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It's the story of a wandering knight devoted to defending his dream woman and punishing those who break the code of chivalry.

Don Quixote, the nonsensical nobleman who sets out on a quest with his squire Sancho Panza, gallops across Old World Spain in Festival Ballet Theatre's rendition of the classical ballet based on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes.

The full-length production, running March 25 and March 26 at Irvine Barclay Theatre, stars American Ballet Theatre's principal dancers, Hee Seo and Marcelo Gomes, in the lead roles of passionate young lovers Kitri and Basilio.

Gomes, a Brazilian ballet dancer awarded the prestigious dance award Prix Benois de la Danse in Moscow for his role as Othello, has performed throughout the world. He has danced with Festival Ballet, Orange County's premiere professional ballet company, four times; "Don Quixote" will be his fifth.

Seo, a South Korean ballerina who, five years ago at age 26, became one of the youngest dancers in ABT history to be promoted to principal, will mark her second time performing with Festival Ballet Theatre.

"I'm thrilled," Seo said about her upcoming performance in "Don Quixote." "I love classical ballet, and this has energy and it's fun to connect with the role."

Seo, who will mark her first time partnering with Gomes, said she joined the performance for her love of dance but also because of Festival Ballet Theatre's artistic director, Salwa Rizkalla, who is a special mentor in the young woman's life.

Rizkalla established Southland Ballet Academy in 1983 and five years later founded the Fountain Valley-based Festival Ballet Theatre with plans to enrich Orange County's artistic community and appreciation for dance.

Rizkalla herself was a professional dancer who worked under the direction of world-renowned choreographers Leonid Lavrovsky and Serge Lifar. She studied with ballet masters of the Bolshoi and the Kirov ballets and later taught at Goldenwest College in Huntington Beach and the Huntington Beach Academy for the Performing Arts.

"Salwa is feisty and she tells you the truth," said Festival Ballet Theatre company dancer Tara Ghassemieh, who will perform the role of Mercedes in "Don Quixote."

At age 16, Ghassemieh was offered a full scholarship to join the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre in New York. She went on to roles in the Broadway show "Movin' Out,"the film "Step Up" and television shows "Gossip Girl" and "CSI."

At 21, she broke her back. She would spend the next couple of years getting healthy again.

Rizkalla guided her.

"I needed the queen to retrain my body, and it was her that made me a ballerina," Ghassemieh said. "A ballerina has a presence about her. She floats. Nothing is overstated or understated. It's very much a being."

Mercedes, Ghassemieh said, is a sultry partner to a legendary bullfighter whose whirling cape and fiery chemistry create a grand presence.

It's a role that takes her back to a time when she had the utmost confidence in herself. She felt fearless and energetic. "Don Quixote," a ballet she has never danced before, has helped her regain strength, she said.

For Rizkalla's part, she wants not only to present powerful seasons of classical and contemporary dance, she also hopes to provide a nurturing environment for dancers and choreographers a training ground that also draws top-tier talent.

Amid the fragile world of ballet, the company has survived on minimal donations for years, said Rizkalla, who nonetheless plans to enlarge the company and sustain its programs.

As part of the company's outreach, Festival Ballet Theatre members will perform excerpts from "Don Quixote" at noon Saturday at the Newport Beach Public Library. The program is being aided by a grant through the Newport Beach Cultural Arts and support from the city Arts Commission.

"My hope is that people know Orange County has a great ballet company with amazing old and young artists who are nourished right here," Rizkalla said. "Dancers feel at home with us and they love presenting a top level performance for audiences. It's a jewel in Orange County."

*

What: Festival Ballet Theatre's "Don Quixote"

When: 7 p.m. March 25 and 2 p.m. March 26

Where: Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive

Cost: $42 to $55

Information: (949) 854-4646, Ext. 1; festivalballet.org.

kathleen.luppi@latimes.com

Twitter:@KathleenLuppi

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Festival Ballet Theatre lures ABT stars to OC for 'Don Quixote' - Los Angeles Times

Every year SEO gets more complicated as Google rolls out updates and changes the rules. This is especially frustrating for small business owners who dont have the time or resources to stay current in, what they believe to be, an esoteric and confusing industry.

