Keluarga merupakan elemen masyarakat terkecil yang menunjukkan miniatur masyarakat. Dalam keluarga, perlu pengelolaan keuangan yang baik. Jika keluarga-keluarga dalam masyarakat menerapkan sistem pengelolaan keuangan yang baik, hal tersebut akan memberikan efek positif terhadap kondisi perekonomian masyarakat.
Masalah yang sering dihadapi oleh keluarga adalah pengelolaan keuangan. Secara umum permasalahan tersebut terfokus pada membengkaknya pengeluaran, yang disebabkan oleh belum adanya perencanaan, jika pengeluaran itu benar-benar terjadi. Efek jangka panjang yang ditimbulkan adalah semakin bertambahnya hutang sehingga kondisi keuangan setiap bulan selalu minus (penghasilan rutin bulanan hanya digunakan untuk menutup hutang). Jika kondisi ini berlanjut maka efek lanjutan yang ditimbulkan adalah menurunnya etos kerja dan kinerja, stress dan depresi yang berkepanjangan. Hal tersebut semakin diperparah dengan gaya hidup yang tidak bisa berubah.
Menjadi suatu hal yang sifatnya sangat perlu, ketika melihat akibat akhir yang ditimbulkan, karena tidak sejalan dengan tujuan dibentuknya keluarga. Sehingga perencanaan keuangan sangat diperlukan terutama bagi orang-orang yang ingin membentuk keluarga dengan kondisi keuangan yang sehat. Untuk mendeteksi kondisi keuangan keluarga, ada beberapa parameter yang bisa dijadikan sebagai indikator. Sehat dan tidaknya keuangan keluarga bisa diukur dengan melihat (1) proporsi pengeluaran terhadap pemasukan, dan (2) komposisi pengeluaran.
Penjelasan mengenai hal tersebut sebagai berikut, (1) proporsi pengeluaran terhadap pemasukan, merupakan perbandingan antara pengeluaran dan pemasukan dalam keluarga tersebut. Jika perbandingan tersebut menunjukkan angka lebih dari 1, maka kondisi keuangan keluarga tersebut tergolong tidak sehat. Jika perbandingannya menunjukkan angka 1, maka kondisi keuangan keluarga tersebut tergolong mengkhawatirkan, dan jika perbandingannya menunjukkan angka kurang dari 1, maka kondisi keuangan keluarga tersebut tergolong sehat. Pengeluaran dan pemasukan tersebut dihitung dalam jangka waktu satu tahun terakhir.
Sedangkan untuk (2) komposisi pengeluaran merupakan alokasi pendapatan yang digunakan untuk macam-macam pembelanjaan. Pembelanjaan meliputi pembelanjaan konsumsi (pangan), angsuran hutang, transportasi, belanja pakaian, pendidikan, kesehatan, kemasyarakatan dan tabungan. Normalnya, angsuran hutang adalah tidak melebihi 30% dari pendapatan. Jika komposisi pengeluaran didominasi oleh hutang, maka keuangan keluarga tersebut bisa dikatakan tidak sehat. Komposisi yang sehat ditunjukkan dengan sebaran yang proporsional dalam hal pembelanjaan, alokasi untuk konsumsi kebutuhan pokok, kemudian ada alokasi pendapatan untuk tabungan yang besarnya minimal 10% dari pendapatan.
Cara untuk menjaga kesehatan keuangan keluarga adalah dengan menerapkan sistem pengelolaan keuangan yang tepat. Berikut ini beberapa tips, dalam mengelola keuangan keluarga :
1. Menerapkan skala prioritas dalam mengatur pengeluaran.
Belanja berdasarkan kebutuhan, bukan karena penawaran (apalagi dan bukan karena harga murah). Mempersiapkan daftar kebutuhan sebelum berbelanja, dan komitmen terhadap daftar yang telah dipersiapkan. Jangan tergiur dengan banyaknya tawaran diskon, yang kadang kita tidak berfikir panjang dalam berbelanja.
2. Menambah pendapatan dengan mengoptimalkan waktu yang kita punyai (waktu senggang setelah bekerja), memanfaatkan hobby, dan juga sumberdaya yang barangkali untuk saat sekarang belum begitu optimal pemanfaatannya (bisa berupa lahan kosong, kendaraan yang jarang dipakai, komputer yang jarang dipakai, atau bisa berupa aset yang hanya ditabung saja) sebagaimanan dijelaskan oleh Ahmad Ghozali (Perencana Keuangan). Beberapa hal tadi bisa dimanfaatkan dengan cara sebagai berikut :
a. Waktu senggang setelah pekerjaan utama, bisa dimanfaatkan untuk bekerja sambilan yang tidak begitu menghabiskan tenaga, seperti menjadi penjaga warnet dan mengajar privat.
b. Hobby, yang selama ini hanya sekedar menjadi penghilang stress, bisa diarahkan sekaligus untuk menambah penghasilan, misal : berkebun, memelihara ikan hias, dan memasak.
c. Sumberdaya nganggur, bisa dioptimalkan pemanfaatannya, lahan kosong bisa disewakan, komputer bisa digunakan untuk menerima ketikan, kendaraan yang jarang dipakai, bisa disewakan di persewaan kendaraan, dan aset bisa diinvestasikan.
