of Google.
- Don’t forget email!
Your consumers want to hear from you. In fact, 86 percent want to receive emails at least monthly from companies they deal with, a MarketingSherpa survey found in 2015.
Make your call to action (CTA) to click through and read the content crystal-clear. Avoid placing competing CTAs in your email, and resist the urge to try to sell in every communication. Your content is designed to do the work of helping them take the next logical step.
T — Tangible business results are derived from SMART content
KPIs like social interactions and site visits give you a great idea of how well your content performs in search and social, but you need tangible business results to prove value.
- Make content profitable with CTAs that drive performance.
What action would you like readers to take? Which of your site’s conversion pages is currently converting best and generating the highest-quality leads? These insights will help guide your CTA selection, but remember, your CTAs should also match the consumer intent you’re targeting with each piece. Don’t forget to include embedded performance tracking for both site traffic and conversions.
- Incorporate elements that support multiple business functions.
Make your content multidimensional with elements to build brand authority, inspire or educate on product (or service), encourage engagement and more.
Incorporate testimonials into your content, where they can serve the purpose of providing social validation within the context of an existing consumer experience. Develop author personas to give your content greater authority and build the profiles of key employees and executives.
- Improve ROI with ongoing content management and optimization.
How much content does your organization have sitting on-site and around the web? Each piece is an opportunity for ongoing traffic and lead generation, but only if it’s kept in line with constantly changing SEO standards.
Google: No Changes On Use Of Image Meta Data In Search
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Back in 2014, Matt Cutts formerly of Google talked about meta data in images and basically said they reserve the right to use it, that Google is able to parse it out but did not comment if they use it for rankings or display or both. Well, he did say they did use it for showing more details about the photos in the image thumbnails on Google Image search but did not comment about the ranking component.
Here is that video:
Google: First Click Free is over, being replaced by Flexible Sampling
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Most online news publications are not able to support themselves with advertising these days. For this reason, among others, Google is yielding to publisher requests and replacing its much-debated “First Click Free” program with what it calls “Flexible Sampling.”
Content and news publishers will now control whether and how many articles they want to let searchers access before showing a paywall or subscription prompt. The company is also working on an array of other tools to help boost publisher subscriptions.
End of First Click Free
Google’s VP for news, Richard Gingras, told me last week that the company has been collaborating with publishers and testing the new approach with The New York Times and Financial Times specifically. But despite allowing publishers greater flexibility, Google is still recommending (but not enforcing) that publishers make some content available for free in search results:
Based on our investigations, we have created detailed best practices for implementing flexible sampling. There are two types of sampling we advise: metering, which provides users with a quota of free articles to consume, after which paywalls will start appearing; and lead-in, which offers a portion of an article’s content without it being shown in full.
Publishers will not be required to provide free content to be indexed. Gingras said that Google will be crawling full articles behind the wall for indexing but that publisher decisions about how much content to sample to search users will not impact rankings in any way.
Subscription optimization
Gingras said Google is going to use ad-targeting tactics to identify which audiences are most likely to subscribe. He said that publishers would need to share their audience profiles, and Google would then seek out lookalike audiences to maximize subscriber signups.
He added that different offers and content might be shown to different audiences based on a “propensity to pay” or subscribe. Google will be using its machine learning and other capabilities to find the right audiences, based on publisher data. Publishers will be able to adjust the presentation of content and offers according to different sub-segments or profiles.
Subscription optimization won’t become available until next year, however. When I asked if this was going to be a formal ad product — given that it uses ad targeting technology and approaches — Gingras said that it might become one, but that Google was right now “just trying to understand costs and value delivered.”
Removing purchase friction
Google also wants to make it much easier for users to subscribe to publisher content. Gingras cited improved checkout and purchase flows and one-click payments as Google aspirations for publishers. “We’d like to get the purchase process down to one click.”
The company is building a standard or template-based checkout flow that will be available to publishers at their discretion. Publishers will be free to ignore it, adopt it or modify it.
Gingras told me that where the user is a Google account holder, the company can prepopulate multiple fields and accelerate checkout. And in cases where there’s a payment card on file with Google, it can enable one-click subscriptions. In real time, the publisher will query Google to determine what category the user falls into and deliver the right experience accordingly.
This attention to improving the checkout experience is especially important on mobile. Pew Research Center data show that 85 percent of US adults access news on mobile devices.
Gingras said that Google wasn’t going to take fees or a revenue share for transactions it delivers or facilitates. He asserted that the company doesn’t want to own the user and that all data would be turned over to publishers.
Showing pubs you subscribe to
Scientists Discover Ice On Mars Where It Shouldn’t Exist
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Scientists have made an unexpected discovery while studying old images from the NASA archives – a region of ice near the Martian equator, where water simply isn’t meant to exist.
