Navigating Your Monthly Budget - Eastern University: Fill & Download for Free

Q. Which presidents were not elected to serve a second term and why? What party were they affiliated with?George HW Bush: What makes a one-term president?The 10 One Term Presidents of the United States6 Little Words Helped Make George H.W. Bush (A 1-Term) PresidentThe most successful one-term presidentWhy George H. W. Bush Is America’s Greatest One-Term PresidentGeorge HW Bush: What makes a one-term president?Image copyright AFP/GETTYSince 1933, only three men have failed to secure a second term as presidentThe late George HW Bush was the last US president to lose a re-election campaign. What sets single-term presidents apart?George Herbert Walker Bush was a war hero, a congressman, an ambassador, the head of the CIA, Ronald Reagan's number two and, between 1989 and 1993, the most powerful man in the world.He also enjoyed a more dubious distinction - membership of the small group of sitting presidents who have stood for re-election and lost.Since 1933, only Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford have been beaten in a general election while occupying the White House.Image copyright Getty IMAGESIn modern US politics, incumbent presidents tend to win re-electionEvery other incumbent president - including Bush's son, George Walker Bush, who served from 2001 to 2009 - has been endorsed by the public when they have stood on their party's ticket.It is a quirk of no small significance in a nation where eras are defined in the popular imagination by their presidents - from the thwarted promise of John F Kennedy's early 1960s to the cynicism and paranoia of the Nixon years and the thrusting optimism of Ronald Reagan's 1980s.For voters and historians alike, the question of whether the head of state serves just four or the maximum eight years has huge symbolic value.Donald Trump will be under pressure to run again and retain power come to the 2020 election.In a 2010 ranking of all 44 presidents by 238 eminent scholars for Siena College Research Institute, there were no single-term presidents in the top 10.The highest-rated incumbent to have been defeated in a re-election campaign was John Adams in 17th place. Kennedy, in 11th place, was assassinated a year before he could return to the polls and James K Polk, in 12th, did not seek a second term.Why do presidents serve two terms?Image copyright Getty IMAGESBush served "four more years" under Ronald ReaganSince World War Two, eight sitting US presidents have been re-elected to serve a second term, while only three have failed in a general election.The presidency offers an unrivaled platform to attract airtime, raise campaign funds and set the policy agenda.Sitting presidents, too, tend to escape bruising battles for their party's nomination - although not George HW Bush, who faced a grueling primary challenge for his place on the Republican ticket from Pat Buchanan.In addition, they have the rare ability to make a compelling claim - that they know what it is like to take decisions from inside the Oval Office."People feel some comfort knowing who is going to be in charge, even if they don't love that person," says Julian E Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.This carries added contemporary significance after Barack Obama's two terms.Obama's own historical legacy appeared to be as important an election issue as any other, to both the president and his opponents alike, ahead of the 2012 ballot.Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell famously declared in 2010 that his "number-one priority" was to make Obama, a Democrat, a "one-term president".In the same year, Obama himself told Diane Sawyer of ABC News: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president."Defenders of Bush, the 41st president, put him in the former category.His time in office coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and his popularity soared in the wake of the first Gulf War.However, a protracted economic recession on his watch saw him break a pledge not to raise taxes, provoking fierce hostility from within his own Republican party. With Ross Perot, a third-party candidate, splitting the vote in the 1992 election, Bush's attempts to win re-election were thwarted by the charismatic Bill Clinton.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, believes Bush was a victim both of timing and the US's system of fixed-term presidencies."Margaret Thatcher could call an election to capitalize on the Falklands War, but George HW Bush couldn't do that to capitalize on the first Persian Gulf War," Sabato says."If he could have done that, he would have won."Image copyright GETTY IMAGESGeorge and Barbara Bush in the 1960sGeorge HW Bush: a political life1966: Wins seat in House of Representatives1971: Nixon installs him as UN ambassador1974: Heads newly established mission in Beijing1976: Ford makes him CIA director1981-1989: Ronald Reagan's vice-president1989-1993: President of the US; leads the US into first Gulf War; copes with the collapse of communism in Eastern BlocFor Sabato, recent one-term presidents have been the victim more of adverse circumstances than of their own weaknesses.Carter was unfortunate enough to take office at a time when the global economy was in turmoil while Ford - who assumed office after Nixon's impeachment - only had two and a half years to make an impact, Sabato insists."Events put them in a bad position at the wrong time," he says.It's a perspective that is flatly rejected by Robert W Merry, author of Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.In a democracy the customer - that is, the voter - is usually right, Merry argues.He notes that with only a handful of exceptions - Grover Cleveland, John Quincy Adams - defeated presidents are rarely judged more favorably by historians than by the electorate which rejected them."The American people are very unsentimental in their judgments," he says. "If you look back at one-term presidents, it's pretty hard to miss the reality that their performance was not quite there."Presidents get the blame and they get the credit. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that they are innocent bystanders."As a result, he has little time for any suggestion that Bush was under-appreciated by the American public."I think he was a fine man, but he was an in-basket president," Merry says. "He responded to stimuli that came to him. He didn't have an agenda to change America in any particular way."Certainly, Franklin D Roosevelt, Reagan, and Obama all inherited economies in dire straits and all won re-election.What is not in doubt is that, in an average year, an incumbent enjoys significant advantages over a challenger in a US election, thanks to the visibility and prestige of their office.But that raises the question of what difference a second term actually makes, in practice, to a president's legacy.Image copyright THE WHITE HOUSEOne-term father, two-term sonRe-elected presidents are, of course, freed from the requirement to face the voters again, which may offer them some leeway. The very fact they have been endorsed twice at the polls can enhance their authority.But they face the same institutional barriers and separation of powers as in their first four years - the mid-term elections, the need to win Congress's support for legislation."The president has some more leeway to make decisions in a second term, but they begin to lose their starch," says Zelizer."You find fewer people who are willing to take a job in their administration for a two-year tenure. It's harder to maintain forward momentum."As a result, he says, the defining policies of most presidents tend to occur in their first term.In Sabato's view, George HW Bush should not be regarded as a one-term president but as the president who spearheaded a three-term dynasty."He had a son who served two terms and served them only eight years after his own," he says."I don't think there's any question they viewed it as a personal vindication of the 1992 defeat."And given the unpopularity of George W Bush when he left office, it would appear that many people may believe Bush Senior's one term made him a better president than his two-term son.The 10 One Term Presidents of the United Statesby Tom Murse Updated June 04, 2018There have been nearly a dozen one-term presidents who ran for second terms but were denied by voters, but only three one-term presidents since World War II. The most recent one-term president who lost his re-election bid was George H.W. Bush, a Republican who lost to Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992.Is four years enough time for new presidents to prove themselves to be Commanders in Chief worthy of being elected to a second term? Considering the complexity of the congressional legislative process, it can be hard for a president to enact real, visible changes or programs in only four years. As a result, it is easy for challengers, like Clinton, in defeating incumbent George H. W. Bush, to ask Americans, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”Who are the other one-term presidents in the history of the United States? Who are the other modern one-term presidents? Why did voters turn their backs on them? Here's a look at America's one term presidents - those who ran for, but lost, re-election - through history.George H.W. BushHulton Archive / Getty ImagesRepublican George H.W. Bush was the 41st president of the United States, serving from 1989 to 1993. He lost a campaign for re-election in 1992 to Democrat William Jefferson Clinton, who went on to serve two full terms.Bush's official White House biography describes his re-election loss this way: Despite unprecedented popularity from this military and diplomatic triumph, Bush was unable to withstand discontent at home from a faltering economy, rising violence in inner cities, and continued high deficit spending. "In 1992 he lost his bid for reelection to Democrat William Clinton."Jimmy CarterBettmann / Contributor / Getty ImagesDemocrat Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981. He lost a campaign for re-election in 1980 to Republican Ronald Reagan, who went on to serve two full terms.Carter's White House biography blames several factors for his defeat, not the least of which was the hostage-taking of U. S. embassy staff in Iran, which dominated the news during the last 14 months of Carter's administration. "The consequences of Iran's holding Americans captive, together with continuing inflation at home, contributed to Carter's defeat in 1980. Even then, he continued the difficult negotiations over the hostages."Iran released the 52 Americans the same day Carter left office.Gerald FordDavid Hume Kennerly / Hulton ArchiveRepublican Gerald R. Ford was the 38th president of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977. He lost a campaign for re-election in 1976 to Democrat Jimmy Carter, who went on to serve one term."Ford was confronted with almost insuperable tasks," his White House biography states. "There were the challenges of mastering inflation, reviving a depressed economy, solving chronic energy shortages, and trying to ensure world peace." In the end, he could not overcome those challenges.In reality, Gerald Ford never even wanted to be president. When President Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973, Ford was appointed vice president by Congress. When President Nixon later resigned rather than face impeachment for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, Ford—who had never run for the office—ended up serving as president for the remainder of Nixon’s term. “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers,” Ford found himself having to ask the American people.Herbert HooverStock Montage / Getty ImagesRepublican Herbert Hoover was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. He lost a campaign for re-election in 1932 to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who went on to serve three full terms.The stock market crashed within months of Hoover's first election in 1928, and the United States plunged into The Great Depression. Hoover became the scapegoat four years later."At the same time he reiterated his view that while people must not suffer from hunger and cold, caring for them must be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility," his biography reads. "His opponents in Congress, who he felt were sabotaging his program for their own political gain, unfairly painted him as a callous and cruel President."William Howard TaftStock Montage / Getty ImagesRepublican William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States, serving from 1909 to 1913. He lost a campaign for re-election in 1912 to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who went on to serve two full terms."Taft alienated many liberal Republicans who later formed the Progressive Party, by defending the Payne-Aldrich Act which unexpectedly continued high tariff rates," Taft's White House biography reads. "He further antagonized progressives by upholding his secretary of the interior, accused of failing to carry out [former President Theodore] Roosevelt's conservation policies."When the Republicans nominated Taft for a second term, Roosevelt left the GOP and lead the Progressives, guaranteeing the election of Woodrow Wilson.Benjamin HarrisonStock Montage / Getty ImagesRepublican Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president of the United States, serving from 1889 to 1893. He lost a campaign for re-election in 1892 to Democrat Grover