Here are seven small business SEO tips to help earn more business through traditional organic search rankings.

Yes, optimizing title tags, site structure (keep it flat) and load-speed are important. Many experiments have shown these elements are in the Google algorithm.

Dont obsess.Hire someone to run an assessment and tune up the site; then move-on. Far too many small businesses get stuck at the starting line.

We have all read that content is king, but what does that really mean?

Your website must have engaging content for the end-user. The importance of this cant be overstated. It will impact time-on-site, conversion and SEO (engaging content is more likely to be shared and linked to).

It is also critical because it orients the small business webmaster towards offering something of value. Thin content leaves a bad footprint, both onsite and offsite.

Most small business owners are savvy enough to know that 70 percent of their search engine rankings are the result of backlinks. Being a pragmatic bunch, they then ask where can I buy some?

Dont buy backlinks it also leaves a bad footprint.

Small business marketers need to earn links, and content marketing is extremely effective for gaining earned links. The trick is in the trade. Something of value must be offered.

Quality content containing humor, information, controversy, politics or training usually brings backlinks and is definitely considered acceptable SEO.

There has been healthy debate recently about the changing role of anchor text in the Google algorithm. Even if the importance is fading, it is clearly still a factor.

Small businesses should know their backlink profiles. A lack of branded anchors and brand mentions is a clear signal of manipulation, and therefore a rank killer.

Healthy businesses market their brands through press releases and are discussed in forums by name. This all leaves a good footprint.

Co-citation is also a sign of a natural backlink profile. Strong companies are mentioned in the same paragraph as other strong brands.

Articles with a single anchored link to a website with low domain authority sticks out like a sore thumb. Google can spot these insubstantial articles and weighs the links accordingly, or worse. Read about the Penguin update for more.

While the term link bait is perhaps overused, it is considered an acceptable activity by Google. This is because the activity is aimed toward creating a positive end-user experience.

Without a community element, link baiting is hard to distinguish from content marketing. Developing a community (best if done onsite) is perhaps the best link bait of all because the community starts to develop the content in ways no SEO consultant could ever think of.

This is truly organic, extremely natural, and helps SEO. Read up on Latent Semantic Indexing if this concept is confusing.

It is tempting to fall for the email solicitations for large quantities of inexpensive links. But we all know where that got JCPenney.

The SEO industry isnt like the automobile industry, where automation is praised as a gain in efficiency. Automation in SEO is bad because Google says it is. They believe it results in a poorer end-user experience, an argument that has merit.

Small businesses may not like this rule, but they do need to respect it if they want to see increases in rankings.

Small business owners are busy, but that is no excuse for not knowing what the SEO consultant is doing. Its important to digest the monthly reports for a couple of reasons:

Google is a computer, largely, and needs to be thought of as such. The major elements in the algorithm are fairly well understood.

While its true that updates are frequent and the rules of the game do shift, the major elements of onsite SEO and backlinks have been the fuel for better rankings for years. Follow these seven small business SEO tips to earn better rankings and build a community around your brand. And ignore the rest as noise.

This article was previously published on Search Engine Watch

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7 Small Business SEO Tips - SME Insider

The DigitLab Academy was launched last year in 2016 and we've been very busy adding value to the digital marketing industry. We wanted to take some time to update you on what we have been up to. Our focus has been in three main areas covered in this video breakdown and the article below:

Public workshops Our popular public digital marketing workshops delivered in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town on SEO and Social Media Strategy are in full swing.

The Social Media Masterclass curriculum explores multiple facets of social media in an insightful, practical manner. On completion, you should understand the social media landscape, be able to develop a social media brand guide, design an advertising strategy, manage content strategies from trend-jacking and event promotion to employee amplification and influencer marketing.

Our SEO for Marketers course is designed to give marketers a handle on SEO (search engine optimisation). The goal is to gain insight into what matters in search engine ranking by giving marketers and understanding of what SEO is, how to improve it, how to manage it and how to be strategic about it.

This year we launch our corporate training division. Our focus will be on developing customised digital training solutions to business. Covering a wide range of digital skills from mobile marketing and social media to digital brand analysis. To find out more about these corporate services please contact Danielle on az.oc.baltigid@ymedaca to find out how we can up skill your team.