3. Menabung
Seperti yang disampaikan oleh Thomy (2009) dalam tulisannya yang berjudul Tips Pengelolaan Keuangan Keluarga Buat yang Penghasilannya Pas-pasan, bahwa mengalokasikan pendapatan untuk tabungan dilakukan di awal waktu, sebab jika tabungan diakhirkan maka yang terjadi adalah selamanya kita tidak akan menabung. Kalau kita susah menabung, kita bisa mencari produk Bank berupa simpanan yang langsung dipotong dari rekening gaji, dan hanya bisa diambil pada waktu tertentu.
4. Menunaikan kewajiban spiritual yang berkaitan dengan harta. Thomy mencontohkan dengan membayar zakat dan bersedekahlah. Zakat adalah kewajiban dan jadikan sedekah sebuah kebutuhan, percayalah Anda pasti akan mendapat pengembalian berlipat di dunia, sekaligus akhirat.
Ketika setiap keluarga bisa menjaga kesehatan keuangan keluarganya masing-masing dengan baik, maka keluarga impian (keluarga kita surga kita) akan terealisasi. Kunci dari semua itu adalah terletak pada bagaimana kita mengelola keuangan, dan bukan pada besar kecilnya pendapatan. Apapun dan siapapun kita, yang penting, kita berpenghasilan dan belajar untuk mengelola penghasilan tersebut dengan baik dengan menerapkan prinsip-prinsip di atas. Semoga bermanfaat.
Senin, 14 Juni 2010
Selasa, 02 Februari 2010
12 Easy Mistakes That Plague Newcomers to the SEO Field
Posted by randfish on March 4th, 2009 at 12:02 am Technical Issues
I've been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW - sorry for the delays, the volume's tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we're a bit overwhelmed). It's been a great learning experience and I've gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject. As a partial remedy, I thought I'd take some time tonight to cover a few of the worst offenders:
Repetitive Keyword Targeting
If you're targeting a specific keyword term or phrase, it's not necessary, and often ill-advised, to place that keyword in the title tag, H1 and body text of every page on your site. It's certainly OK to use the term/phrase in passing and when relevant, but remember that pages target rankings, not sites - a good rule is to target one specific keyword term/phrase per page, sometimes more, but only in rare circumstances (like when you're trying to get a secondary, indented listing) do you actually want to target the same term on multiple pages.
Splitting Efforts Across Many Domains
If you've found 10 reliable sources to get links, don't fall into the trap of thinking you can register 500 domains, get them all links from your 10 sources, then link from those sites back to your main domain and suddenly appear to have a diverse domain backlink profile. Splitting up your efforts on multiple domains is, in my opinion, rarely advisable (see this post for more) and can seriously detract from your goal of gaining rankings on a single site. The days of link farms and link islands are long gone - with link acquisition, quality is slowly but surely getting the upper hand on quantity, so use strategies that will get you the right links, not just any link.
Reciprocal Linking
I'm not sure what happened, but reciprocal linking seems to be making a comeback (and both Google & Yahoo! have been doling out some penalties recently for sites engaging in it). It's not that reciprocal linking is inherently bad - if I link to Aaron's SEOBook (a great site, BTW), and he links to me (which he sometimes does), that's not what I'd call "reciprocal linking." I'm referring to the practice of creating link list pages on websites and then trading with other link list pages on other sites - the "you link to me and I'll link to you" phenomenon. These aren't hard to algorithmically spot and we see penalty after penalty (or at least, devaluation) hitting sites that leverage this tactic.
Keyword Stuffing
If you're not ranking for a given keyword, placing a few dozen more instances of it on your page is very rarely the answer. Folks have been asking about modified versions of their keywords, whether they need to add more related text content, whether they need to use it more times per sentence or per paragraph and my answer is always the same. Once you've got your keyword in your content a few times, in your H1, title and URL, and maybe in the alt tag of an image, you're 80-90% of the way there with on-page optimization. The content needs to be valuable to a human (so you can earn links and interest and return visits and sharing), not more "optimized" for search engines with repetitions of your keyword.
