The world and financial markets are in turmoil. Investors are starting to worry. More and more people are realizing there are few things they can trust in this world, but they can still trust precious metals.

If you find yourself in this position, you may be wondering which precious metals you should buy to protect your investment portfolio. Well, we are going to break this down for you.

Gold and silver (and platinum and palladium) are all called precious metals because they do not occur in geology that often, and they have tremendous value to humanity. So, limited supply plus tremendous value equals a metal that is regarded as “precious”.

When it some to saving and investing though, there are some added nuances you’ll want to know before purchasing. This can be the difference between a smart investment, and a terrible mistake.

Silver is Way More Volatile

Silver is a new tech stock or a cryptocurrency for investors compared to gold, which acts more like a blue-chip stock like Berkshire Hathaway. The price rockets higher, and crashes lower than gold.

Some of this has to do with supply and demand dynamics. There are approximately 1 billion ounces of new silver produced every year and only about 130 million ounces of new gold produced annually.

The supply of silver is much bigger compared to gold.

But this is inverse compared to their value. The value of the new gold production is worth many multiples that of the new silver productions. Humanity simply values the gold metal more.

The annual market supply of gold (at current prices) is valued at about $200 billion whereas the annual market supply of silver is valued at about 15 billion, or less than 10% of that of gold.

This smaller value adds to silver’s volatility because there is less money that is needed to affect the market supply of silver. An amount as small as $150 million, about 10%, coming into or out of the silver market, will have a tremendous effect on the value of silver investments.

If the same $150 million goes into or out of the gold market, hardly anyone would notice.

So, how does this affect you as an investor that wants to add precious metals to your portfolio? Well, you better be prepared to handle the psychological highs and lows of holding silver.

In general, if you are new to investing in precious metals, you will want to stick mostly to investing in gold. And if you are a newbie to precious metals, you’ll want some help from the pros when making your purchases. You should start your research of which companies to work with by reading this Hard Assets Alliance review.

Precious metals go through cycles just like everything else and investors need to understand this. You want to make these cycles your friend. These raging bull markets often last for a decade or so. Then they are followed by vicious bear markets. So your job is to understand the cycle and profit from it.

The 1970 – 1980 bull run saw gold climb in value 2500%, it then proceeded to crash in value 68%. During this same cycle silver, the more volatile sibling ran up 3200%, then silver proceeded to crash 90%.

A much more recent bull run from 2008 – 2011 saw gold charge 175 %, then crash 45%. During this same time, period silver went on a run up 470% only to crash back down 75%.

Can you see how as an investor you must understand these cycles? You will never sell at the top and buy at the bottom. What you want to do is to be aware of these cycles. When gold has been on a very long run-up, you might want to sell some, or simply stop your purchases. And when gold crashes, you want to start buying a little, until you see some price stabilization, then you can add more aggressively.

Another thing to note about the numbers above is that you can make a lot more money with silver. So why wouldn’t you allocate all your precious metals to silver? Because you can also lose a lot more money with silver. Now, if you are a seasoned precious metals investor then you may be fine going all-in on silver, and this article is not written for you.

If you are a beginner, how can you still capture some of that silver rocket fuel to turbocharge your portfolio? You can do this by smart asset allocation and position sizing. As a side note, if you want to learn more about asset allocation, this is a good article to read: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/getting-started/asset-allocation.

Let’s say hypothetically you want to put all the money you allocate for precious metals, in just gold and silver bullion. To get capture the upside of silver, without being punished by the downside, just allocate a smaller percentage to silver.

In this hypothetical situation, a 75% gold and 25% silver allocation makes a lot of sense. You have enough exposure to silver to benefit from the bull market, but not so much that you won’t be able to sleep soundly at night, knowing that you have made a prudent investment decision.

Another reason why many investors like silver are because it is more affordable. Currently silver is trading at $25/ounce. Gold is trading at $1950/ounce. This means that an ounce of gold is 78 times more expensive than an ounce of silver. Also, there are just more people that can buy an ounce, or several ounces of silver, than can buy an ounce of gold.

In this sense, silver is more divisible. This is attractive to a lot of investors, and everyday folks that want to protect some of their savings from inflation.

Your job is to understand where you fit as an investor. Gold and silver have a lot of benefits for people that are saving for retirement, and can be beneficial to a lot of portfolios, but only if you understand the unique and important differences between the two most popular metals to invest in.

If you follow any SEO folks on Twitter then you know that it’s the search industry’s awards and conference season.  Here are some typical post about all the happenings.

Some of this stuff is useful, some is not.  A lot of folks like to tweet about what the top brass at Google is saying about search.

Be real careful wasting anytime paying attention to that stuff.

Google is just like a human.  Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.

If a fat person is telling you all about their diet and how much they work out, and they are telling you what you should and should not eat.  Well, what the heck do you think about that?  I think they do not know what the heck they are talking about.