We have developed a 12-week programme teaching marketers about Digital Brand Strategy. This optimised digital strategy short course will empower you to think strategically about building your digital brand presence with all the necessary tactical functions. Whether you are just starting out with your website or are a seasoned marketer who now wants to learn about the online world, this short course is for you.

The practitioner-led Digital Brand Strategy short course has been designed to help you understand how to plan, implement and manage a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your organisation. This course is suitable for a variety of professions and for all levels of marketing experience. The course will help you to understand how to integrate digital marketing tactics into your overall marketing strategy and to maximise the performance of your online marketing investments.

This course is designed for those with the responsibility for developing or implementing an organisations online marketing strategy, including senior management, marketing managers, marketing executives, small business owners, IT managers and anyone who would like to pursue a career in digital marketing. Through dynamic lectures presented by leading digital marketing practitioners, case studies and small group discussions you will gain exposure to the latest methods, techniques and tools for improving your organisations digital marketing and brand-building efforts. You will walk away with the necessary theoretical knowledge and practical application skills to feel confident in experimenting in all things digital beyond this short course.

The Digital Brand Strategy course is available through The Vega School of Branding which launched in February 2017.

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DigitLab Academy update - Bizcommunity.com

Bruce Clay, Inc.'s search engine optimization tutorial is a step-by-step SEO guidethat will teach you how to optimize a website for search, complete with free SEO tools! Are you a website owner concerned that your site doesn't show up in Google? Or are you planning a website and want to make it search-friendly from the ground up? Whatever your situation, this tutorial will teach you all the SEO basics and important SEO tips to help you optimize your web pages to be found in search engines.

This SEO how-to guide follows the proven, topically organized, keyword methodology that Bruce Clay has taught thousands of students worldwide in our renowned SEO training courses. You can be hands-on while you learn, optimizing your website as you go! We've provided free SEO toolsand many bonus videosto help you every step of the way.

To make sure your education is well-grounded and effective, these pages cover a wide range of Internet marketing-related subjects. Here you'll learn SEO tips for:

Our SEO tutorial covers only "white hat" methodology that adheres to search engine guidelines. Our founder, Bruce Clay, set the standard for ethical web marketing by authoring the "SEO Code of Ethics," now translated into 18 languages. A respected leader in the ever-changing search marketing industry since 1996, our company provides Internet marketing services, software tools, and SEO training. In fact, thousands of people have attended our classroom-style training courses throughout the U.S. and internationally. This combined expertise makes Bruce Clay, Inc. uniquely qualified to present an ethics-based, search engine-friendly SEO tutorial to teach you best practices that reflect the latest developments in search.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science/art of increasing traffic to a website by helping it rank higher in organic (non-paid) search results. SEO tips and strategies that are trustworthy aim to improve both internal and external factors that influence a website's ranking (aka "on page" and "off page" elements) for SEO. Optimization involves some web programming expertise combined with business, writing, marketing, branding and even competitive puzzle solving skills. If you do all of this right (or at least the best among your competitors), you can achieve higher search engine rankings in the organic sections of search engine results pages. And you can have a website capable of maintaining your revenue goals.

Search engines want to show the "best" results possible the most relevant, most expert and highest quality web pages that will satisfy the searcher. To do this, the engines look at more than 200 factors to determine a site's relevance to a search request. Some of these factors are woven into the fabric of the website ("on-page" factors). Others are trust signals based on links from reputable sites and (in some cases) social media engagement. No single web page, even with the best search engine optimization in the world, can be perfect in all 200+ ranking factors. Furthermore, no one knows precisely what the factors include or how they are weighted to determine the search results for a given keyword or query. So what's an SEO to do? This SEO tutorial teaches you a "beat the leader" approach to search engine ranking. To see what Google or Bing thinks is best for any specific attribute, you can look at the sites they are currently rewarding the top-ranked results. Once you know what structural and content choices worked for the "leaders," you can do even better by making your pages the "least imperfect"!

There are no search engine optimization secrets or tricks just ranking methodologies to follow in order to help a site that offers value to users beat the competition in search results. Today's SEO must be committed not just to optimizing a website, but also to making it a quality site that attracts links naturally and is worthy of ranking. This bears repeating:

It is not the job of search engine optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of SEO to genetically re-engineer the website so that it becomes an eagle.

Bruce Clay

Creating a website that can achieve high ranking involves more than just technical skills, or content writing, or links, or engagement objects or search engine submission alone; it requires an integrated effort. It is difficult to accomplish this type of project without a formal, proven SEO methodology and strong search engine optimization tools. This SEO tutorial is an entry-level how-to guide covering all of that and more. It's like taking a free SEO training course!

Before you begin, you should understand that being among the top 3 rankings in search engine results can be achieved, but not without great effort. Your web pages must earn that high ranking with high-quality content and best-practice SEO optimization basics. Still, even for the best websites, maintaining a top organic SEO ranking requires constant keyword monitoring and content reworking. Search engine optimization never rests but neither does your competition.

Ready to learn? Let's get the Bruce Clay SEO Tutorial started! It begins with keyword research.

Please review our SEO Code of Ethics and SEO Standards pages before you edit your site pages.

Looking for a short SEO Optimization Checklist? Try ours!

We think it is important that you learn how the search engines relate to each other. View our Search Engine Relationship Chart. This is a Flash rendering of our famous FREE PDF that is suitable for color printing, and all the links are active! The Search Engine Relationship Chart has evolved quite a bit over the years; check out the Search Engine History - Chart Histogram to see how much it has changed.

Bruce Clay, Inc. was singled out as the Best Professional Services Interactive Application award winner for 2004 by the IAC Web Marketing Association for this Search Engine Relationship Chart.

There's a hierarchy to be considered when developing any SEO strategy. To help businesses and marketers apply this strategy of prioritization, the SEO Hierarchy of Needs shows the relative place of search engine optimization tasks.

View the SEO Hierarchy of Needs in interactive Flash, or download the chart in PDF.

Originally posted here:
BruceClay - Search Engine Optimization - SEO Tutorial

Auckland, New Zealand (SBWIRE) 03/15/2017 Clickthrough recently introduced in-person SEO training courses for New Zealand companies. The programs are designed to cater for the surge in market demand for SEO training. The courses cover best practice search engine optimization and include follow-up training. All students work with an advanced SEO expert to ensure they get the best education possible. They are currently run in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, and Dunedin. However, the company plans to expand and bring their services to more locations soon.

The company created its first training courses way back in 2009. Since that time, theyve helped thousands of business owners to improve their online results. SEO is perhaps one of the most important elements when it comes to sourcing new clients or customers. Indeed, that is why many companies spend thousands on employing the services of professionals. With Clickthrough SEO Training, bosses can now perform most of the tasks in-house. That means they keep tighter control over the process, and they save a lot of money.

Taking an SEO course online is a wise move for any professional. Even so, the experts say that face to face alternatives will always provide better results. At the end of the day, SEO has become a fundamental building block for online success. So, making an investment this year is a fantastic move for anyone who wants to push their brand to the next level. Outsourcing search engine optimization is always more expensive than training a team member. That is why so many people have used Clickthroughs services during the last few years.

All courses are suitable for website owners. However, they are also designed for digital marketing agencies. A staggering number of advertising specialists have used the service to improve their skills. Lets presume a marketing company employs an apprentice with the intention of turning them into an expert. While they could handle the training in-house, that would take a long time. Designing courses of this nature could take weeks or even months. So, it makes more sense to use Clickthrough and remove all the hard work.

If people would like to know more about the services provided by Clickthrough, they just need to get in touch. There is a dedicated form on their website that anyone can access using the link at the top of this page. Alternatively, people are free to use the media contact information below this paragraph. There is always someone waiting to take calls and provide advice and suggestions. So, speaking to a member of the team as soon as possible is a wise move. Indeed, it could turn any business around and help everyone to succeed online.

Contact: Glen Maguire Company: Clickthrough Address: 51 Drinnan Road, Auckland, New Zealand Phone: 021400067 Email: glen@clickthrough.co.nz Website: http://www.clickthrough.co.nz

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New SEO Training Courses Prove a Big Hit - MilTech