Blocking Bots Access to Duplicate Content
I think fear plays a major part in this one. People read that duplicate content causes a penalty, so they block bots from accessing duplicate versions of their content. The problem is that you lose the link juice those pages may accumulate and potentially restrict access to pages that would let the engines better crawl and index your site. If you want to fight duplicate content, try either 301 re-directing the duplicate version back to the original or employing the new canonical URL tag (if & when appropriate). Don't just go blocking bots from pages unless you're sure you know what you're doing.
Avoiding XML Sitemaps
Maybe it's my fault for previously recommending that webmasters don't submit Sitemaps. Let me just go on record again as saying that I have come 180 degrees on this and now completely endorse sitemaps for nearly every kind of site. In every instance we've seen them used properly, they've added significant boosts in search traffic over a very short period. If you want an easy win, and haven't yet invested in the sitemaps XML protocol, go do it.
Blocking Bots Rather than Using Nofollow
I think there's been some confusion about how PageRank sculpting works. You should NOT block bots access to pages you don't want to send link juice to - in fact, this doesn't even accomplish that goal. If a link points to a page, even if that page is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots noindex, it still accrues link value metrics. The only way to stop a link from passing juice is to use a nofollow (or to make it via an external Javascript redirect or embed in a non-HTML-parseable object). Please be careful about what you noindex or block to bots and why - you don't just hurt that page, you can hurt downstream areas of your site by walling off navigation paths too (and even stop link juice that flows in from flowing out).
Paranoia About Registering with Google Webmaster Tools
Unless you truly are nefarious and have designs around link manipulation and scheming, there's really nothing to fear by registering your site with Google's Webmaster Tools. The value of having their metrics on hand and knowing what they report (especially with non-accessible pages) almost always outweighs the tinfoil hat theories.
Ignoring Non-Google Search Engines
Why limit yourself to Google!? Just because they're the market leader doesn't mean that another 15-20% of search traffic from Yahoo!, MSN & Ask isn't worthwhile. Most people salivate at boosting SEO 15-20% but continue to ignore the other engines. As a first step, at least register with Live Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer and send them your sitemap. Beyond that, Ben's research next week will go into a bit more about the ranking algorithm differences between these three engines.
Using Google's Link Command
The Google link: command presents a (very) small sample of the links Google knows about, and while, for comparison purposes, it does appear to have some degree of accuracy, the actual links reported by it are in no way particularly significant. Just because a link does or does not show via this command doesn't make it better/worse/more interesting than any other link you have (or should try to acquire).
Submitting Articles for Links
I'm not always against the practice of submitting articles or content to other sites (heck, YOUmoz is one of the best links an SEO can get, IMO), but beware of submitting tons of the same article over and over to sites in the hope of getting more links. The value passed is not high (at least, from 99% of these sites) and you do lose the value of having great content on your own site (and earning the search traffic and links that might have flowed to it naturally). Just be smart about why you're pursuing this strategy and mindful of the benefits and drawbacks.
Chasing DoFollow Blogs
When did dofollow blogs become the link acquisition practice du jour? Honestly, I have yet to see competitive rankings earned from a dofollow blog link strategy, and the focus on it to the exclusion of other, more valuable and scalable linking tactics is a cause for concern. When you're starting a link building campaign, remember the immortal words "nothing worth having comes easy."
Please feel free to contribute your own frequently-seen misconceptions or mistakes made by new SEOs. And for those reading this who are new - don't feel bad at all! I can't enumerate the number of pitfalls I suffered in my first few years tackling organic search. From 2002-2004, I was as green as they come, and it really took a half dozen campaigns and lots of help from the good people in the SEO industry to pull me out.
I've been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW - sorry for the delays, the volume's tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we're a bit overwhelmed). It's been a great learning experience and I've gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject. As a partial remedy, I thought I'd take some time tonight to cover a few of the worst offenders:
Repetitive Keyword Targeting
If you're targeting a specific keyword term or phrase, it's not necessary, and often ill-advised, to place that keyword in the title tag, H1 and body text of every page on your site. It's certainly OK to use the term/phrase in passing and when relevant, but remember that pages target rankings, not sites - a good rule is to target one specific keyword term/phrase per page, sometimes more, but only in rare circumstances (like when you're trying to get a secondary, indented listing) do you actually want to target the same term on multiple pages.
Splitting Efforts Across Many Domains
If you've found 10 reliable sources to get links, don't fall into the trap of thinking you can register 500 domains, get them all links from your 10 sources, then link from those sites back to your main domain and suddenly appear to have a diverse domain backlink profile. Splitting up your efforts on multiple domains is, in my opinion, rarely advisable (see this post for more) and can seriously detract from your goal of gaining rankings on a single site. The days of link farms and link islands are long gone - with link acquisition, quality is slowly but surely getting the upper hand on quantity, so use strategies that will get you the right links, not just any link.