Or they are just plain lying.

Either way, I am just going to ignore what they say.

I will only pay attention to what they do.  And I will see that they sit on the couch a lot.  They use a Pelaton stationary bike for twenty minutes and call that a “workout” and they buy “healthy” food like Belvita gluten free, fat free whole grain cookies.

That is not a healthy person.

I take all this SEO conference stuff the same way.  I’m not going to pay attention to what Google or some speaker says.  No.  I’m going to put up a bunch of websites and test what works.  I’m going to learn from experience.

And that’s how I know how to make a website go to the top of Google searches.  From testing my own stuff and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

This is what works for me and the most successful SEO’s out there.  You build your own stuff and build up your own data.

For everyone that can’t do that, they can go to fancy conferences and hope that Google will one day decide to love their website and move it to the top of valuable searches.

ICYMI: Possible Google update kicking off – we will continue to watch it https://t.co/meRwp8Q5oe pic.twitter.com/B5dQGlPPfB

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 3, 2019

How Can an SEO Expert Navigate a Google Update?

Google is constantly changing their algorithm.  If you believe what Google says, they update their search algo hundreds of times a year.

There is a whole industry now that just reports, or talks about Google updates.  It is all pretty ridiculous.

If you were to follow Google’s advice you’d be completely changing around your website every few days or weeks.  Then you would be glued to Twitter, waiting to hear everyone say how the sky was falling and there may have been a “potential Google update.”

Heck, sometimes, although it is rare, Google will actually per-announce that they are going to do an update.  This is not to say that every update is b.s. and nothing ever changes, but it doesn’t change nearly as much as you might think it does.

Now, the really big changes do matter, they are important.  Take for example, the upgrade to mobile friendly websites and the mobile first index.  More searches were taking place on mobile devices, so it only made sense that Google would give priority to mobile friendly sites.

This is not rocket science.  Google let everyone know at least two years before they made any changes.

An SEO Consultant Can Help Your Business

If you have no idea what you are doing but you realize your website is important and needs to bring customers to your business, then you need to hire a consultant that has been successful for years in search like DeterminedSolutions.com.  They have been navigating websites through tumultuous Google updates successfully for years.

The way that you get through Google updates is to ignore them in the first place.  Search engine optimization is about building your business online, not some tip or trick or hack to get you to the top of a search result.

When you have been building your business properly, you can get traffic from search (of course) through folks searching for your goods and services or just your brand name search.  You also get searches, not just from Google, but from different search engines like Yahoo, and Bing.

Your website will also get referral traffic.  You can get referral traffic from all over the internet.  Some important areas to get referral traffic from are business listings like Yelp, BBB, Foursquare, etc.

One of the biggest drivers of traffic on the internet is the giant known as social media.  A website can get traffic from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Pinterest.

Another source of referral traffic is from other websites on the internet that have linked to your website because you have an interesting blog post or some other form of content worth mentioning, so they link to you.  When readers on one site, click a backlink and go to your website, this is known as another form of referral traffic.

And referral traffic from other relevant websites is some of the best traffic to have because these visitors tend to stay the longest on your website, which is a great signal to show Google, and they also tend to convert the highest, because they are coming from a similar type of website.

You can even get visitors to your website from traditional media sources like direct response, T.V., and even radio ads, but for the purpose of this discussion, we will stick to just digital marketing.

Get Traffic To Your Website By Building a Business

If you view your website as a business and you take it seriously, then you will invest the resources in to making sure your website functions properly.  This is also known as On Page SEO.

If you have an simple content management system like WordPress, then this is easy to do.  First you will want to make sure that your URL’s (unique resource locator) are easy for a search engine, and in this case, also a human, to understand.  Go in to your setting and change the Permalinks to Post Name.

This creating simple and clean URL’s.

You will also want to extend this idea to your images.  The way you do this is by naming your image files something relevant to the content on the page, before you upload the file to your website.

Next up is page titles.  Your page titles are a great place to put information about what the page is.  This is super important and you want to make sure you take full advantage of your page title and fill them out properly.

You also want to go to your images, and fill out the Alt Text.  You can think of Alt Text on images the same way you think of page titles in that they are both forms of meta-data.  You can enter the Alt Text by going to the Media section in WordPress, simply select the image and then you will see the area to fill in the Alt Text.  Of course you want to make the Alt Text of relevant to the image as well as the page the image is going on.

This is not meant to be a step by step guide to search engine optimization, but rather to give you a different perspective.  You see, Google updates come and they go.  What you need to focus on is to build your business to web standards and norms.  You want to build to HTML standards, which is the language of the internet, which is bigger than just Google.

If you approach your website this way, by making your information easily discoverable, and by having relevant content, then you will fare pretty well in search, no matter what Google updates decide.