Cleveland, who went on to serve two full terms, though not consecutively.Harrison's administration suffered politically after a substantial Treasury surplus evaporated, and prosperity seemed about to disappear as well. The 1890 congressional elections swept in Democrats, and Republican leaders decided to abandon Harrison even though he had cooperated with Congress on party legislation, according to his White House biography. His party renominated him in 1892, but he was defeated by Cleveland.Grover ClevelandStock Montage / Getty Images*Democrat Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, having served from 1885 to 1889, and 1893 to 1897. So he doesn't technically qualify as a one term president. But because Cleveland is the only president to serve two non-consecutive four-year terms, he holds an important place in U.S. history, having lost his initial bid for re-election in 1888 to Republican Benjamin Harrison."In December 1887 he called on Congress to reduce high protective tariffs," his bio reads. "Told that he had given Republicans an effective issue for the campaign of 1888, he retorted, 'What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?'"Martin Van BurenStock Montage / Getty ImagesDemocrat Martin Van Buren served as the eighth president of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. He lost a campaign for re-election in 1840 to Whig William Henry Harrison, who died shortly after taking office."Van Buren devoted his inaugural address to a discourse upon the American experiment as an example to the rest of the world. The country was prosperous, but less than three months later the panic of 1837 punctured the prosperity," his White House biography reads."Declaring that the panic was due to recklessness in business and overexpansion of credit, Van Buren devoted himself to maintaining the solvency of the national Government." Still, he lost re-election.John Quincy AdamsStock Montage / Getty ImagesJohn Quincy Adams was the sixth president of the United States, serving from 1825 to 1829. He lost a campaign for re-election in 1828 to Andrew Jackson after his Jacksonian opponents accused him of corruption and public plunder - "an ordeal," according to his White House biography, "Adams did not easily bear."John AdamsStock Montage / Getty ImagesFederalist John Adams, one of America's Founding Fathers, was the second president of the United States, having served from 1797 to 1801. "In the campaign of 1800 the Republicans were united and effective, the Federalists badly divided," Adams' White House biography reads. Adams lost his re-election campaign in 1800 to Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson.Don’t feel too sorry for one-term presidents. They get the same nice presidential retirement package as two-term presidents including a yearly pension, a staffed office, and several other allowances and benefits.In 2016, Congress passed a bill that would have cut the pensions and allowances given to former presidents. However, President Barak Obama, soon to be a former president himself, vetoed the bill.And Perhaps Lyndon Johnson?President Lyndon B. Johnson Signs the Voting Rights Act. Bettmann / Getty ImagesWhile President Lyndon B. Johnson served for six years, from 1963 to 1969, he could actually be considered a one-term president. Elected as President John F. Kennedy’s vice president in 1960, Johnson became president through succession after Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.Elected to his own first term in 1964, Johnson succeeded in convincing Congress to pass many of his Great Society proposals for sweeping social domestic programs. However, under growing criticism for his handling of the Vietnam War, Johnson stunned the nation with two surprise announcements on March 31, 1968: he would cease all U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and seek a negotiated end to the war, and he would not run for reelection to a second term.Updated by Robert Longley6 Little Words Helped Make George H.W. Bush (A 1-Term) PresidentRON ELVINGVice President George H.W. Bush accepts the Republican nomination for president in 1988. In that speech, he laid out a promise that he would later break, hurting his chance at re-election and changing his party.Rarely have six words meant so much, and so many different things, to so many.They rang out in the Superdome in New Orleans in August 1988 as the vice president of the United States, George H.W. Bush, accepted the Republican nomination for president:"Read my lips: no new taxes."And the crowd, as they say, went wild. A roar had been building, even in that vast and airy stadium, as Bush built up to his payoff line:"My opponent won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say, to them, 'Read my lips: no new taxes.' "There were other memorable moments in that address, drafted by a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan named Peggy Noonan. The soon-to-be-famous "thousand points of light" were mentioned, along with a reference to a "kinder and gentler nation." Both would follow George H.W. Bush for the rest of his life.POLITICSWhat We All Forget (If We Ever Knew) About The Political Career of Bush 41But it was the "read my lips" quip that ignited the convention and caught the attention of the media. Tough-guy talk was not Bush's usual métier. It was far more associated with Reagan, the movie actor, who, as a politician, borrowed from film scripts from time to time. A few years earlier, Reagan had delighted his fans by quoting from a Clint Eastwood movie, where a cop with a very large gun taunted a criminal crawling toward a weapon nearby:"Go ahead," said Dirty Harry. "Make my day."So when Reagan was confronting Democrats and other "tax increasers" in Congress, he lifted that line to dramatize his veto threat.YouTubeWhere the phrase came from"Read my lips" sounded like a movie, but it wasn't from one of Clint's. William Safire researched the phrase for his column for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Safire was a lexicographer as well as a political columnist and former speechwriter for President Richard Nixon.He found the first widely public use of the phrase in a song title in 1957 (by Joe Greene) and later in a 1978 album title (by singer Tim Curry) and several song titles in the 1980s. It then migrated into the world of sports and sports clichés, from which it was a short leap to political speech.A Reagan aide used it in 1981 about the release of American hostages held by Iran, and even by Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee used it in congressional questioning.Safire concluded, the phrase simply meant "Listen closely" or "Get this straight."What was important, though, was that it sounded tough. Bush, all too often, did not. In fact, his campaign had suffered from a perception problem regarding his virility.Newsweek had pictured the former World War II fighter pilot and college baseball player on a boat on its cover with the headline, "Fighting the 'Wimp Factor.' " That's something the editor of that article now says he was wrong about, but in the 1988 campaign, it was a narrative that stuck — and Bush's principal task of his New Orleans convention speech was to dispel that image tout suite.George Bush wades through a crowd in Houston after his victory speech in the 1988 presidential election.Mike Spague/AFP/Getty ImagesIt helped ... then probably hurt"Read my lips" succeeded, probably beyond their fondest dreams. Polls showed that after the convention, Bush had a lead over Democrat Michael Dukakis. But if it improved Bush's chances of being elected that year, it may also have ruined his chances of being re-elected in 1992.That was because less than two years after making the no-tax pledge, Bush found himself in circumstances in which he no longer felt he could keep it. Locked in budget negotiations with the majority Democrats in the House and Senate, Bush felt he had to allow higher rates on some existing taxes or the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction bill would shut down important services of the government.So he signed off on a compromise involving revenues as well as spending restraints. Democrats exulted at having forced him to renege. Conservatives seethed. A young Newt Gingrich, elevated to the No. 2 spot in the House Republican leadership the previous year, made no secret of his displeasure. He insisted any option was preferable to any new revenue.That position helped inspire a major Republican challenger to Bush's renomination in 1992. He was Patrick Buchanan, a former communications director for Reagan and a familiar commentator on TV. He announced his campaign for president in December 1991, saying he was running "because, we Republicans, can no longer say it is all the liberals' fault. It was not some liberal Democrat who said, 'Read my lips: no new taxes,' then broke his word to cut a seedy backroom budget deal with the big spenders on Capitol Hill."Reagan and Bush had won two landslides on a platform that was anti-communist, anti-abortion and anti-tax. Global events had greatly diminished the communist threat by 1990, and Bush devoted little of his time and energy to the abortion issue. That left taxes, and for Bush to abandon that citadel as well was an outrage to many on the right. Buchanan gave Bush enough heartburn in the early primaries that the president actually apologized for his tax shift in several interviews in the spring of 1992.But whether he would have done differently in retrospect is another question. In July 1990, the federal government was taking on a new obligation to bail out those harmed in the collapse of the savings and loan industry. The annual budget deficit was already $200 billion a year, and the cumulative national debt had grown from $1 trillion in 1980 (when Reagan and Bush were first elected) to $2.7 trillion.NPR POLITICS PODCASTIn that same month, the economy was slipping into a recession that was sure to reduce revenues. And Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was about to invade neighboring Kuwait, which would trigger the first Persian Gulf War.Bush knew the time had come to get the nation's fiscal house in order, or something like it. His 1990 compromise began a decade of relatively responsible budgeting that, combined with moves made by the Clinton administration in 1993, enabled the federal government to harvest considerable revenue from the personal computer boom of that decade.As the year 2000 approached, the stock market was booming and the annual budget deficit was nearing zero. Nonetheless, the risk Bush knowingly took with the budget deal turned out to be worse than he realized. He fought off the Gingrich critique and the Buchanan challenge and was renominated in 1992. But he received less than 38 percent of the popular vote in November.The winner was Clinton, who profited from depressed GOP turnout with nearly one-fifth of the popular vote going to a third-party candidate, businessman H. Ross Perot, who ran against the budget deficit and the national debt.The most successful one-term presidentGeorge H. W. Bush “gave the nation its most successful one-term presidency.” He “was the best one-term president the country has ever had, and one of the most underrated presidents of all time.”So said two not impartial sources — the late president’s vice president, Dan Quayle, and his Houston friend and secretary of state, who was with him at the end, James Baker. But their assessments are entirely defensible.The toughest one-term competitor to Bush has to be James K. Polk, who achieved all four of his goals — gaining the Oregon Territory and the Pacific Coast, establishing an independent Treasury, and lowering tariffs. But Polk’s acquisitions left the country with a problem — slavery in the territories — that it wasn’t able to solve without civil war. He left his successors a nation and world headed toward broad sunlit uplands.Ryan Zinke leaves Trump administration amid Justice Department investigationPolk was the original “dark horse” presidential candidate, and when George H.W. Bush started running for president in the 1980 cycle, he was, too — a successful oilman who had lost two Senate races and in between served two terms in the House.His brief campaign autobiography minimized, perhaps with his characteristic modesty, the value of his experience in appointive office. As ambassador to the U.N., he was not clued in on Richard Nixon’s opening to China; he was unaware of the Cultural Revolution while serving 13 months in Beijing; he was CIA director for just 11 months. But his network of friends and cousins — all those notes dashed off on stationery! — propelled him to victories in the Iowa caucuses, Northeastern primaries, and second place on Ronald Reagan’s ticket.Bush probably, as he said at Reagan’s funeral, learned more about issues and certainly about world leaders as vice president than he had ever known before. The result was his masterful navigation as president of choppy currents and sudden storms: uniting Germany but not humiliating Mikhail Gorbachev after the Berlin Wall fell; assembling an international coalition and winning the Gulf War.This despite his pushing against disassembling existing structures — the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia. They unraveled anyway, but mostly peacefully. It’s useful to have a steady balance wheel in a time of revolutionary upheaval.On domestic policy, he was more of an innovator than people think. The teenager who signed up to be a Navy pilot and the young husband who left leafy Greenwich for the desert wastes of West Texas oilfields pushed successfully for policies others hadn’t considered.Such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. This wasn’t a handout but, like the G.I. Bill which paid his tuition at Yale, opened opportunities for people to help themselves.The 1990 Clean Air Act was perhaps the last authentically bipartisan environment initiative. The FIRREA law mopping up the savings and loan mess was costly, producing one-third of the budget deficit, but also necessary and self-liquidating.Liberal journalists who have been praising Bush this week ridiculed him as a clueless preppie whose success was handed down to him — absurd given the risks he took in the Pacific and Texas. They’re still attacking him as a racist for his 1988 campaign ads that accurately attacked his opponent for defending for nine years the policy of granting weekend furloughs for prisoners sentenced to life without parole — a policy for which there is no rational argument.So why was this mostly successful president defeated resoundingly for a second term? One reason is that he broke his “read my lips” promise and agreed with Democrats to raise taxes. The tax increase fueled enthusiasm for Pat Buchanan’s insurgent primary campaign. And the NAFTA trade deal with Mexico — another original Bush initiative — helped Ross Perot make a different conservative case against him.But one other factor, I suspected then and believe now, was decisive: I think Bush was ready to retire. He had accomplished most of his goals, including some that had seemed impossible. He had enlisted in the Navy exactly 50 years before and spent more than 20 of the intervening years in public service.He had been elected president at age 64, older with one exception than all but three other past presidents when first elected (Harrison, Buchanan, Taylor) and two when re-elected (Jackson, Eisenhower). But the exception was conspicuous: Ronald Reagan, who had just carried 44 and 49 states at ages 69 and 73.In politics, success can be as fatal as a failure. Achieve some original bipartisan goals and neither party may want you anymore. Demonstrate mastery of foreign policy and voters may conclude they don’t need it anymore. Gracefully retire and Americans may gratefully if belatedly give thanks, as they have this past week.Why George H. W. Bush Is America’s Greatest One-Term PresidentBy David MarcusDECEMBER 6, 2018As we reflect upon the life and presidency of George H. W. Bush, it is only natural to wonder where he falls in the pantheon of our 45 presidents. These kinds of rankings are subjective and capricious, but nonetheless enjoyable and perhaps useful in helping us think about what we want from a president.As we look back over Bush’s four years in office, the decades have shined up the diamond. At his funeral yesterday, the speakers spoke of his myriad successes and accomplishments. After this most recent examination of his term, there appears to be a strong argument that H. W. Bush was the most successful one-term president in American history.Twenty-two of our 45 presidents have served only one term. For my purposes, I am only considering those who were not assassinated and who lost re-election after serving their first term. No Harry Truman, no John F. Kennedy, and no Lyndon Baines Johnson. That still leaves a few contenders.The ContendersTruly great men have been one-term presidents. John Adams, without whom we might still have kings and queens on our money, was a one-term president. But his was a presidency mired in political strife and controversy and, frankly, some illiberal tactics that make Trump calling the press the enemy of the people look like one of those CNN apples and banana ads. A great man is not always a great president.When I posited last night on Twitter that a strong argument could be made for Bush being the greatest one-term president I discovered an unfound corner of the Internet. Apparently, James Polk Twitter is a real thing, and these folks aren’t kidding. Almost every response I received was from a conservative claiming Polk is the greatest one-term president. I barely remembered that he’d been a president.Yes, Polk presided over the vast expansion of the United States from sea to shining sea. We may owe America the beautiful in some way to Polk, but surely we also owe him in no small part the Civil War. Polk created a tinderbox without thinking to provide water buckets. Ten years after H. W. Bush’s presidency, the United States was the global hegemonic superpower. Ten years after Polk’s, it was mired in a bloody battle it was lucky to survive.Another contender is William Howard Taft. He did, after all, fill six — count them, six — Supreme Court vacancies. He continued Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-corporate crusades. He had a fairly successful presidency that probably should have earned him a second term. But not unlike Bush, he faced a third-party candidacy, from that same Teddy Roosevelt and his new Progressive Party. Eighty years later, Ross Perot and the Reform Party would derail Bush in much the same way.The Case For BushFew presidents have ever been inaugurated into a world as dangerously in flux as Bush was. Certainly Abraham Lincoln. But the closer analogy is Truman. Truman took power as the United States was successfully completing World War II. In accomplishing that, he became the only man to ever launch a nuclear strike. Afterward, he had to help create a new Europe, one divided, in which a wall bifurcated Germany.H.W. Bush was president when that wall fell. Today we look back and think, Hey, we won the Cold War, great job, everybody. But we forget that suddenly thousands of nuclear weapons were under the control of a post-Soviet government about as well-organized as a Marx Brothers routine. Meanwhile, who knows what the future of Germany was to be? Was that really a gang we wanted to get back together? He healed the world with his kind and gentle soul. And we take that for granted far too much.H. W. Bush, the former head of the CIA and former ambassador to the United Nations, was the right man at the right time. As former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney made clear in his eulogy yesterday, Bush was absolutely essential in creating a new world order. Whatever you think of that, it has not plunged the world back into global war.In domestic policy, Bush ushered through the Americans with Disabilities Act, creating improved access to services and facilities for millions of Americans. This legislation sent the message that America is for everyone, that doors will not be closed. It was a piece of legislation that is still improving the lives of many Americans and making us a better country.Why He LostIf he was so good, why did he lose? Two and a half words: H. Ross Perot. Whether Perot cost Bush the 1992 election is a political science question for the ages. Well, I’m here to tell you, Perot cost Bush the election. Perot is without question the most overlooked and ignored political figure of the late 20th century. He and his Reform Party tapped into a constituency that never went away.Both parties ignored this faction, who were skeptical of globalism, immigration, and foreign adventures. Neoliberalism was the tonic that crafted the hairdos of both parties. But the Reformists lingered. They were enough to knock Bush out of office in ’92, but they weren’t enough to win until Donald Trump grafted the Reform agenda onto the GOP and defeated his son.Whether the Reform Party coup over the Republican Party is a good thing is an argument for another day. Maybe Bush and his sons are the last Republicans of their ilk. I doubt it. Time will tell.One thing seems clear: No one-term president had as smooth, successful, and meaningful a presidency as did George Herbert Walker Bush. It may be a dubious honor, but maybe not. Bush did what he thought was right, even when it meant going back on his sacred word about taxes. He did what he thought was right, and usually, it was. For Bush, one term should be enough to list him among the great presidents. We would be lucky to see his like again.David Marcus is the Federalist's New York Correspondent and the Artistic Director of Blue Box World, a Brooklyn based theater project. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.

Brexit may not be universally recognised as a disaster yet, but it is certainly shaping up that way.I do not judge Brexit as a failure because the nation has, or may ultimately, take steps that I may agree or disagree with.Brexit is a disaster because the nation is divided and is mired in a toxic conflict that has caused a catastrophic drop in the value of its money, eroded business confidence in our nation, and promises a decade or more of below trend growth - a bill that is currently running at about £455million a week of GDP.A successful democratic nation should be able to:-Make constructive changes in its legal, economic and political infrastructures without destroying 20% or more of its wealth and inflicting a decade or more of hardship on its people.Maintain confidence by communicating effectively with stakeholders to ensure they are able to tolerate and adjust to change.Agree on how to identify and quantify the value of the costs and benefits of change.Elect a legislature able to reflect the views of the electorate whilst building and maintaining consensus for constructive change.The UK has failed on all counts.By any measure Brexit is already a disaster, and is shaping up to get worse.WHAT IS A DISASTER AND HOW DO THEY HAPPEN?Humans have lots of experience predicting, preparing for, enduring and recovering from disasters. Natural disasters are usually a time when humans appear at their best - willing to help each other and put aside petty differences in the face of shared danger.Man-made disasters are a different situation altogether. They usually happen when circumstances cause three or more critical systems or safeguards to fail at once, unleashing destructive forces on the unwitting victims in ways that shake our confidence in our infrastructure.One failure in a system is not uncommon and so we are usually ready to spring into action and put it right. Two failures together are usually easy to identify, more difficult to deal with, but we can usually recover before anything really bad happens.Three or more failures together create multiple confusing warning signals, complex unexpected interactions, and distressing competing priorities that confuse our navigation systems and overwhelm our ability to focus on what is important and what to do next to stabilise and improve the situation.Brexit is emerging as the result of a sequence of failures in the UK political system - failures in representation, resourcing, and response to events.DISASTERS GERMINATE WHERE MAINTENANCE IS LACKINGWell maintained systems work at minimising the number of failures that can happen at once.Ships’ masters know this. Good masters keep their crews busy keeping the ship clean, tidy and well maintained. They do this, not because they are neat freaks (although some of them are), but because they know that maintenance activity uncovers and redresses the potential failures before they can become real failures that can combine to cause disasters.This means that everybody on duty on a well run ship is working at something, even when the ship is not moving. There is always something to be checked, cleaned and sorted out. And when they are not maintaining, they are practising drills, monitoring and improving. That means a well maintained ship costs money - even when it is not apparently doing the work it is being paid for. But it also means that it is always able to take looming disasters in its stride and reliably deliver on its mission.Organisations are similar. They need investment in routine maintenance or they suffer from failures that can prepare the ground for disaster. They need some surplus capacity to allow them to monitor and improve their efficiency and effectiveness so that they can continue to deliver on their missions.Every organisation under budget stress starts by cutting or deferring maintenance and eliminating surplus capacity. Then it starts to shed capabilities, knowing that it can only get away with discontinuing services to customers who are least able or likely to complain, defect or bite back.The UK ship of state has suffered from years of cuts to maintenance of its public services so that there is no surplus capacity to deal with emerging threats.There is also a long standing lack of maintenance in the link between the legislature and the voters - both at the national and EU levels.Many UK voters felt abandoned and ignored by representatives who seemed uninterested in them or their challenges. This found expression in an assertion of English nationalism, a movement that is much weaker in Scotland and Ireland where local assemblies have given a much greater sense of local control and self determination.The EU has not effectively communicated with the citizens of the UK. Ergo, individuals seldom understand the limits of its power, the workings of its organisations, or the benefits that its existence bestows upon the people of its member countries.WHY UK GOVERNMENT WAS RIPE FOR A DISASTERThe 2008 financial crisis destabilized the UK political system and landed it with enormous deficits - of finance and trust. The Conservative cure was a purge in pursuit of small government in the name of austerity - repeatedly cutting budgets everywhere that government touched for almost a decade in a quest to eliminate ‘waste’ and fix the national balance sheet.That set the scene for alienation up and down the land as reduction in government services exposed the weak and vulnerable and highlighted the growing inequality between the winners and losers of globalisation and technological change.Whatever its intended objective, its result was to further erode trust between the haves and have-nots, between the government and the governed, especially in the remoter areas where the governed rely upon government services, where the salaries of employees of all levels of government represented the solid core of the economic base, and where there are fewer alternatives.Perhaps if the UK had conducted referenda more frequently at each stage of treaty change with the EU - as was done in the Republic of Ireland - the electorate would have been more aware of the workings of the EU, more connected with its ideals and less likely to feel that UK politicians had been giving away sovereignty to a foreign body. More frequent referenda would have made the UK government and electorate more familiar with the unpredictability of referenda and better able to prepare the nation to consider the question without toxic conflict and division.SEARCHING FOR THE CULPRITWe are in the midst of a commemoration of the Great War 1914–1918 that happened 100 years ago. That commemoration raised our awareness of the past aggression of European dictatorships. That commemoration reminded the peoples of the nations of the EU, whose ancestors had exhausted themselves in war, of the reasons why they had resolved never again to be led down the path following dictators with glorious visions and grand slogans.This recollection was not evenly shared. As Hans Rosling highlights in his book Factfulness, humans formulate our world view during the years of our education. We adopt the world view of our teachers, and we tend to hang on to that world view (regardless of how the world has actually changed), only adjusting the parts of it that are updated by our personal experience.It is notable that the demographic group with the least formal education, educated by the adults who had endured World War 2, was the most likely to reject identity with the EU, and as part of Europe. That demographic is also most likely to be suspicious of Germans and to identify with the UK as the centre of a global empire - even though the UK has not had an empire for more than half a century in anything more than a cultural & linguistic sense. See Causes of the vote in favour of Brexit - Wikipedia.A belief that a large number of refugees and economic migrants from middle eastern (Syrian, Turkish, etc) and north African countries could find their way to the UK and that UK border controls would be powerless to stop them, also helped raise alarm and increased fear. There is a large gap between the reality and the stories promoted by the Leave campaign. But in a campaign dominated by lies, it becomes very difficult to separate outright lie from exaggeration. And both tend to drown out truth.Humans innately focus on the dramatic negative stories and automatically adopt them as evidence that the world is a more violent, scary and dangerous place than it really is. This keeps us alive by making us avoid danger, but it is usually wrong. On every measure, on average, the world is a better, more peaceful, healthier, richer place than our brains want to believe. See Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - WikipediaThe nations of continental Europe understand the threats they face from the east and the south, but they are not about to willingly follow a conquering leader to face another foe across another battleground. They are much more inclined to invite their neighbours to join the market and share in the decision making, and cling close to others who share that aspiration. And there is a steady queue of nations waiting for that opportunity.That same commemoration that united many of the people of Europe, has left some people in the UK asking themselves what the nation had gained from the peace that followed the wars of the last century. Where are the spoils of victory? What was it all for? And for many in this green and pleasant land, they could not see any evidence in their daily lives of any brave new world they felt their ancestors had sacrificed themselves for so gloriously.When offered the opportunity to name a culprit as a target of their ire, it is always easy to identify a foreigner - somebody we will never have to speak to, never have to recognise as human like us - somebody upon whom we can lay the blame of all our troubles and attribute whatever motives we care to, safe in the knowledge that they will not be able to defend themselves or contradict our argument - however specious or illusory.The EU is the perfect target. It is an organisation created by treaties between sovereign nations. It has no agenda other than the consensus of the agendas of its members. Some of its leaders enthusiastically embrace closer union, some less so. There are so many people who have at one time made statements about what the EU does, or should or could do, that we can pick and choose any of them, from any time recent or distant, regardless of how close or distant they are from the truth of actual EU policy or implementation.We can choose any anecdote of an encounter with an EU bureaucrat or agency, any single phrase from any single speech from any single person and allege whatever motive suits our argument. And we can do so with impunity because divining the true direction of the EU, and reporting it impartially to us, is within the job description of relatively few people in the UK.Most of our understanding of the EU’s intention is filtered through the partisan lens of our government’s elected officials who are very happy to have a scapegoat, or somebody outside our tribe to identify as the source of our difficulties.I am not discounting the view of people who truly believe that EU and UK government cultures are incompatible. They may be correct in some respects. The EU has been proactive in addressing significant issues such as climate change, data rights and food security. The EU has taken steps that the UK government was unwilling to initiate, even though it would be unwilling to contravene or reverse them. This allowed UK politicians to blame the EU rather than take tough decisions or defend wise but unpalatable policies.And, it is beyond question that the UK can be successful outside the EU. But it is difficult to find solid evidence that the UK can be more economically successful outside the EU than inside it, particularly if the EU could be reformed in ways that the UK public could and would find desirable.It is incontrovertible that the transition will impose substantial losses and damage upon some individuals, businesses, and regions if the transition is not well managed. Ignoring those losses is not likely to make the project easier to manage or increase the credibility of the leadership.It is difficult to conduct constructive relationships with our neighbours if a large part of our population falsely believe that our neighbours are malevolent and wish us evil. Any initiatives for change in those relationships is likely to fail to achieve an optimum if we are defensive and delusional. Any compromise is made harder to achieve if a negotiation is approached with an assumption of bad faith arising from unwarranted paranoia.WHAT FAILURES CREATED BREXIT?Brexit has been characterised by several failures:-A failure of connection between large numbers of voters and their elected representatives that created a sense that UK politicians had, for decades, being capitulating to foreign powers without the consent of the voters.A failure of awareness of the reality of the EU, its motives and processes among a demographic who’s experience is local and whose worldview was acquired during and in the aftermath of WW2.A failure of trust in UK government and its ability to improve the experience of its people caused by the financial crisis and the long period of austerity that followed.A failure of awareness of the true causes and full impacts of economic hardship, austerity and globalisation among the political leadership and many of their supporters.A failure by the UK government to anticipate the strength of feeling and to prepare the nation for change in a constructive fashion.A failure to build a consensus around a positive vision of the benefits of Brexit and adjustment measures to avoid costs offsetting the benefits.DID BREXIT FOLLOW A GOOD PROCESS?Brexit requires changes to hundreds of legal, commercial, administrative and social relationships affecting every aspect of life in the UK and our partners in the EU. Managing Brexit is Change Management on a national scale.Change management is a well understood discipline. Change management - WikipediaChange management in large organisations follows a well defined process of investigation, consensus building and implementation punctuated by some decision-making thresholds and periodic reviews. Those review points ensure the work is done properly before moving on to the next stage, and that the change programme is kept harmonised with the organisation’s objectives.Well-run change management programmes invest early in fact finding and consensus building so that the changes are understood, accepted and embraced by all concerned, and the business-as-usual does not suffer during the transitions. Sorting out the conflict ridden issues early on allows the programme to pick up speed and momentum as it achieves quick wins and gains confidence to tackle the tougher goals.Poorly prepared change management programmes often struggle to get started and repeatedly get bogged down by:-internal conflict about objectives and priorities;resistance from parties who have real unaddressed issues that they feel are being ignored;unforeseen pitfalls that could have been recognised and avoided by consultation and planning;crises of confidence in leadership; andresource shortages resulting from poor preparation.Did Brexit follow a process that benefited from the body of knowledge used by Change Managers? Not so much. In fact, not at all.Here are some of the obvious signs that this change management project is not being well managed.IMPROPER MOTIVES DESTROY TRUST: We STARTED with a referendum, not so we could explore whether Brexit could be a good idea with positive potential, but mainly so we could “deal with the bastards”. Because everybody who has a major grievance, and wants the government to do something about it, must be a bastard. NOT.DEPARTURE BEFORE IDENTIFYING DESTINATION: By passing the referendum, we decided to leave the EU, BEFORE reaching any consensus about where to arrive, in the midst of an argument about why we were leaving. Less like an orderly departure, more like a mass panic.CONFUSED AUTHORITY: We told the voters that the referendum was ‘advisory’ when the true believers knew very well that if it didn’t happen there would be hell to pay. Parliament is sovereign and nobody can tell parliament what to do, and we want parliament to take back control, that is why we had a referendum to tell parliament to take back control, but only in the nicest possible advisory tone of voice, so parliament can work out what ‘take back control’ means, …. Completely clear. A bit like telling a gunman that he is in charge and you are going to do exactly what he asks, except that you both know you are going to hit him on the head, or try to run away at the first opportunity. That’s a normal way to behave in a democracy…NOT.CONFLICT BASED ON MISUNDERSTANDING : In the referendum, we allowed the campaigners to paint signs on buses promoting lies and fabrications that were argued about because nobody had enough time or money to actually do the proper research to reach an agreed view of the truth, and a full understanding of the problems we were trying to solve, so the voters had to decide based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations and gut feel, which led to accusations of stupidity because it is impossible to reconcile financial and non-financial goals. That is usually how sensible people make important complex decisions involving large amounts of money, with big risks of loss or damage to lots of people. NOT.DEPARTURE BEFORE PREPARATION: We gave notice (Article 50) that we were leaving BEFORE starting to discuss the terms or what we might do to adjust, or even WHERE we were going to. That is exactly how you left your last marriage, and that turned out alright - after a few months of couch surfing, and a lot of shouting, and an ABO, and ….COMMITMENT BEFORE INVESTIGATION: We waited to start a parliamentary investigation into the impacts of Brexit until AFTER we decided when it would happen. Why would we want to waste money on research about whether it will solve the problems, until we are committed to do it…? We always sell the house BEFORE we have decided where we want to live or why we are moving. NOT.FAILURE TO PLAN: We stop the government departments most impacted from doing any scenario planning for Brexit until after we know it is going to happen. Oh, yes, about that, we are going to need quite a lot of new civil service people to do all the things that Brussels has been doing for us, like negotiating rather a lot of trade deals in a very short time … so we better hire some people in Westminster. Look, turns out we’ve had enough austerity - at least in Whitehall.ALLOWING DISTRACTIONS: We have an election half way through the process so that the leadership is over a barrel and cannot function without worrying whether the extremists are too close to the big red button that makes the government blow up. Don’t you just love a bit of excitement? This is much more fun than austerity and national debt and budget cuts. Government is not supposed to be predictable or apparently well managed or in control of leading change - is it?ACTIVELY DESTROYING TRUST: We go into the negotiation treating it like a poker game where the publicly discussed objective is to trick the EU into making a deal that is good for us and bad for them so we can make off with the winnings before they realise how they have been outsmarted. It’s not like we are ever going to see them again…INADEQUATE PREPARATION: We keep everybody guessing until a few weeks before the actual departure date and then deliver an enormous report full of vague conditional promises so that the businesses and departments most affected don’t have enough time to understand all the impacts or make preparations. … and we promise to build a big car park so that the truck drivers can go to the pub while the new border control staff work out which boxes have to be ticked. Why should businesses get any time to prepare? It’s not like they employ anybody or make anything… And the truck drivers will enjoy a couple of pints and a snooze. What’s not to like?FAILURE TO SEEK ADVICE: When the lawyers finally get to understand what we have negotiated, and they tell us what the fine print actually means, we say “Don’t you worry about that… because we really WANT it to mean something else much better.” We don’t usually take legal advice to find out what the fine print means BEFORE we sign a contract, do we…?HOW SHOULD MAJOR CHANGE BE DONE?Next time we want a Brexit that is not a disaster, we must:-START with a Royal Commission or a parliamentary enquiry (i.e. run by serious credible people able to see all sides of the argument) that defines:-What problems we are trying to solve.What the costs and benefits will be in detail.What is the optimum future relationship with our neighbours and trading partners;Is Brexit the best way of achieving it?If so, which type of Brexit might be best. Many a salesman has been justifiably criticized for having a solution in search of a problem. That is not a salesman you want to spend a lot of time with unless you actually have that precise problem, and their solution is the best one available. So, doing the work together to understand the problem and identify all the available solutions is a good way to make sure everybody is on the same page. Because being on the same page stops you wasting a lot of time and money and avoids conflict that comes from misunderstandings.When that work has been done, we start building a consensus of public opinion for the best option - or perhaps the 2 or 3 best options. This is important because some people will always resist any proposal for change, but there will be less opposition if the true believers can prove that there are wise adults in charge of the process, that they have identified what is best for the whole nation, have delivered the evidence, and are willing to hear criticism and refine their proposals; rather than just following some charismatic leader with a great slogan who doesn’t care if he leads his followers lemming-like over a cliff, whilst calling the dissenters “traitors” or “doom-mongers”. Ask the Germans, they know what being led over a cliff feels like, and they won’t let it happen again.Then we open a negotiation with the stakeholders with skin in the game (the EU, Irish, Gibraltarians & Spanish, the government agencies and businesses that will be affected, etc), treating everybody as if we are all partners trying to help each other get the best outcome, and we try to find out how to adapt the proposals so everybody wins, and check whether our early assumptions are correct. We will probably discover some new pitfalls to avoid, and maybe some new benefits or other problems that can be solved at the same time. We can keep the public informed so that they don’t get their expectations up for something that turns out to be unachievable or impossibly expensive. This helps to keep everybody on the same page, and then everybody feels they can trust each other.Then we announce the final refined details of the best options and give the voters enough time to analyse the evidence for themselves and compare and ask questions, and we hold a referendum to decide which of the 2 or 3 alternatives are most popular. Note that this is step 4, not step 1.Then we put the legislation to parliament with a detailed schedule of changes and timing and adjustment programmes allowing enough time for the people who are impacted to take the necessary steps to adjust. And if anything important has changed, parliament can speed up the process or slow it down, or change the plans, to keep the project on track and get the best result for everybody.Then we implement the legislation; the stakeholders get busy with their adjustment programmes; and the nation exits on schedule and transitions to the agreed position with a minimum of fuss and confusion.Then we head to the pub and pat yourselves on the back for being efficient and effective managers of change, and we note that nobody complained about treachery or called anybody a traitor. And we can be pleased that everybody is still talking to their neighbours and relatives, even though they have just been through an enormous once-in-a-generation change. And over a few beers, we review everything that happened so that we can learn from any mistakes we made and get ready to do it again next time, only better and cheaper and faster.Along the way a few diehard people complain, but almost everybody says that it really was not such a big deal because, just like the millenium bug, we all had time to understand the impact and get ready for it, we could see that the process was well managed and beneficial, and so when it happened the few problems we encountered were expected and taken in our stride.FACT OR FICTION - EVIDENCE OR GUT FEEL?The implications of Brexit are many and varied - incalculably so. In the absence of hard evidence of impact to the nation, many voters approached their decision based on a few bad experiences with an EU agency, or a bad impression of what the EU was willing or able or likely to do. When questioned afterwards, many voters identified “taking back control” as the dominant motive for voting to leave, despite the fact that few could identify any real issue for which taking back control would impact their lives in a positive fashion. Is that a sound basis for a decision as complex as Brexit with such far reaching implications in so many different aspects of life? Arguably not.The fact that many millions of people made their decision like that does not increase the referendum result’s credibility - it makes it more suspect. And those lingering doubts leap to the surface at the first sign of trouble, fueling the passion of the resisters and eroding the resolve of the all but the most paranoid supporters.It is perhaps most disturbing that the project leadership are so fond of slogans and simplistic analogies that are at best meaningless, at worst misleading. Treating Brexit like leaving a marriage or resigning from a sporting club is simplistic in the extreme and encourages the view that the UK can be unreasonable or mercenary without consequences. Relationships with national neighbours are far more complex, of much longer duration, of far greater value to more people, and far more significant in their consequences if badly handled than any simple sporting club membership or even a marriage. The nation cannot “leave town” and assume we will never need to see or speak to our neighbours again. We cannot strive for a deal that leaves our neighbours aggrieved or disadvantaged without real consequences now and in the future for large numbers of people on both sides of the borders. The major lesson of the two wars of the 20th century is that ultimately we must all live together, and that our failure to adequately resolve the underlying causes of our conflicts will create problems that must be dealt with by our children and grandchildren.It is important to invest early in the process to ensure that the project is proceeding on the basis of facts and widely accepted evidence. Starting out on the basis of gut feel and false assumptions is likely, at best, to waste time and money heading off in the wrong directions pursuing solutions that don’t work or creating unnecessary damage. At worst, we can destroy trust and confidence in the project leadership so effectively that the whole effort gets cancelled as being misconceived and damaging. Discounting critics as doom-mongers and traitors does not avoid problems - it increases the likelihood of being mugged by reality. It is increases the chances of suffering from avoidable problems that were foreseen but were intentionally ignored. That is the situation we are facing now.The first stage of the process is arguably quite expensive and time consuming because there is a lot of talking about things that some people want to change and other people want to keep the same. But that is usually a good thing in a democracy because it helps people understand their neighbours’ point of view; and stops people feeling grumpy because they think they are being ignored and left behind.WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?The credibility of the project leadership has been damaged, perhaps fatally, and many stakeholder relationships have been fractured. So, getting everybody back on the same page will take some work and some time, and a lot of apologies all round.It will be especially difficult to get the people who have fallen in love with the project - the ardent Brexiteers - to accept:-That navigation is about understanding where we are AND where we are trying to get to. If we have a referendum to tell the pilot what course to steer, it is not enough to just decide we want to leave - we need to be clear that we all agree where we are going, what we will find when we get there and whether we can afford the journey. That applies not only to Brexit but also to the coming decades when the UK must find a new place in the world outside the EU.The passengers need to know that there is adequate fuel and supplies on board for the journey, and that the leadership is united - both in their direction and destination. Otherwise we will find the passengers getting in the way shouting loudly that this is not the voyage they signed up for. That is what we have now.A democratic decision is only as good as the information available to the decision makers. We cannot hold each other to our past decisions if we have discovered new information that suggests a different decision is better. Current information indicates that the most likely long term outcome is that the UK will rejoin the EU after a decade or more of decline and hardship.A good course to a distant destination often means not striking out directly heading for where we think we want to be. We might have to make some detours around the rocks, go out of our way to benefit from some favourable winds, or pause along the way to make sure everybody is keeping up.It will be necessary also to get the Remain supporters to accept:-That the UK can be successful outside the EU because we are implementing a well defined programme of reforms that will make it fit for success in its new context. The reforms must be specified and discussed and agreed before committing so that there is some sense that the whole project is well thought out and is not the result of a mad deluded extortionist forcing the government to drag the nation into something they don’t believe will succeed.That the whole project is a long term visionary plan with good prospects of success because it is being reassessed at each stage by realistic and perceptive managers open to all input, and the course will be modified if appropriate.Democracy is important. It is very important to us in the UK. But we must accept that good decision making requires the decision makers to have a good grip on all the relevant facts before they make their decision, and keep a grip on events as they change so they can respond appropriately. Witnessing our leadership being reluctantly held to a vague past referendum decision by a small group of extremists, regardless of poor quality information and changed circumstances, is not democracy - its stupidity or tyranny depending on your point of view. On a ship, it is always a bad idea. And it scares the pants off the passengers.Insulting your critics by calling them morons or traitors or doom-mongers is well below the standard of response we need in a modern democracy. Evidence is good. Reasoned debate based on good evidence is better. Criticism based on evidence that leads to improvement is ideal.Ideally, we need to go back to the beginning and do the work that should have been done assembling the evidence by a credible authority, and revising the plan accordingly. Most of the hard work has been done by now, but much of it has been done defensively by some people trying to justify their positions. And there has been no effort to reach consensus on an agreed view of the facts - what the problems are, and what our longer term objective should be beyond Brexit.It is impossible to move the nation forward if we cannot agree which direction we should be moving in. Worse still, if we head off in the wrong direction based on faulty guidance and incorrect maps, imagining we will reach the destination, not only will it not be there, but we will probably have to retrace some of our steps, get some new maps and systems and do it all again in the right direction. That is the sort of waste of time and money that erodes trust in leaders, governments and navigators alike.Then we need to reassess the negotiated agreements to see whether they will help us to get to our objective, or perhaps whether something different would be better for all of us - including our partners. International treaties and trading arrangements are too important and fluid for us to get dogmatic about. We need to be constantly reviewing to make sure we are always heading for the best outcome and not getting tripped up or sidelined.The ship of state is constantly in motion. We have very good guidance systems in parliament. And they can get better with some refinement and some better feedback systems. We should be focusing on ensuring that they understand what we want, and let them get on with sailing the ship, only resorting to referenda when it is clear that they cannot move forward. And we should only expect a referendum to decide how to break that deadlock, not impose constraints on parliament that make it unable to steer us out of the storms that lie ahead.If we find that referenda are necessary to keep the electorate in touch with each step of constitutional change, we need to improve the quantity and quality of referenda, and ensure that the electorate is properly prepared with comprehensive fact based briefings by credible independent authorities that ensure each step is taken deliberately in an agreed direction, rather than allowing the nation to dissolve into mud-slinging and insults because we have not done the work necessary to understand all aspects of the problem.

1. Improve Engagement to Improve RankingsSimply put, engagement is the ability to hold a user’s attention. In SEO terms, it is a measure of the amount of time spent on a page.Although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that this search engine giant does reward sites with strong user engagement with higher page ranking.Research from SimilarWeb found a positive correlation between engagement metrics and search rankings and a study of 1 million search results by Backlinkofound a similar correlation between bounce rate and rankings.Google’s reasoning is that if a user spends more time on a page, it’s probably because she found the page useful. And since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).So how can you improve your site’s engagement?Here are five tactics you can use to give your existing content a boost in search engines:A) Format Your Posts for Easier ReadingGood formatting can instantly improve your page’s readability. This, in turn, can improve your engagement rate. According to eye-tracking studies, the following three formatting tactics can help increase your content readability:Shorter paragraphs: Limit each paragraph to 2-3 sentences at most. It’s even okay to use one-sentence paragraphs if necessary, but use them sparingly or your post will look like a bullet-pointed blog without the bullets.Shorter sentences: Longer sentences are hard to follow onscreen. When possible, break longer sentences into multiple shorter sentences.Sub-headers: People don’t read on the web; they scan. To make scanning easier, use plenty of clear and informative sub-headers to guide readers down a page.Bullet points: When you have a lot of data — stats, facts, ideas, examples — packed into one paragraph (like this one!), it makes it easier to scan when you list them with bullet points.Here’s an example of poor formatting:Knowledge of the existence of the Law of Attraction is a huge benefit in itself. Most people live their entire life and never realize that there thoughts are creating their reality. When one discovers this universal truth the entire world begins to open up. After much hard work and practice you will begin to see life-changing and long -lasting results from utilizing the techniques and strategies taught here. There are many ways to use the law including through daily affirmations, visualizations, goal setting, changing think patterns and of course tapping into the universal storehouse of information.Most people live their entire lives and never realize that their thoughts are creating their reality.After much hard work and practice you will begin to see life-changing and long -lasting results from utilizing the techniques and strategies taught here.Here are some ways you can use the law of Attraction to your benefitDaily affirmationsVisualizationsGoal settingsChanging link patternsB) Use Bucket BrigadesA “bucket brigade” is a copywriting technique designed to keep capture a reader’s interest and keep them on your page.It essentially involves breaking an idea into multiple sentences, using a trigger word or phrase (as simple as “Look.” Or as lengthy as “The secret to great copywriting is this”) and then ending the sentence with a colon.Look at this example from Backlinko:C) Use Images Throughout Your ContentIncluding professional, high-quality images (photos, graphs) throughout your content is an easy yet powerful way to increase engagement. For one, images help you show an idea, not just tell it (a picture tells a thousand words, right?).Secondly, images help you break content into different sections. And finally, people just like pretty pictures.For example, take a look at how Growth Everywhere uses images to clearly illustrate the step-by-step content in How To Do A Content Cleanup (And Grow Your Organic Traffic):On Single Grain, charts and screenshots are frequently used to divide up content into separate sections, like this example from The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Advertising:D) Write in the Inverted Pyramid StyleIf you went to journalism school, you know all about the inverted pyramid style of writing:This method means giving away the most valuable information at the top of the article, and following it up with less important information. If readers tend to scan and rarely make it to the bottom of an article, it makes sense to give them what they want as soon as they land on the page.E) Improve Your Bounce RateWriting well, delivering value, and proper formatting only go so far. Another key part of engagement is lowering your bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who land on your website and leave without interacting further.Bounce rates can be raised by a number of factors, from incorrect implementation to poorly designed landing pages.More often than not, however, high bounce rates result from poor usability and an awkward user experience (UX). While these problems vary from site to site, they are very easily remedied with several popular online tools, such as:Crazyegg – Clever and intuitive, Crazyegg helps subscribers rate and understand user experience with their rich visual aids like heatmaps, scrollmaps, confetti, and overlays.Each of these are graphic representations of one aspect of UX.For instance, heat maps are colorful representations of where users have clicked on your site, while scrollmaps show you just how far down the page your users scroll before leaving.With this data, it’s possible to figure out what your best design features (or flaws) are, and correct them accordingly. Here’s an example of a heatmap that shows you where visitors clicked:Optimizely – Founded by Dan Stocker, the man behind the digital component of Barack Obama’s highly successful digital campaign of 2008, Optimizely specializes in A/B testing—a scientific, data-driven way to test websites for maximum usability and engagement.In A/B testing, multiple versions of a web page are randomly shown to users, compared against a control page (generally the existing website), and then analyzed for effect.The biggest advantage of a proper A/B testing process is that marketers can understand how even the tiniest changes can positively affect their website, such as moving the buy button to the left or changing its color from red to blue.Take a look at the sample A/B test below from 5 Important Landing Page Elements You Should be A/B Testing:In this test, hygiene company L’Axelle is trying out different headlines, pitting a comfort-oriented headline against an action-oriented one. The change is subtle, but it’s there.It’s clear that A/B testing is an integral part of both the copywriting and the UX design process.The genius of Optimizely is that it massively simplifies something that would otherwise require a team of dedicated, experienced UX designers and researchers to carry out.Image Source: OptimizelyGoogle Optimize – Along the same lines, Optimize by Google Analytics also assists marketers in improving and maximizing customer engagement and conversion. As a free version of its Optimize 360 program, Google’s Optimize is a streamlined, user-friendly software that simplifies A/B testing and includes advanced modeling to improve engagement and targeted experiences.But perhaps the biggest draw of Optimize is that it seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics, allowing marketers to further leverage their existing resources.With Optimize, marketers can use existing Analytics metrics as a starting point, which allows them to rely on a familiar interface as they move on to deeper and more complicated experiments.Here’s a shot of the Google Optimize user screen. Notice that it givesrecommendations and suggestions for the optimal interface.User Experience Research Platform – While Google Optimize and Optimizely are essentially DIY UX tools for marketers and small business owners, User Testing.com is far more specialized. In its most basic form, User Testing is more of a pure research tool, gathering commentary from target audiences and offering marketers detailed videos of user interaction and behavior.Pro Plan subscribers, however, have the option of receiving the help of UX professionals who will conduct research, analyze user behavior, and measure and benchmark. In this form, User Testing.com - Buckley Media Group: The Exclusive Brokers for Testing.com offers customers the benefits of an in-house UX team at a fraction of the cost.Don’t Make Me Think – These four tools are some of the best UX testing programs available today. Yet one of the best UX resources isn’t digital, but rather a book: Don’t Make Me Think, a groundbreaking work by UX designer Steve Krug that has sold 100,000 copies over 5 years.Witty, entertaining and down-to-earth, Don’t Make Me Think offers actionable advice and useful mindsets for novices and veterans alike.With its conversational tone and engaging manner, Krug’s work gets readers into the habit of critically examining and rethinking everything about their websites, including even the tiniest details, like misplaced buttons or unwieldy site maps.Google Search Console – Click-through rates, or how often viewers click on your ads after seeing them, are some of the most important metrics of success and failure. A high CTR reflects positively on your content and advertising, and in turn widens your funnel for more prospects to enter, engage with your brand and content, and ultimately close, be it in the form of purchases or subscriptions.There’s also strong evidence that click-through rates will influence your website’s Google search ranking, though this is difficult to confirm given the company’s secrecy surrounding their algorithms. Either way, improving CTR is absolutely a good investment for the long-term health of your business.Luckily, there are programs like Google Search Console and Tableau, which allow marketers to identify critical keywords which are performing (or underperforming) for their position, understand why and, most importantly, quickly visualize the terms and pages to target. With these programs, marketers can turn around underperforming terms by rewriting titles and descriptions, thereby increasing CTR and drumming up traffic.Learn More: 10 Google Search Console Hacks to Boost SEOFree Bonus Download: Get our free SEO guide to learn how you can skyrocket your rankings, even in a competitive niche! Click here to download it for free2. Make Your Existing Pages LongerA recent study by Backlinko concluded that the longer the content, the higher the likelihood of it ranking at the top of the SERPs.However, writing 2,000+ words for every blog post is not for everyone; it’s an intensive, time-consuming process. Instead, it’s much easier to take a page from 1,200 words to 2,000 words than to go from 0 words to 2,000 words.Existing content already has authority and an established readership. So rather than writing something entirely from scratch, it’s much simpler to find a post of yours that is already doing well on Google, refresh it with updated information and extra content, and rely on existing signals to make it rank for terms.Here’s how you do it. First, under “Search Traffic” in Google Search Console, click on “Search Analytics.”On this page, check “Position” and select “Pages”:Try to find pages that are ranking between positions 11-30 on Google. These are ideal candidates for additional content that can increase their rankings.3. Focus on YouTube SEO55% of all keyword searches on Google return at least one video and 82% of those videos are from YouTube.YouTube is also the second most popular search engine with more than 3 billion searches per month, surpassing Bing and Yahoo combined.Focusing on YouTube SEO will push your website onto the first page on Google and get you traffic from YouTube as well.A) Make Your Video SEO FriendlyThe filename, the title, the description—all these elements affect your rankings.Video Title – Crafting a compelling video title is a balancing act—you have to make the title SEO friendly and make it clickable. Ideally, you should follow the same convention in your video titles as you would in your blog posts: to get clicks and shares, include keywords as well as power words.Here’s a great example:Another tactic is to use your keywords at the start of the title, then add a sub-header after a colon to drive clicks. Here’s an example:At the very least, your title should have 5+ words and include a broad target keyword. This will not only help you rank in SERPs but also get you more clicks on YouTube.Learn More: 20 Ways to Grow Your SEO RankingsVideo Description – Because Google’s spiders can’t “read” videos, they will rely on your written description to determine what your video is actually about. So instead of just throwing in some target keywords, try creating short blog posts that describe your video content in detail.It can be as short as this example from Growth Everywhere:This tells Google—as well as your readers—exactly what your video is about. Since most of your competitors aren’t doing it, it will also help you rank way faster.B) Make Longer VideosLike content, longer videos tend to do better in YouTube search.Try it yourself: type in a popular keyword or topic and see what shows up at the top of the page. For example, here’s what you’ll see when you type in “wordpress”:Or when you search for “photography tips”:Try to make your videos at least 5 minutes long. As with written content, longer videos tend to get the most traction.C) Use Better Video ThumbnailsA better video thumbnail won’t necessarily help with your SEO, but like a great headline, it will help you get more clicks. This means that you can often earn more views than higher ranked results, all thanks to your choice of thumbnail.A strong thumbnail should tell viewers exactly what the video is about. Try to use a compelling image along with a title card. Here’s an example:4. Improve Site SpeedBack in 2010, Google announced that it would be using site speed as a ranking factor and since then, Google has consistently emphasized the importance of site speed.First, it launched the PageSpeed tool to help developers improve site performance, followed by the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to boost speed on mobile sites.Recently, it launched another tool called Think with Google to help gauge how responsive (or mobile-friendly) a site is, which includes speed as a parameter.Clearly, Google wants your website to load faster than it is right now. But how fast?Unfortunately, the exact definition of “site speed” is open to speculation. According to the surveys done by Akamai and Gomez, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. If the site fails to launch in 3 seconds, there is a good chance they’ll abandon it.You should work on your site’s speed not only to work your way up Google’s rankings, but also to increase conversions. For instance, one survey found that nearly 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance won’t return to the site to buy again.While improving site speed is a pretty big topic, check out this HubSpot article to improve page load times.A) Use Kraken.io Image Optimizer to Optimize ImagesImages are usually the largest components on any site (in terms of file size). By compressing them, you can often cut down page size by 30-40%.A quick way to do this is to use Kraken.io. This tool automatically compresses all images uploaded to your WordPress blog. It also has an API to make image compression for non-WordPress sites easier.B) Use Browser CachingCaching is the mechanism for temporarily storing web data such as HTML pages and images in order to reduce bandwidth usage.If you’re on WordPress, enabling browser caching is as simple as installing a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.For non-WordPress sites, browser caching is a little trickier. One quick way to do it is to change your .htaccess file. Follow the instructions here to learn how to do this.C) Content Delivery NetworkA CDN is a network of servers based throughout the globe. When visitors access your website, they are delivered the site from a server that is as close to their physical location as possible, thereby improving site speed.Using a CDN is a easy fix to instantly improve site speed and will have an immediateimpact on site performance.A quicker way to improve your page performance is by using browser add-ins like YSlow to determine the exact bottlenecks and propose respective fixes.This tool will help you monitor your website and list all the factors that are dragging down the site’s speed. They also suggest best practices to follow to achieve the same. The best part is the suggested fixes are described in non-technical language which can be comprehended by anyone.Here are some more technical changes you can make to further improve your site load speed:Load JavaScripts at the Bottom: Take those script tags you see in any javascript webpage, and move them to the end of the page. You’ll see a significantimprovement in page load performance. This is one of Google’s crucial performance metrics when displaying search results.Lazy load images – This change will reduce the page load time drastically. Lazy loading basically avoiding to load all images on initial page load. In other words, load them after the user scrolls to that section of the page.Here’s atutorial that lists a bunch of ways you can modify your images to save your bandwidth.5. Focus on Topics Instead of KeywordsImage Source: MozGoogle is evolving and so is its algorithm. Its objective now is to understand the intention of the users: what users expect, what they are looking for, and more specifically, what search results would best help answer their query.Plus, for an increasingly large number of queries (19.45% to be exact), Google shows “rich results” that include the best answer at the top of the results:In 2017, don’t expect your website to end up on the first page of Google simply by creating keyword-focused content. Tom Anthony from Moz concludes, “We need to stop looking at keywords and starting looking at queries.”In short, you must consider what your users are looking for rather than coming up with different ways that users can phrase a search query. Here are two things in particular you should consider:A) Know Your Target AudienceWhat kind of content you’ll create will depend on your audience. The better you know them—their location, age, and likes—the better the content you’ll create (and the better your SEO).For example, suppose your keyword tool shows that “android” has a lot of search volume. People searching for it could fall into several categories:Mobile users searching for Android helpStar Wars fans looking for droidsRobotics enthusiasts looking for information about androidsWithout knowing your target audience, you might end up creating content for all these topics, which would win you neither readers nor good rankings. By building a detailed buyer persona, you’ll be better able to zero in on topics that matter to your readers.B) Organize Content into “Themes”Instead of focusing on standalone keywords, organize all your content into different “themes.”For example, if you run a website about WordPress, you might have three types of readers:Casual bloggers who are taking the first steps with using WordPressExperienced users who want to learn WordPress tips and tricksEntrepreneurs who want to use WordPress to build their businessesTo target each of these types of readers, you can organize your content into different themes that cover multiple topics, such as:How to Use WordPress for Business (topics: WordPress marketing plugins, marketing advice, etc.)How to Optimize WordPress (topics: WordPress customization, WordPress development, etc.).How to Build Your First WordPress Blog (topics: Installing WordPress, essential WordPress plugins, etc.).This is far more reader-friendly than simply creating content for specific keywords.C) Research Keywords—and Use Them SparinglyAt the same time—keywords still matter. Organizing content thematically is very important, but it’s a mistake to ignore keywords entirely, given that they serve as signposts to Google’s spiders, signaling topics and giving hints as to the nature of the content on the website.Still, the keyword aspect of SEO is becoming increasingly difficult with Google Adwords hiding volume data.Luckily, there are a number of tricks and tools that can help marketers find topics and volume data. Google itself is a good way to get related search ideas. Just type “sushi restaurants in San Francisco” into the search bar of Google Chrome and you’ll be presented with carousels of related images at the bottom of the page, such as the names of specific restaurants or dishes to order.This is a strong hint for developers to include these topics in their content, or to create pages to leverage these related images.Read on for some extremely useful tools that can help you find and optimize keywords:Keyword Explorer by Moz – A one-stop shop from the SEO specialists at Moz, Keyword Explorer is a versatile, dynamic program that covers nearly every aspect of the keyword process. With Keyword Explorer, marketers can brainstorm keywords, build lists and filter them by topic; you can analyze metrics, click-through rates and other measures of effectiveness; and you can even spy on and assess keywords used by your business rivals.SEMRush – Another great tool for SEO analysis, particularly where it concerns business intelligence, SEMRush allows you to identify and analyze the keywords that your competitors are using. Enter your competitor’s URL into the SEMRush search bar and you’ll be provided with a list of SEO keywords, along with their rankings and traffic. For instance, a search on Title Boxing, one of the most popular online boxing and kickboxing retailers, yields 60,500 organic searches for the term “punching bag” (sixth overall), as well as 49,500 results for “title boxing,” the name of both their in-house brand and retail store.Interestingly, SEMRush also allows users to use a competitive positioning map, where they can see overall website traffic and keywords: Title Boxing boasts 120.9k in search traffic and 15.3k in keywords, far outpacing their closest competitors.Ahrefs – An extremely versatile company, Ahrefs offers a wide range of products, including backlink checkers, content explorers and position trackers. For our purposes, however, we will focus on their expansive, adaptable Keywords Explorer, which allows marketers to search nearly 3 trillion keywords in over 170 countries, assessing metrics like keyword difficulty, click-through rates, related keyword lists and search volume.When considering which keyword tools to use, look for something that allows you to monitor a high volume of keywords broken down by relevant themes. Additionally, the best tools must ensure that you can track all your competitors, from large corporations to small, up-and-coming firms.As always, go for quality and not quantity. It’s better to get 10 conversions from 100 visitors than it is to get 10 conversions from 1,000 visitors. Rather than casting a too-wide net, focus on keywords and topics that are within your niche, ones that you can optimize for and be the authority on. Fill in these gaps and establish yourself as an expert in this smaller field before tackling larger and broader keywords where the competition is much fiercer.6. Build BacklinksDespite what you might have heard, building backlinks is still crucial for good rankings.As per Moz, a site’s backlink profile is still the most reliable indicator of its eventual rankings. Another Moz study shows that without backlinks, it is nearly impossible to rank well, even if you have great content.Image Source: MozWhat has changed is the way you must build backlinks if you want good results. Low-quality links that are easily spammed—blog comments, paid links, etc.—don’t seem to work anymore and can actively harm your site.Links that are earned—through high-quality content, outreach and influencer marketing—on the other hand, are safe and extremely effective.7. Reporting and AnalyticsA critical part of SEO is reporting and analytics, which are indispensable to improving marketing strategies. By setting up an analytics platform to track both micro and macro events, you can understand your customer’s journey from your sales and marketing funnel.For instance, what content really appealed to your customer? What part of the website had the most UX issues? Which page was the least (or most) visited, and why?A) DatastudioHaving the ability to tie online data back to offline data to get a full 360 view of how your content and marketing is performing.One great tool to help you do this is Google Datastudio, which helps you aggregate data from multiple sources (rankings, traffic, conversion data) into a single interface. You can even share your data internally or with clients. Most importantly, these metrics can help you determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and whether you need to pivot or change tactics.Along those lines, always be on the lookout to see what your competitors are doing, and how well it’s working. What techniques are they using? How have they changed their approach? What mistakes have they learned from?B) Wayback MachineOne great tool to see how your competition has changed is Wayback Machine, which allows marketers to access petabytes of archived web pages. By sifting through Wayback Machine’s extensive database, you can track the evolution of your competitor’s brand and web presence, taking note of factors such as changes in UX design or differences in copy from one web version to the next.Still, you shouldn’t implement something just because your competitor is doing it, whether that’s designing a website a certain way or using specific copy or images. This is especially true for larger websites like Amazon, which have much more leeway with search engines. Thanks to their numerous, highly skilled staff, they can test small changes and measure results with a high degree of accuracy.If used correctly, Wayback Machine has some interesting lessons to offer any company. Take a look at these two screencaps of Title Boxing. The top picture is a screencap of Title’s homepage from Wayback Machine, circa 2007, while the bottom one is a screencap from 2016.The differences are pretty clear. In 2007, the web layout was much more cluttered and crowded, with small, hard-to-navigate sidebars squeezing some small, insignificant-looking pictures in the middle advertising daily specials.In 2016, however, the user experience is much more streamlined. Visitors are greeted with a clear, easy-to-use sidebar at the top, labeled with categories like “Gloves,” “Punching Bags,” and many more. A large, sliding image in the center replaces the tiny, hard-to-notice ads from 2007, allowing buyers to see exactly what is on sale. The new website is almost minimalist, doing away with the previous confused, slightly chaotic format.Clearly, Title has come a long way when it comes to UX, testing their changes and eventually settling on this new, simpler design. Still, it’s very likely that plenty of testing, design and redesign was put into this process, which is clear when you track their changes through Wayback Machine.Be strategic about your changes, test them thoroughly, and examine how your competitors’ websites have evolved with Wayback Machine.8. Technical OptimizationSEO and content tips aside, it’s absolutely essential to have a solid website, without worrying about any technical issues that may arise. With that being said, here are some tips and techniques to help you ensure that your website is up to par.A) Switch to HTTPSFirst off, do yourself a favor and switch to HTTPS, the most commonly used, securest version of the old http web protocol. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP.It’s a best practice that will help your website boost its SEO presence, stay secure, and make it harder for malicious parties to break in and take advantage of your website.Granted, transitioning to HTTPS is easier said than done, and requires a multi-step process. When the Atlantic, a highly-regarded, well-established media organization, decided to move to HTTPS in early 2016, the transition was complex. First, content had to be scanned individually, then ported over and checked for compatibility. The process was repeated with ads, and once compatibility and security were ensured, the website slowly went live in order to guard against traffic loss and unforeseen errors.If you’re a smaller organization, your process will likely be less painstaking or time consuming. All the same, moving to HTTPS is a necessity in a world of cybersecurity threats and heightened SEO and SEM requirements.B) AMP for MobileAMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, began as a Google-backed open initiative to allow publishers to easily create responsive, mobile-optimized content.Envisioned as a way to quickly render content on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, AMP combines three components:HTML tags, which help common web patterns render quicklyAMP JS, a library that manages the resource loading and best practices necessary for fast renderingAMP cache, a content delivery network that both loads content and ensures speed.Since AMP was only incorporated into the search giant’s results in February 2016, the format itself is still fairly new. For those of you who use WordPress, AMP should be much easier to implement than a home-grown CMS from scratch.C) Budget Money for CrawlersTo ensure that Google is crawling your preferred pages and not pages that don’t appear in its index, turn to crawl programs like Deep Crawl or Botify. These SEO crawler programs are similar to Google’s own crawlers and will give you an overview of how your page will perform in SEO rankings.Deep Crawl: Possibly the most comprehensive tool of its kind available today, Deep Crawl is the equivalent of a physical exam for your website, checking its SEO health and viability in an increasingly crowded http://market.In short, Deep Crawl will provide you with a laundry list of necessary improvements and errors, such as duplicate content, broken pages, flawed titles, descriptions and metadata.Botify: A cloud-based crawler that has already signed up big names like Expedia, eBay, and BlaBla Car, Botify is one of the strongest crawlers available today, short of Google’s own secret algorithms.Not only can Botify check whether Google has crawled your page, it can also offer suggestions on how to restructure web content and site maps to optimize your web page for Google’s crawlers.Still, even with its diverse functions and fast crawl speed, Botify’s disadvantage is that it can be expensive: basic plans begin at around $500 per month, while larger options for bigger firms can run up to $10,000 annually.D) Correct Your Semantic MarkupsTo help Google understand your data or to show your website smartcards and voice searches, you need to ensure that your semantic markups are correct.Semantic markups are essentially HTML tags which can help emphasize key information on your website.For instance, a heading tag (H1) can help a crawler understand precisely what your content is about. If you tag “Five Holiday Destinations in Eastern Europe” with a H1, then a crawler will know to sort your blog post under relevant categories, such as holidays or Eastern European travel.In short, edit your semantic markups so that they reflect your data and information as accurately as possible.E) Fix 404 ErrorsNothing will sink your website faster in search rankings than a 404 error, when a search engine can’t find the desired web page and leads to a dead end. It’s in your interest to fix these broken or missing pages and re-engage your users as soon as you can.Whatever platform you use, be it Google Analytics or Oracle, take a look at the number of pageviews for your 404 page. Then add URL as a secondary dimension and fix the biggest offenders first.F) Web Browser and WordPress PluginsTo make your job easier, there are a number of web browser and WordPress plugins that you can use. We’ve listed a few of them below, along with a brief description of their capabilities and common uses.Redirection by WordPress: An easy plugin that seamlessly integrates into your WordPress interface, Redirection allows you to keep track of 404 errors, 301 redirects, and generally keep your website tight and functioning smoothly. It’s especially useful for those who are moving their web pages from one site to another, or for directory changes.Canonical: This plug-in handles content syndication, which essentially allows other blogs to publish your work (similar to franchising) without hurting your website’s SEO ranking—simply by adding a rel=canonical tag.You can get your brand and content out on the web in multiple outlets, ensuring a greater reach and bigger audience without hurting your own search results.Ultimate Nofollow: This simple, easy-to-use plugin automatically inserts `rel=nofollow` and `target=_blank`into your hyperlinks, which alerts search crawlers.This way, you won’t accidentally boost the rankings of other pages simply by linking to them, or fall victim to pageview or link-related spam.SEOQuake: A plugin for your web browser, not WordPress, SEOQuake allows users to quickly and seamlessly assess SEO attributes of any website without opening up extra programs. You can audit your page’s SEO health, compare SEO metrics for a number of pages, and analyze both external and internal links on any given web page.9. Local SEO and ListingsIn the digital era, it’s easy to forget that people still visit physical shops and establishments. True, they may use online resources to research, but plenty of commerce is still conducted in real life. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can’t neglect local SEO and listings if you want to stay profitable.A) Correcting Your ListingsAs powerful as search engines like Google or Bing are, they still can’t be everywhere at once, and have to rely on additional information from local, on-the-ground sources, which gather, aggregate, and submit relevant data for area businesses. These aggregators will do much of the legwork, pulling information from physical directories (like Yellow Pages) or scanning business registrations.In a nutshell, bigger search engines will rely on these data aggregators to fill in the gaps of the existing information already in their databases, and will also cross-check to make sure that the facts are up-to-date. Problems arise, however, when aggregators collect out-of-date data, leading a search engine like Google or Bing to list the wrong information, like an old address for your business or a disconnected phone number.That’s why it’s critical to ensure that your physical contact information is as current as possible.The first step is to identify any obsolete information that may be out there. Because Google is the largest search engine, start with Google My Business, its free-to-use listing service, and update your data accordingly. Be sure to list important details like extra locations, the latest opening hours, and what forms of payment are acceptable.Then, use a local directory management service, which carries out the painstaking, tedious work of scanning countless local directories, interacting with data aggregators, and correcting any old information. The best of these are Moz Localand Yext, which can help you avoid any glaring inconsistencies that can hurt your revenue stream, or even worse, trick Google’s algorithms into thinking that you’re a different business entirely.B) Technical SEO for LocalCarrying out technical SEO for local search engines is a similar process.You may be questioning the point of optimizing for local search engines, especially given Google’s unquestioned dominance of the search landscape. Even so, local search engines are still extremely useful. After all, if you’re a physical, brick-and-mortar establishment, you will benefit greatly from having in-store visits.If you’re a digital business, local searches are still important. One study shows that consumers are 36% more likely to begin with local search engines, rather than general search sources like Google. Even if they’re looking for a digital marketing agency rather than a hardware store, if you don’t optimize for local search results, your business could lose potential customers.Here are some useful terms and techniques to ensure that you optimize your business for local searches:First, understand that schema markup is one of the most powerful, least used parts of SEO today. Schema are basically brief snippets of data that can give extra information to search users and search engines. Best of all, schema markups don’t require extra coding, and can be inserted through Schema.org, a rare collaboration between Google, Yahoo, and Bing.In the case of the example below, the schema gives extra information about showtimes at the following venue:Image Source: GoogleAs you can see, schema is a game-changer: you can make your site more visible in Google and quickly add brief, useful data for the benefit of users.If you want to go a step further, you can also include a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) injection through Google Tag Manager. JSON is a form of data that is easily read by humans and artificial intelligences alike, and familiar to anyone who has ever used C++, Javascript, Python, and more.With Google Tag Manager, however, it’s easy to combine schema and JSON together to further boost the strength of your schema, resulting in a higher CTR and visibility, without having to spend precious time and lines of code. Granted, the learning curve is a bit steep for those who aren’t familiar with Javascript or another basic programming language, but once set in place, JSON injections can help execute and put structured data in place simply and efficiently.Image Source: Moz10. Guest postingGuest blogging is a method used by bloggers to increase blog traffic where they write posts to be published on another blog.Few years ago this method was deemed dead because of all the spammy content and paid links. However, this is not true anymore. As long as the blog post has original and high quality content, Google will not penalize you. Just be sure to avoid duplicate and repetitive content.The key to building a blog to rank higher is to have a niche in your domain and build your blog posts around this topic. Pick a specific domain instead over a broad topic one. Become an expert in that domain.If you’re an amateur blogger on the block, your first goal would be to increase SERP ranking.If you’re new to this space, it’ll definitely take a while to increase ranking. Guest blogging is one way to climb up the ladder sooner than you might otherwise be able to do. You have two ways to do this.Source: - https://www.singlegrain.com/seo/effective-seo-techniques-that-work-in-2017/