The Mortgage and More Blog

Do you have a account? Do you use it? How do you use it? In this post I want to examine the benefits that YouTube (and other video service hosting sites) can bring to your business.

Most smart business people already recognize the reach of the internet in getting their business out there. From stand alone websites like Strategic Funding Concepts to sites like RE/MAX Lakeside: Lake Arrowhead Real Estate which take advantage of the SEO juice that a network creates, a huge part of any overall business plan should incorporate a dynamic website. Dynamic websites have new material added on a regular basis.

Adding new material can be easily accomplished through adding new static pages, blog posts, images, or videos. While traditional blog posts are one of the easiest ways to add new content, both photo and video posts are growing in popularity. Here is a great post on the benefits of photoblogging Say It With Pictures – Photoblogs. You can either incorporate photoblogs and videoblogs (vlogs) into your existing blog or you can create an entirely separate blog just for these mediums. Here is a post on the benefits of multiple blogs Increase your SEO with multiple blogs on one site.

If you have a YouTube account (or an account with one of the other video service hosting sites) then using videos on your site is a snap. From walkthrus of your property listings to potential issues home inspectors encounter everyday to a walking tour of a local attraction, it has never been easier to incorporate these videos into your site. All you do is upload your video to whichever service you have an account with. This then places it in your account so that when others view it, they know it comes from you. You can then use your video’s URL to place it in your blog as a post. That is all you do! You have now added to your video library and to your website; this is a win/win on both counts.

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.

YouTube And Your Business is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

It never fails that I get 2 or 3 emails requesting link exchanges on a daily basis. Most of the requests are from people with low ranking sites that have some relevance to us. However, I typically turn all of them down unless it is a member of our online real estate network. The biggest reason that we do this is because we are not here to promote sites of non-members. We created this network to promote our members and that is what we try to do.

With that said, yesterday I received an email that was requesting a link on our site and even went as far as to state that they would pay for the link. I replied to the email and it did not take long for the person to respond to my email. I basically told them the ONLY way that we would accept a paid link is if the link could have a “nofollow” attribute added to it. The person said “NO” and ran away.

Now, why would I have told him that? Why not just take his money? Well, let’s turn to Google Webmaster Central for the answer to that:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know. We’ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links.

In closing, I am hoping this will help to shed some light on how Google actually looks at paid links. Many of the other search engines are starting to follow this same path. Matt Cutts of Google once stated “The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails–the best links are earned and given by choice.” I have to 100% agree with him. Earning links or getting them because someone likes your site is so much better than obtaining them by having them built by paying for them, selling them, or even link farming.

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.

Paid Links: A Love Hate Relationship is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

Over the last month I have discussed mastering search engine optimization with many of our members of this online real estate network as well as clients of R & D Art. In those conversations, it always seems to end with me telling them that to master SEO it is not all about the meta keywords that are in your site. Actually, that might be the weakest link to mastering SEO and getting the search engines to recognize you. With that said, I think the biggest problem is that people think they need to master Google and forget about Alexa, Yahoo, and Bing. Regardless what my personal feelings are on the search engines, I still have to pay homage to them.

If you notice, I have linked to several keywords in my first paragraph. However, only one of those keywords is something that I really key on for our real estate based site to show up in. That is: real estate network. Over and over, when we blog, we want to make sure that we are keying on this phrase. With that said, it is not certain that phrase that will drive readers to our site. We make sure that our articles are packed with keyword enriched content. I have said it many times before and I will say it again; CONTENT IS KING. No matter where you go on the net, anyone that knows anything about SEO will tell you this. Great content will win every time.

