Archive for March, 2010

Keeping up with the momentum of bringing new and powerful tools to our online real estate network, I am pleased to announce that we have brought in two new tools pertaining to copyright. In today’s age of syndication, duplicate content, and scraping, the staff here at Positive Real Estate Professionals thought that we needed to bring in some tools that will benefit and protect our members. With that said, we put our focus on COPYRIGHT.

The first tool is a copyright for the entire site. It is designed to automatically update as the years change. While it can have a custom “Rights Reserved Message”, once set this feature will never need to be followed again. As for the second tool, it pertains to each and every post that our members write as well as page content. This tool is designed to place a link into your RSS or Atom feed that will direct back to the original article. With this particular tool, you get the year, blog name, and All Rights Reserved right in the RSS or Atom feed. The blog name provides a link back to your site.

In closing, while these two tools might not seem like much, they are huge. The intent is to protect the original author from people stealing content in order to increase their blog or website’s rankings in search engines. Like always, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Copyright Done Right is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

PREP now offers broken link checker to it’s members. We decided to add this tool after running a number of reports on our online real estate network. For those of you that are unaware of what damage broken links can have to your SEO and your site, let me explain it this way. When a link is broken and someone clicks on it, they are directed away from your page. Sometimes you will get a “500″ error, but most of them come back as a “404″ error and state nothing was found. Not only are these errors encountered by human searchers, they are also encountered by search engine bots. In the end, neither are happy when they encounter this.

As part of full disclosure, when we ran ours on PREP, we found 144 broken links out of 1751 for just over 8%. For me, that is just too high of a ratio and damages our SEO. Once we figured that portion out for our site, we thought that the members would have similar issues. So, with that coming to light, we decide that this was a “must have” tool to offer to our members. It is free to use and can be located on your dashboard under tools. The first time that you run it, it might seem to be stuck, but let it do it’s thing. It will clear out.

Now, what causes broken links, you ask. Well, that is a simple answer. Links can be deleted over time. A website can expire over time or go corrupt. Even worse, a site can be moved from one domain to another. While there are other fixes out to preserve these links, you have to ask yourself if it is worth the effort to track down the new URL. Once the program runs, you will have the choice to edit the URL, exclude it, or unlink it. In most cases, the only real choice is to unlink it.

So, what all does this tool do? For that information, I thought that I would just turn to Wordpress Plugins Directory for that answer:

Features

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).

• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.

• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.

• Also detects redirected links.

• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).

• Link checking intervals can be configured.

• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.

• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.

• Searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text and so on is also possible.

• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

Basic Usage

Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll), etc and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take a few minutes or even several hours. When parsing is complete the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress and set various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.

Note : Currently the plugin only runs when you have at least one tab of the Dashboard open. Cron support will likely be added in a later version.

The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of WP admin panel – Tools -> Broken Links. A notification will also appear in the “Broken Link Checker” widget on the Dashboard. To save display space, you can keep the widget closed and configure it to expand automatically when problematic links are detected.

The “Broken Links” tab will by default display broken links that have been detected so far. However, you can use the subnavigation links on that page to view redirects or see a listing of all links – working or not – instead.

There are several actions associated with each link listed -

• “Details” shows more info about the link. You can also toggle link details by clicking on the “link text” cell.

• “Edit URL” lets you change the URL of that link. If the link is present in more than one place (e.g. both in a post and in the blogroll) then all instances of that URL will be changed.

• “Unlink” removes the link but leaves the link text intact.

• “Exclude” adds the link’s URL to the exclusion list. Excluded URLs won’t be checked again.

• “Discard” lets you manually mark the link as valid. This is useful if you know it was detected as broken only due to a temporary glitch or similar. The link will still be checked normally later.

In closing, this tool is set out to benefit our members. Unfortunately, we do not have the time to run these for you. We also do not have the time to review your broken links to give you direction. Ultimately, this is something that you are going to have to make the call on. There is really no right or wrong answers.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

PREP Now Offers Broken Link Checker is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

Many of you that have followed me over the last two years might remember that when I first broke into blogging, I was a manager for a mortgage company. I originally started blogging on ActiveRain as The Mortgage & More Guy and soon converted my blog name to The Mortgage & More Blog. It did not take me long to know that I needed to grow my presence and that is when I gave birth to The Mortgage & More Blog. Just so you know a time line, the site was born in April of 2008.

I originally turned to Blogger, which was a free platform through Google. I went there thinking that because it was tied to Google, I would be able to garner more Google Juice. Boy, was I dead wrong. It did not take me long to realize that this was the wrong platform. I soon started looking for a platform that I could expand on.

This is when I found WordPress. Many people do not realize that WordPress comes in two flavors; WordPress.com and WordPress.org . If you want to get techinical, there is also MU.Wordpress.org , in which Positive Real Estate Professionals is actually built on. I won’t get into that as it is a bird of a different color. The big difference between the .com and the .org is that .com host your site for you and there are many restrictions. The .org does not host the site for you and there are few limitations. In my estimation, .org and the MU platform might be the best content management system on the market today in terms of what it can do for you.

Now, let’s get back on track. I originally went with the .com version. However, it did not take me long to know that it was not the right version and I soon mover to the .org version. Since that point and time, I have been able to increase my web presence with little effort. The tools that this platform offers is extremely powerful. With that said, the people that still follow me know that I left the mortgage industry last year to follow a dream. Since that time, I have tried to keep this site going, but it has been difficult. I have since automated the site to pull my articles from PREP.

With the time running near for the site to renew, I have decided to sale it off. With that said, if you are interested in purchasing the site and all the content on the site, then we need to talk. The site is established and still has a following. It is generating about 200 hits a day at this point. If you want to discuss this, you can call our office @ 865-951-0522 or email me.

With all of the hoopla over the release of Google’s Buzz  in the past couple of weeks I got to thinking about similar services that already existed. First lets look at what Google Buzz actually does. If you missed Danny Thornton’s recent post on Buzz, you may want to check it out Positive Real Estate Professionals adds Google Buzz; especially the video.

Buzz is basically a social bookmarking site. Once you have created a Buzz account http://www.google.com/buzz you can then begin building your friends’ list. An easy way to start building this is by utilizing your current gmail contacts. This type of bookmarking is a way to create a ‘Buzz’ about your articles and by extension your website and business. You actually setup an integration with various services you use, like , , etc. which will bookmark your posts from these sites to your Buzz account. These bookmarks are then shared with your friends.

I setup a Buzz account within the first couple of days of the service going live. While I appreciate this bookmarking service and what it can do as far as generating more exposure, I have had an account with for quite some time. Like Buzz, FriendFeed is also a social bookmarking site. FriendFeed has similar features in that you build your friends’ list and then share with those friends your posts from both your own sites and posts from sites that you like. There is not supposed to be any SEO advantage to using Buzz over FriendFeed simply because Buzz is a Google product.

Both of these systems are rather easy to setup. Simply visit their respective websites (link to FriendFeed https://friendfeed.com/account/create?next=http%3A%2F%2Ffriendfeed.com%2F and Buzz http://www.google.com/buzz) and follow the instructions to setup your own account.

FriendFeed And Buzz is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.