Everything we know about the red planet says water isn’t thermodynamically stable at low altitudes, but a team lead by researcher Jack Wilson, John Hopkins University, has now suggested that this might be wrong.
And this new information could be groundbreaking for any future Mars missions.
NASA
The images in question were first collected by the neutron spectrometer instrument on NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft (the agency’s longest-operating Mars orbiter) between 2002 and 2009.
But have recently undergone some serious editing.
Wilson’s team were able to reduce blurring and remove ‘noise’ from the imaging data, improving the spacial resolution from approximately 320 miles to 180 miles, allowing us all a closer look.
“It was as if we’d cut the spacecraft’s orbital altitude in half,” Wilson said, “and it gave us a much better view of what’s happening on the surface.”
As a result they were now able to see evidence of ‘significant hydration’ near the equator, located between the northern lowlands and southern highlands along the Medusae Fossae Formation.
Spotting unexpectedly high quantities of hydrogen gathering at high latitudes, the planetary scientists knew this was a sign of buried water ice much lower down (even though the spectrometer itself can’t directly detect water).
This revelation is so mysterious because although hydrogen was always known to exist higher in the atmosphere, as confirmed by 2008 NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, but it was thought that this was impossible closer to the surface.
Indeed the team wonders how the water could be preserved there, with some speculations suggesting that it is only being held there by an ice and dust mixture cycled through the atmosphere the polar areas.
But those conditions last occurred hundreds of thousands of millions years ago and any ice deposited there should be long gone.
“Perhaps the signature could be explained in terms of extensive deposits of hydrated salts, but how these hydrated salts came to be in the formation is also difficult to explain,” Wilson added.
One In Four Teens Admit To Bullying Someone On Social Media – But Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Panic
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In late 18th Century England, public concern over Imperial wars in America, India, and Europe, was matched by a growing fear of an altogether more insidious problem developing at home – the increasing mass consumption of novels!
‘My sight is every-where offended by these foolish, yet dangerous, books […] I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread’ – The Sylph no. 5, October 6, 1796: 36-37
For critics of this trend (which gained pace after the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740), novels were seen as both psychologically and physiologically harmful: warping ideas of life and relationships, while also damaging readers eyesight and posture.
Fast forward a few hundred years, and this debate has echoes of current consternation around social media – albeit with the main focus of that concern moving from ‘ladies’, ‘mistresses’, and ‘belles’ to today’s young people. Look through any national newspaper and you’re likely to find at least one shocking story of abuse or crime linked to social networking sites.
However, while the tone of the debate on social media may have similarities to the novel-reading panic of the 18th Century, public anxiety in the contemporary case is backed up by empirical evidence. The NSPCC has, for instance, reported a doubling of Childline calls related to cyberbullying between 2012 and 2016, and a recent report by the OECD classified 37% of British 15-years olds as ‘extreme internet users’, significantly above the international average (26%).
At Demos, in our upcoming report ‘The Moral Web‘, we’ve focused on understanding how young people act on social media, and what motivates their decision-making. We found that a quarter of 16-18 year olds admit to bullying or abusing someone over social media, with many saying that they feel drawn into negative behaviour due to the visibility of communication, leading to a need to be seen ‘to act tough’.
The public response to moral panics of the past is generally to look to prohibit or restrict access the object of ‘vice’ or censor content deemed particularly harmful. In her analysis of the novel-reading panic of the 1700s, Ana Vogrinčič, finds evidence of significant attempts to ‘thwart their spread and restrain novel reading’. However, she argues that these attempts often proved counterproductive (in this case increasing public attention given to this literary form).
Again, there are parallels to our current predicament. Much of the contemporary policy response has so far focused on online safeguarding, social media companies are under increasing public pressure to ‘do more’ to remove harmful content, and schools and parents often get drawn into attempts to limit access to smartphones, and reduce screen time.
While all worthwhile endeavours, there are both practical and social limits to solely restrictive approaches. From a practical perspective, the nature of social media technologies makes traditional forms of regulation difficult – for example, constant connectivity through smartphones means that young people are regularly online outside spaces of parental mediation. There’s also a danger that overly intrusive interference into young people’s digital worlds becomes counterproductive, encouraging more covert online behaviour, as well as limiting positive developmental opportunities.
Our research for instance found that while a significant minority of young people engaged in abusive behaviour, social media provided the majority with opportunities for honest and empathetic communication (88% said they had given emotional support to a friend over social media) and civic and political engagement (51% had posted about political or social causes).
So how to address the legitimate concerns that underpin public anxiety? Our research finds that young people’s character and social and emotional skills are important in shaping how they think and act on social media. Traits of empathy and self-control were, for example, found to be particularly closely linked to reduced likelihood of engaging in bullying behaviour online.
It’s here that we feel policy-makers, schools, and parents can make the biggest difference – empowering young people to make a positive contribution to their online communities by building their social digital skills, together with those wider character traits which guide and shape behaviour.