One of the things that I see that people do is have a very short post on their site or even worse, a recipe, and they hope that it pushes them up because they wrote a blog. Unfortunately, writing a recipe on a real estate site really is not going to carry much weight with the search engines. People might think you are more down to earth and come looking for more recipes, but frankly, the search engines won’t. It is the same with many topics that do not pertain to your main topic. The great thing about the main blog for PREP is that we can discuss SEO, SERP, blogs, social media, social media marketing, financing, the housing industry, and a world of other topics and still be point on. The great thing with a Realtor® is that they can discuss local events, neighborhoods, dining, schools, shopping, and much more and still be right on target. However, if your blog is about USDA or FHA, home staging, or home inspections, appraisals or home repair, then most readers are going to want the articles to be about that. They do not want to sort through all the fluff to get to the meat.

Here is one thing that I also see that people have a tendency to do; they write on a level that not many can understand. So many times I have had to tell bloggers to “dumb it down”. For those that do not understand that, it just means that you are probably writing on a college or doctoral level. I do not really know many people that understand that. The key element in this is to write on a secondary or grade school level. It means leave the 6 syllable words at home. With that said, don’t sacrifice your article for the sake of this procedure.

I would have to say the next thing that I see in bloggers that ask me why their sites are not showing up at the top of search engines has to be the lack of consistency. In the last month I have talk to two different bloggers in reference to this fact. One had 8 articles published and the other had 6. Both wondered why they could not be found on the first 3 pages in the search engines. Well, frankly, if I were only writing 8 articles over a 6 month period, I would not be found either. Blogging is not something that you can do just when you feel like it and magically appear. You have to work at it. And by working at it, I am not referring to 20 hours a week. However, being able to sit down and post 5 or 7 post during your downtime and have them automatically publish is a great feature. Not many platforms can supply that fact. But, even if you do not have that opportunity, 2 to 5 hours a week can still net you the front page of keyword searches where as neglect cannot.

Another thing that I notice that people have a knack for forgetting about has to be linking. Rich wrote an article about linking the other day and in it he talked about linking to some of your older articles. If you have not read that post, I recommend that you do. I have caught myself forgetting to use links in post, so it happens and I can understand that. However, if we want to get pushed up in the search engines, we need to link like crazy and I am not just talking about in our articles on this site. We do it to all of our sites. Use links to your other sites through your signature and then you can make sure that you have it covered all the time.

Now, this is where most people stop when it comes to SEO. PREP does not. This is where the power of Wordpress extends to help push your SEO even further. This real estate network has a feature that allows for you to send trackbacks to other links that you have used in your post. This is a great way to get internal links built for your site, or maybe external links built using another site you own. Regardless, it takes linking to another level.

The last thing that I will talk about is the added feature of the All In One SEO Pack. For those of you that do not understand what this provides, let me state it like this. The All In One SEO pack gives you the added ability to optimize pages, post, and your site individually. Here are some features:

• Advanced Canonical URLs

• Fine tune Page Navigational Links

• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality

• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites

• Nonce Security

• Support for CMS-style Wordpress installations

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines

• Generates META tags automatically

• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs

• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.

• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything

• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

In closing, mastering SEO is not something that will happen over night. I have seen Black hat tricks and grey hat tricks in SEO and I have seen both cost site owners their place in search engines when they are caught. In the long run, it is so much better to just do it the right way.

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.

Mastering Search Engine Optimization is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

Today was a good day for PREP admins and hopefully for the general public who have their own website or blogsite built on a platform. This is because we launched SEO Info Now. This site is independent of the Positive Real Estate Professionals network.

Why did we build this site?

The reason for this site is rather simple. Since many of our PREP members find our SEO posts helpful, and the tutorials on the Test Account helpful as well we wanted to launch a site that combines both.

Will all the articles from PREP be on this new site?

While we are using a syndication from PREP’s main blog and the Test Account, these are going to be the only two sources of information for this site. Also, we have set up the syndication to hold posts in draft for the simple reason that if they are mainly concerned with PREP and not SEO or SEO enhancements or Wordpress tutorials we can simply leave them in draft.

What is the benefit to PREP overall (why should I care)?