Even if you have some experience with SEO, you may struggle to improve the search engine rankings for your WordPress site. WordPress provides its users with plenty of tools that can improve their search engine rankings. However, it’s important to consider the unique structure of WordPress when you’re developing SEO strategies. This simple guide to SEO to WordPress should get you off to the right start.

Choose The Right Theme

There are a number of WordPress themes that are specifically designed to improve SEO. Whether you’re using a premium theme or a free theme, you’ll want to be sure that the theme you have chosen for your site is optimized for search engines.

If you’re not satisfied with any of the themes that you are seeing, you could hire a web designer to create a theme for you. Of course, if you choose to take this route, you’ll want to be sure that they have a strong understanding of WordPress SEO and how it works.

Take Advantage Of SEO Plugins

WordPress has numerous plugins that can improve the functionality of your site. Some of these plugins were specifically created with SEO in mind. If you utilize these plugins, you’ll naturally be able to optimize your sites for search engines.

While there are some plug-ins that you’ll have to pay for, there are also plug-ins that you can use for free. You should try to find highly-rated plugins that a lot of people have had positive experiences with. Research your options and make sure you use the best plugins for your WordPress site.

Create A Sitemap

If you haven’t created a sitemap for your WordPress site and submitted it to major search engines like Google, you’ll want to do that sooner rather than later. A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and all of its content. There are a number of plug-ins that will automatically generate a sitemap for you, which means this process should be easy.

Take the time to build a sitemap for your site and make sure that you submit it to search engines sooner rather than later. Creating a sitemap isn’t very challenging; it’s something that anyone can do. Shortly after submitting your sitemap, you can expect to see a major improvement in your search engine rankings.

Remember That Content Is King

WordPress can be used to build all kinds of sites, but it was initially designed for blogging. Content should be an essential part of any SEO strategy, and it’s particularly important if you’re building a site on WordPress.

You need to focus on creating high-quality content that people will want to read. If you include the right kinds of keywords in that content, you’ll be able to draw in plenty of traffic from search engines.

Follow this simple guide if you’re trying to learn more about SEO for WordPress. As long as you take the right approach, you should be able to make sure that your WordPress site does very well. You’ll be able to draw in organic search traffic on a daily basis.

The WordPress Content Management System is an excellent choice for all kinds of sites. With that said, if you’re using WordPress for your site, you’ll need to think about search engine optimization. These are a few steps you can take to improve your site’s search engine rankings.

Take Advantage Of Plug-Ins

One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress is that you’ll have access to a wide range of plug-ins. A number of popular plug-ins were specifically designed for SEO. Some of these plug-ins are free to use, while other plug-ins are available for a small fee.

If you do utilize these plug-ins, you’ll be able to easily improve your site’s on-page SEO. You’ll be able to create posts that will rank well in search engines. You can even experiment with different plug-ins so that you can find something that works well for you.

Pay Attention To Your Analytics

If you want to improve your site’s search engine rankings, you’ll need to have an accurate picture of the search traffic your site is currently drawing in. The best way to see how your site is doing is to look at your analytics. There is a Google Analytics plug-in that can be installed on WordPress sites.

Check your analytics on a daily basis. When you track this data, you’ll be able to see what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. You’ll be able to make adjustments to your methods and gradually increase the amount of search traffic your site receives.

Make Sure Your Site Has A Blog

Not everyone that uses WordPress takes advantage of its blogging functionality. While blogging may not be essential, it is one of the best ways to boost your search traffic. When you blog, you’ll be able to update your site frequently, which means search engines will crawl your site more regularly. Blogging will also allow you to hit on a wider range of keywords.

If your site doesn’t have its own blog, you can easily add one. The blog doesn’t have to appear on the main page of your site. You can easily create a subdomain for your blog. Blog posts are easy to write, and they can be a fantastic source of traffic for your site.

Use The Right Kinds Of Keywords

Keywords are an essential part of SEO, but you can’t choose your keywords at random. You need to think carefully about the kinds of keywords you’re using on your site.

You should take advantage of keyword research tools so that you can select the kinds of keywords that people are searching for. You should focus your attention on long-tail keywords; you’ll get more mileage out of keyword phrases that are at least three words long.

Keep these suggestions in mind if you want to learn more about search engine optimization for WordPress sites. There are so many tools that WordPress users have access to, which means it should be easy for you to optimize your site and increase your search traffic.

Let the groove begin!

Explore the diverse talents and experiences as a musician, a painter, anda teacher.

Well known as a Grammy award musician, this was shared in musical talent working with diverse music projects and bands, including this one.

This artwork includes individual paintings of the finest quality, painted drum heads,and setlists. When the tour is not in session, the band loves to share the talents through workshops with students of all ages.

The spirit brings his usual enthusiasm, friendly demeanor, and a can-do attitude to these learning events to create a fun and engaging experience.

In all these endeavors, we want to invite youto share in the rhythms of life. Let the grooving begin!

Hi there and thanks for stopping by.

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