Reciprocal Linking
I'm not sure what happened, but reciprocal linking seems to be making a comeback (and both Google & Yahoo! have been doling out some penalties recently for sites engaging in it). It's not that reciprocal linking is inherently bad - if I link to Aaron's SEOBook (a great site, BTW), and he links to me (which he sometimes does), that's not what I'd call "reciprocal linking." I'm referring to the practice of creating link list pages on websites and then trading with other link list pages on other sites - the "you link to me and I'll link to you" phenomenon. These aren't hard to algorithmically spot and we see penalty after penalty (or at least, devaluation) hitting sites that leverage this tactic.
Keyword Stuffing
If you're not ranking for a given keyword, placing a few dozen more instances of it on your page is very rarely the answer. Folks have been asking about modified versions of their keywords, whether they need to add more related text content, whether they need to use it more times per sentence or per paragraph and my answer is always the same. Once you've got your keyword in your content a few times, in your H1, title and URL, and maybe in the alt tag of an image, you're 80-90% of the way there with on-page optimization. The content needs to be valuable to a human (so you can earn links and interest and return visits and sharing), not more "optimized" for search engines with repetitions of your keyword.
Blocking Bots Access to Duplicate Content
I think fear plays a major part in this one. People read that duplicate content causes a penalty, so they block bots from accessing duplicate versions of their content. The problem is that you lose the link juice those pages may accumulate and potentially restrict access to pages that would let the engines better crawl and index your site. If you want to fight duplicate content, try either 301 re-directing the duplicate version back to the original or employing the new canonical URL tag (if & when appropriate). Don't just go blocking bots from pages unless you're sure you know what you're doing.
Avoiding XML Sitemaps
Maybe it's my fault for previously recommending that webmasters don't submit Sitemaps. Let me just go on record again as saying that I have come 180 degrees on this and now completely endorse sitemaps for nearly every kind of site. In every instance we've seen them used properly, they've added significant boosts in search traffic over a very short period. If you want an easy win, and haven't yet invested in the sitemaps XML protocol, go do it.
Blocking Bots Rather than Using Nofollow
I think there's been some confusion about how PageRank sculpting works. You should NOT block bots access to pages you don't want to send link juice to - in fact, this doesn't even accomplish that goal. If a link points to a page, even if that page is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots noindex, it still accrues link value metrics. The only way to stop a link from passing juice is to use a nofollow (or to make it via an external Javascript redirect or embed in a non-HTML-parseable object). Please be careful about what you noindex or block to bots and why - you don't just hurt that page, you can hurt downstream areas of your site by walling off navigation paths too (and even stop link juice that flows in from flowing out).
Paranoia About Registering with Google Webmaster Tools
Unless you truly are nefarious and have designs around link manipulation and scheming, there's really nothing to fear by registering your site with Google's Webmaster Tools. The value of having their metrics on hand and knowing what they report (especially with non-accessible pages) almost always outweighs the tinfoil hat theories.
Ignoring Non-Google Search Engines
Why limit yourself to Google!? Just because they're the market leader doesn't mean that another 15-20% of search traffic from Yahoo!, MSN & Ask isn't worthwhile. Most people salivate at boosting SEO 15-20% but continue to ignore the other engines. As a first step, at least register with Live Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer and send them your sitemap. Beyond that, Ben's research next week will go into a bit more about the ranking algorithm differences between these three engines.
Using Google's Link Command
The Google link: command presents a (very) small sample of the links Google knows about, and while, for comparison purposes, it does appear to have some degree of accuracy, the actual links reported by it are in no way particularly significant. Just because a link does or does not show via this command doesn't make it better/worse/more interesting than any other link you have (or should try to acquire).
Submitting Articles for Links
I'm not always against the practice of submitting articles or content to other sites (heck, YOUmoz is one of the best links an SEO can get, IMO), but beware of submitting tons of the same article over and over to sites in the hope of getting more links. The value passed is not high (at least, from 99% of these sites) and you do lose the value of having great content on your own site (and earning the search traffic and links that might have flowed to it naturally). Just be smart about why you're pursuing this strategy and mindful of the benefits and drawbacks.
Chasing DoFollow Blogs
When did dofollow blogs become the link acquisition practice du jour? Honestly, I have yet to see competitive rankings earned from a dofollow blog link strategy, and the focus on it to the exclusion of other, more valuable and scalable linking tactics is a cause for concern. When you're starting a link building campaign, remember the immortal words "nothing worth having comes easy."
Please feel free to contribute your own frequently-seen misconceptions or mistakes made by new SEOs. And for those reading this who are new - don't feel bad at all! I can't enumerate the number of pitfalls I suffered in my first few years tackling organic search. From 2002-2004, I was as green as they come, and it really took a half dozen campaigns and lots of help from the good people in the SEO industry to pull me out.
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