This new site will provide backlinks and deeplinks to PREP. This will strengthen and enhance even further our positioning as a network with the search engines.

If you have a chance check out the new site and if you know someone whose site is built on a Wordpress platform that might appreciate the articles, send them on over too!

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 Launches SEO Info Now is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

PREP adds tool to speed up owner verification of sites today. Instead of having to get codes from Webmaster Tools, SiteExplorer, Webmaster Center and Siteowners and having to locate the section where you have to insert these codes, we have made it much easier. So, you are asking me how this might actually help you. Well, let me explain it all from the start and lets go over each and every one of the four search engine tools that are listed in this article. Also keep in mind that our real estate network is progressive when it comes to technology. Our goal is to bring our members and our readers the best in technology that we can.

First off, let’s take a look at Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! SiteExplorer, Bing Webmaster Center and Alexa Siteowners and how each of them can help us. For Google, their Webmaster Tools are designed to provide you with Google’s view of your site as well as help you diagnosis any issues or problems. However, it goes deeper than that by allowing you to provide a link to your sitemap so that Google bots can crawl the site more efficiently. You can also research internal and external links to your site as well as search for keywords that are driving people to your site. With Yahoo! SiteExplorer , you are able to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. You can also view the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any other pages. With Bing Webmaster Center, you can use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites. Alexa Siteowners is really no different except that it allows for you to add detailed information about the ownership of the site.

The biggest question that I get asked when it comes to these four is “Why use all four if they provide almost the same info?”. The answer to that is simple. While they provide much of the same information, they provide it from their perspective. Hence, why you want to use all four. If you walked into your doctor’s office and he told you that you were dying from some serious untreatable disease, you would more than likely ask for a second opinion. With each of these tools, that is basically what you are getting; a second opinion. With that said, remember this fact: each of these webmaster tools provides information that is unique to them.

Lastly, the addition of the tool is simple to setup. For members of PREP, all you need to do is log into your dashboard. Then go to Settings on the left side and look for “Fast Verification”. Once there, click on the link. When it opens, there will be four large blanks. Below all four will be 4 different links to each of the respective sites. Click on each and look for the code that it is requesting in the examples below each blank. As always, if you have issues, please call one of admins. Unfortunately, this is not something that we can do for you. With that said, it is definitely something that I highly recommend that each person uses. In the long run, it can help you show up higher in SEO and SERP.

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 adds tool to speed up owner verification of sites is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

All The Details For Saturday’s Mardi Growl! is a post from: Spoiled Pet Cafe

©2010 Spoiled Pet Cafe. All Rights Reserved.

Positive Real Estate Professionals adds Google Buzz to it’s list of tools. What does this mean for our members and readers? Well, for the members, it is just one more social outlet that their articles can be shared on. As well, it will create another link on the world wide web, so ultimately, it will provide more Google Juice. For our readers, it will provide an easy and quick way to add things to their Google reader or share them with their friends in their Gmail account. This might be one of the easiest share tools that I have seen in some time. Below is a short video that will help to explain Google Buzz.

It is the desire of PREP and their admins to stay on top of the social media world. The only way for us to do that is to keep up with the social media marketing tools that these social media networks are putting out there. Ultimately, our job is to provide not only our members, but our readers as well with avenues to share articles on our site with their family, friends, and followers. In other words, their sphere of influence (SOI). We will continue to march forward to bring the best of social media marketing to our members and readers alike.

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.

Positive Real Estate Professionals adds Google Buzz is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

Over the last several months, I have been on an SEO kick. While that is all great and dandy, I need to revert back to something that caused me to create this network in the first place. For those that do not know, that would be looking for real estate industry professionals that accentuate the positive. I am a firm believer that these are the people that will survive any market regardless what the conditions are. With that said, these are the ones that I want to be associated with. The media does enough to tear our wonderful industry down and it takes professionals that can accentuate the positive to put it back right. Before we get started, here is a video that inspired this post.

