Archive for November, 2008

Links Between Our Goal and Our Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Achievement situations in which athletes have an opportunity to display physical competence (i.e., in training or competition) activate their task or ego centered goals. They might be either highly task involved or ego involved in that situation, or they might even switch between the two, because their perception of what they need to feel could change from second to second.

For example, imagine yourself as a young soccer player in a knockout match. You’ve felt great during the game because you’ve worked hard, made some great tackles and accurate passes, and your work on your concentration skills has paid off by allowing you to refocus quickly. You’ve spent most of the game in a highly task-involved state of mind and have received praise from your teammates.

The game is tied and goes to a penalty shoot-out. You are the last player of five selected, and the score is 2-2. As you make that long walk to the penalty spot, how does the situation and its potential consequences affect your view of success and competence? Will your feelings of competence depend entirely on scoring or missing? And, if you do become ego involved, how might it affect your chances of getting that winning goal?

All athletes have an innate preference for task or ego involved goals in sport. These predispositions, referred to as task and ego goal orientations, are believed to develop throughout childhood largely due to the types of people the athletes come in contact with and the situations they are placed in.

If children consistently receive parental praise that’s contingent on their effort and recognition for personal improvement from their coaches, and are encouraged to learn from their mistakes, then they are likely to engender a task orientation. It becomes second nature for them to believe that success is associated with mastery, effort, understanding, and personal responsibility.

The behavior of their role models in sport also affects this development. Such an environment is far different from one where kids are shaped by rewards for winning (alone), praise for the best grades, criticism or non-selection despite making their best effort, or coaches whose style is to hand out unequal recognition. This kind of environment helps an ego orientation to develop, along with the belief that ability and talent, not effort and personal endeavor, earn success.

Goal orientations are believed to be reasonably stable and enduring characteristics that are largely formed by mid to late adolescence. Hence, coaches and parents should attempt to shape a child’s development as early as possible during the 6- to 14-year-old phase.

In this developmental period, children’s cognitive abilities start working overtime as they begin to understand that effort isn’t the sole reason for success at a task. At about 11 or 12 years of age, they begin to realise that regardless of effort, some kids simply have more skills than others. That’s when the fantasy of being the next super-star comes under obvious pressure for some children.

The strength of a goal orientation influences whether an athlete will adopt a task or ego involved goal in a specific sport scenario. It is also perfectly reasonable for growing athletes to develop both high task and ego orientations if they have been exposed to an assortment of task and ego oriented situations and people. However, never underestimate the power of a particular situation.

The adolescent athlete might be quite high in task orientation, but in a competition with a high degree of public evaluation, judgment, criticism, or comparison based on who’s best, with rewards and benefits for winners and negative consequences for losers, he or she may become ego involved. Competitions accompanied by high perceived expectations and consequences arguably form the natural basis of sport.

Factors such as the stage of the event (e.g., final or qualifying match), whether selection is at stake, previous head-to-heads, financial rewards, age of the opponent (e.g., playing a talented younger player), representing the team or country for the first time, and the hostility of the audience can make competition a natural ego-involving laboratory.

Nevertheless, not all sport is like that; in fact, some sport situations offset the natural importance of superiority by emphasising participation and publicly reinforcing or rewarding personal effort, improvement, and problem solving rather than focusing on comparisons.

An example is a swimming club that encourages all standards of swimmer, with a coach who gives recognition solely based on individual improvements in time or technique. These scenarios increase the importance and number of task-involving cues. The key message here is that the availability of task-involving cues in sports that are naturally ego involving allows the athlete to develop a more task-involved approach to competition.

If you’re looking for FIFA Players Agents, a Australian Football Academy or Football Tours, contact the Football Management Group.

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Search Engine Submission Tools Help Traffic

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Search engine submission tools are excellent tools when it comes to getting our websites indexed in the search engines. Such tools can either be provided by search engine submission services or in the form of software. What they can do for us is rather straightforward – submitting our website details for inclusion in the search engines. Why is it so crucial that we make use of these search engine submission tools?

There are a few reasons why we submit to search engines. One reason is to get our websites indexed as quickly as possible. Indexing is important so that people can locate our websites in the search engines. Websites that are not indexed cannot be found at all, so it doesn’t matter even if we have built a 1000 page website. Indexing in search engines is powerful because search engines network with one another. Once it is picked up by one search engine, the rest would slowly catch up. One trick is to submit your website to MSN, as they allow you to suggest websites for their search engine spiders to explore. MSN tend to index websites faster than Yahoo and Google. Once your website is accepted and indexed in MSN, the rest would follow shortly.

Another reason why we submit to search engines is to optimize exposure of our websites. There are literally hundreds to thousands of small search engines which you may not have heard of. Some of them are in collective partnership with the major search engines, so there is an intricate network of search engines that interact with one another. Pitting yourself against big-timers or established websites in the major search engines can be a draining and most of the time, unrewarding journey. Submitting to the small search engines and getting them indexed gives you greater opportunities to rank high in them.

While submitting to smaller search engines is an excellent idea, webmasters also understand it is a chore to submit to the search engines one by one. It feels like eternity to submit to hundreds of them. People by nature don’t like repetitive tasks especially you are one of those who hate to perform data-entry tasks. The solution is therefore to employ the services of search engine submission tools like search engine submission services or software.

There are many choices in the internet but unfortunately, some of them charge an exorbitant fee to submit your website. Unless your pockets are deep or your returns from search engine submissions far exceed your expenses, you would find using search engine submission tools barely a good investment or website promotion method. Naturally, there are also some unscrupulous services that employ unorthodox or blackhat search engine submission tools to spam the search engines and their network partners with your website details, getting you banned rather ranking well. Discover what the cheap yet effective options are at my blog if you are looking for affordable search engine submission tools.

This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author’s name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.

About Author

Davion is a successful webmaster and author. Read more about search engine submission and reviews of search engine submission tools and find out how these tools can automate search engine submission for faster indexing, instant traffic and more sales at Search-Engine-Submission-Tools.blogspot.com.

Source: ArticleTrader.com

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Spotting a Phony Search Engine Marketing Company within Three Minutes

Friday, November 7th, 2008

Raise your hand if you’ve ever received an email promising top 10 placement on the search engines. I get them all the time, and I’m in the business. Often these kinds of companies use “blackhat” tactics that can get you kicked off the search engines. These tactics would include hidden text, doorways pages that the public can’t see, link farms, and a variety of other strategies.
Often blackhat search engine marketing (SEM for short) companies use deceptive sales practices and prey on business owners who know they should be doing search engine optimization (SEO) but don’t know much about it. Luckily, these companies have some similarities in their deceit. Here are five ways to spot a phony search engine marketing company as well as three great ways to find a quality SEM company.

They Make Promises of Front Page Placement in a Short Period
A phony SEM company will promise to put you on the front page on three of your key phrases in at least three of the top 10 search engines. Remember, the big three search engines — Google, Yahoo! and MSN—account for approximately 90 percent of the
searches done on the Internet. So the bottom seven search engines divvy up the last 10 percent They’ll let you pick the top 10 key phrases and then work to get you on the lower ranked search engines that have a miniscule percentage of the searches. So the phony SEO company delivers on their promises but it doesn’t result in a great increase in website traffic. Their Site isn’t Highly Ranked or is Blacklisted Do they register highly in the search engine? Are they blacklisted? You can tell their blacklisted by going to Google or one of the other search engines and typing in “site:www.theirdomainname”.

If there are no results then most likely they have been blacklisted or are brand new. One of my clients signed a contract with a company this past year. I showed him that both of the company’s web sites were blacklisted, most likely for using deceptive practices. Do you want your website and business marketed using deceptive practices? Do you want to get blacklisted by Google?
They’re Vague About What They Do
A phony SEM firm will give you vague ideas on what they will do, as well as not tell you the nefarious things they will do. Be wary when a company talks too little in specifics and too much in vagaries. With my proposals I give specifics without giving away my
trade secrets. If they don’t give at least some specifics then they are probably trying to hide something.
They Bully You When You Question Them or Say “No”
One of my clients talked to a search marketing company about pay per click advertising and wanted me to check them out. The company wanted $10,000 in advance and
promised traffic at a good cost per click. But it would have taken three years to spend that kind of budget with the number of searches on his phrases. Thanks, but no thanks. So the
black hat started in with rhetorical questions that presumed I would be an idiot if I didn’t use their services. I calmly said “no” again, and he started up again, so I just hung up.
Don’t waste your time on a bully.

They Contact You
If they are so good at search engine optimization, then you should be contacting them.
They will have high rankings on the search engines themselves on terms that people are searching for. There are some legitimate companies that do initiate calls, so ask for references from clients who are seeing success.
Three Great Ways to Find a Quality Search Engine Marketing Company. If you’re going to do SEM I would recommend:

1. Talk with colleagues or friends that are seeing success with other companies. They should be able to give you an idea of specific results they are seeing and how well they are being treated by their SEO company.

2. Use the search engines to find local companies that are doing well on the search engines. If you live in Dallas, type in “Dallas search engine optimization firms”.
Assuming that the people on the front page are local, you can meet with them to find out more about how they work, what they charge, and what results you might expect.

3. Listen for the Big Three Fundamentals of SEM. A genuine SEO company will talk about finding the best phrases to market, getting more content on your site, and getting incoming links to your site. There might be some ancillary techniques they’d recommend, too, but the three tactics mentioned above should be the foundation of their work.

So, in three minutes you could look up their site, ask them for specifics, and request references. If any of these three are questionable, politely say you’re not interested and hang up. And then start looking for a company who is reputable with an acquaintance,  shows up well on the search engines, and is using good fundamentals. By doing this you will save yourself time, money and headaches.

About Author

Dave Carlson is a Google Registered Adwords Professional and owns Green Chair Marketing Group, an Internet marketing firm specializing in driving visitors to web sites by search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and web site design/redesign.

Source: ArticleTrader.com

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