The very first two verses of this song says it all:

You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene

Staying focused on the positive and pushing out the negative is a choice that we have to make. It does not just happen. We seriously have to work at it daily. If we don’t negativity will eventually swallow us up and potentially make us as bitter as the media is at our industry. Personally, I don’t want to be that. I hate doom and gloom. I hate to think who is at fault when it comes to the current housing situation and I would rather think that we all are working to make it better. I hate to think about the economy and I would rather think about what we are doing as individuals and a country to make it stronger. I hate to think about all the job losses and would rather focus on what we are doing to create more jobs.

In closing, if you are a real estate industry professional and accentuate the positive, PREP would love to have you as a member. If you are not up for joining, we would love to have you visit our site regularly and if we can help you in some way, please ask. We are here to serve our community.

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.

Accentuate the Positive is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

Title: Mardi Growl
Location: Market Square in Knoxville, TN
Link out: Click here
Description: Fun animal parade to benefit Young-Williams Animal Center!
Start Time: 08:30
Date: 2010-02-13
End Time: 14:00

Mardi Growl is a post from: Spoiled Pet Cafe

©2010 Spoiled Pet Cafe. All Rights Reserved.

Today I was reminded of a post that I had written more than a year and a half ago on ActiveRain. The post, entitled Positive Attitude – Power Quotes Series was in a series that I was doing on quotes. This particular one meant a lot to me because it seems to be so hard to kept remaining positive when negativity is staring you down. First, before I get too deep, I would like to share the quotes that I used in this post.

“Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don’t hang around long enough for his or her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, surround yourself with optimistic people.”
Zig Ziglar

“Be conscious of your attitude. Work extra hard at keeping your attitude positive in all kinds of weather, through all the challenges of life.”
Catherine Pulsifer, from All Is Going Well?

“Positive anything is better than negative nothing.”
Elbert Hubbard

“Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it.
I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”
Charles F. Kettering

“Having a positive mental attitude is asking how something can be done rather than saying it can’t be done.”
Bo Bennett

“A ‘positive attitude’ is definitely one of the keys to success. My definition of a positive attitude is a simple one: Looking for the good in all circumstances.
Catherine Pulsifer, from Authors Introduction (partial) to Wings of Wisdom

“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure.”
Norman Vincent Peale

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.”
Mark Twain

OK, now that is done, let’s get deep here. Maybe the quote that sticks out the most in this is the one from Norman Vincent Peale, “Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure”. When I read this, it sends chills up and down my spine. For years I have been telling people that attitude is everything when it comes to success. This rings really loud today for many businesses and people. One thing I hate is to hear people constantly complain about their circumstances, yet they are not willing to do anything to change them. For most of them, their attitude is in the sewer, so there will never be a positive change to those circumstances.

Years ago, I used to wake up every morning and look in the mirror and tell myself that I would never let anyone steal my joy. For that period of time, I might have been the most successful that I had been in years. Somewhere down that line, I let someone steal my joy and going to work became a chore instead of fun. Until today, I had forgotten all about it. Now, it is time to stay positive when negativity is staring you down. On a more personal note, for those of you that do not know, I went into the hospital on Jan 12th at 2:30 AM. In less than 4 hours, they had place me in ICU on a bipap breathing machine because I could not breathe on my own. With that being said, I had two choices to make. One, allow all the negative thoughts to enter my head and rule my life or decide to remain positive that all would work out. Well, I am sure you can figure out which I chose as I am sitting here writing this today.

In closing, there is nothing that we face in life that we cannot get through. We have to learn how to remain positive when negativity is staring you down. for those of you that want to know how to do that, let me tell you this. There is no secret to it. There is no easy path to it. It is something that you have to work at daily. It requires positive affirmations as well as friends that will support your positive attitude. On a side note, if your friends are always negative, maybe it is time to get some new friends.

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.

Remaining Positive When Negativity Is Staring You Down is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals