Daily Archives: August 24, 2011

Katonah NY Mortgage Rates | Katonah NY Real Estate

Current Mortgage rates from Douglas Elliman | Wells Fargo

 

as of 08/24/2011 07:00 PM Eastern

ProductInterest RateAPR
Conforming 1and FHA Loans
30-Year Fixed4.375%4.559%
30-Year Fixed FHA4.250%5.251%
15-Year Fixed3.375%3.691%
5-Year ARM2.625%3.040%
5-Year ARM FHA3.250%3.236%
Larger Loan Amounts in Eligible Areas – Conforming and FHA.1
30-Year Fixed4.500%4.634%
30-Year Fixed FHA4.250%5.195%
5-Year ARM2.875%3.079%
Jumbo1 Loans – Amounts that exceed conforming loan limits1
30-Year Fixed4.750%4.886%
5-Year ARM3.125%3.167%

 

Call Robert Paul at 914-325-5758

 

Waccabuc NY Realtor | SEO Professionals Should Be Great Social Media Professionals Too!

The SEO skill set has evolved (and continues to). While being a great link builder, knowing how to write content for SEO and understanding best practices for optimizing a website are still incredibly important, they are not the only things we as SEO professionals need to understand in order to do our jobs well and produce real results for our clients. In today’s online world, having a solid understanding of how social media works and how it can be leveraged for SEO is critical to developing long lasting and quality SEO campaigns.

These are just some of things we as SEO professionals have to know about social media:

Understanding the Differences Between Social Networks

Not all social networks were created alike. While there is some overlap, each network has a unique audience that uses that site for specific reasons. And there are certain rules of etiquette that companies are expected to abide by when joining a site. For instance, since Tweets are so short, it’s not uncommon to see multiple postings by the same account every day. It’s fully expected, as Twitter is meant to be a “real time” source of information. However, flooding Facebook with hourly updates is often seen as spamming. Even though you are promoting the same content, the rules have changed.

How to Automate Tasks

We know that you could spend hours a day (if not all day) posting, submitting, uploading, Tweeting, sharing, linking, bookmarking and so forth. Now spread those actions across several accounts and there is no way you could get everything done between 9-5. Never mind the fact that most of your social connections might not even be active 9-5.

Knowing what tools are available to help automate your social media tasks is critical. Do you know how to schedule future Tweets and Facebook updates? Are your accounts linked so it’s one-and-done? Do new blog posts automatically go live on your social profiles? If you can automate these tasks, you can save yourself countless hours.

Leveraging Social Media as a Promotional Tool

Matts Cutts has said“A lot of times people think SEO versus social media marketing, and a lot of the times it makes sense to keep a holistic view. First you have to have great content … then you need to tell people about it, and social media marketing can be a great way to do that.” Having great content is only the first step. It doesn’t matter how educational/informative/amazing a piece of content is if nobody sees it.

For example, look at LinkedIn groups. You couldn’t more finely define your target audiences if you wanted to. LinkedIn users have willingly identified and categorized themselves by their industry, job title, level of experience, skill sets and so forth. You can choose exactly what kind of person would be most interested in/receptive to your content. That kind of laser focus means you aren’t wasting your time on the wrong audience.

Understanding Social Signals

The Facebook-Bing integration, indexing Tweets, Google+1. The search engines admit that social signals are an influencing factor on their algorithms. Social media is directly affecting SEO! If you don’t understand why author authority is important for link building (trusted social personalities have more search engine “appeal” than generic spam accounts), then you aren’t getting the most value out of your social media marketing and your SEO will suffer.

Social media and SEO have a lot more to do with each other than you might think. Neither can exist in separate silos if you really want to get the most value from your time and efforts. A great SEO professional has to understand the ins and outs of social media, as well as how to leverage social SEO to help their clients succeed.

North Salem NY Realtor | Desktop Vs. Web-Based SEO Software

Web-based SEO applications are gaining more fans every day in the debate over desktop vs. web apps. Web apps are said to be simpler, easier to use and are easy to learn by end users. Accounts can be accessed from any location, and it seems that all you need is an Internet connection and a password.

I tell you, if they had a Like button somewhere I would click on it right now.

On the other hand, desktop SEO apps are stuck to the machines they run on, and sometimes their features are so complex that they challenge the minds of the most intuitive and experienced testers.

So why in the world would someone choose desktop SEO software?

Business Logic

Desktop SEO solutions are native apps. Therefore, they have the advantage of providing a complex business logic, with strong features and patterns.

Web apps, on the other hand, are based on a client-server model. This restricts activating features and tools directly from the web pages you see on your computer.

Differences in behavior are reflected in other aspects, too.

Application Look and Feel

The fewer limitations that desktop apps have the more complex that end-user interaction becomes. Total control over features and tools means you also need to “tell” the system when and how to perform the actions.

With a more simplistic business logic, web apps have fewer layers. Therefore, poorer control on features and tools can make everything less complicated, which is perfect if you only have a small site to manage.

Frequency of Updates

Desktop SEO apps have an integrated querying engine. In rank tracking, for example, this gives you total control on the frequency of updates. It’s like having your own little postman who’s ready to deliver new queries to search engines whenever you need to send them.

This is not possible with hosted web apps. The querying engine is hidden on the server side. So, when you create an account, instead of fresh ranking numbers for your site, you might get a set of old data and a message saying the next update is scheduled in a few days, usually only once a week.

But, what if your SEO campaign includes paid ads? Google AdWords results are more volatile than organic results. To evaluate your positions correctly, you may need two to five updates a week.

Accuracy of Results Based on Location

All search engines look at the IP address from where queries are sent in order to compute an approximate location and return the most relevant results.

With a desktop app, you can easily manipulate locations down to the city level by defining them manually or adding multiple proxy servers within the application.

This mechanism for rank-tracking cannot be implemented in a web app on the client side. Queries are sent only from the web-hosted server, based on the requests that you enter into your account.

Let me explain how it works.

Suppose you’re in San Francisco, and you have a customer with a local business in Birmingham, UK. He wants to see where his site is listed in Google UK for searchers located in Birmingham.

With a desktop SEO software, you can either use UK proxy servers with IP addresses from Birmingham, or you can define Birmingham as Google Location in the UI, without using any proxies at all. This way, the application gathers the same results that searchers from this location see in the browser.

For the time being, with a web SEO tool you can specify the location only to the country level. So, when you choose the Google UK search engine in your profile, rankings may be retrieved with a London IP address. Thus, results may not be similar to those gathered from Birmingham.

Integration of web based tools

Another beautiful thing about desktop SEO apps is that they can have integrated web-based tools. Tricky, right?

For example, you can access some useful keyword research tools directly from the application framework, without having to load them in a new browser session.

As you may have guessed, hosted SEO apps can’t embed desktop components.

Environment Limitations

Still, desktop SEO apps are also more vulnerable to environment limitations.

Differences between desktop and web tools are reflected in three environment aspects:

First, there’s the dependency on one computer

A desktop application is installed and runs standalone on a specific desktop or laptop. This means you can use it only if that computer is running.

For example, if you want to run a scheduled update over the weekend, you need to leave your computer turned on.

Things are simpler with web apps, because you can log into a hosted SEO account from any machine you have access to. And you don’t even have to worry about leaving your computer running when a new update is scheduled.

Then there’s platform compatibility.

Desktop SEO app limitations are imposed by operating systems requirements. Some are compatible with all platforms, providing Windows, Mac and Linux users with the same end-user experience. But, some are designed only for a certain platform, making it impossible to switch to a different one.

Due to their very nature, all web applications are automatically platform independent. They only need a browser, so limitations are imposed only by browser-supported features.

What is the Internet connection is dodgy or absent?

Both desktop and web SEO tools need an Internet connection to gather and display fresh rankings. However, a difference in behavior appears when the Internet connection is down and the only one smiling is the little postman, tired of so many queries :).

While you can run a desktop application and check the previously gathered ranking data, it’s impossible to access a hosted account without an Internet connection, so you can’t even see your data.

When it comes to infrastructure, desktop vulnerabilities turn into advantages.

The differences between desktop and web apps are seen in the way information is transferred and stored in the database.

With desktop SEO solutions, data is stored locally, on each user’s computer, or on a centralized database. This provides you with a constant time of response, and places the transfer speed and infrastructure down time entirely in your hands.

With hosted apps, ranking data is stored remotely, on a database hosted on the provider’s side. This mechanism can make web apps slower than desktop apps, since data-transfer speed depends on the Internet bandwidth. Here you also don’t have any control on infrastructure down time. This can become a big inconvenience, because data cannot be accessed while the host server is offline.

Desktop databases easily allow tracking and storing tens of thousands of keywords because all data is stored locally. This way, each user gets to use his own resources.

Web-apps databases don’t have this capability. The number of keywords you can track is usually limited according to the account type because everyone uses the provider’s common resources.

When it comes to data security, opinions collide. Online storage, some say, provides more complex security management than does local storage.

But, if you think about it, there are a lot of methods for setting your own security access rules and for protecting your local data. Of course, there’s no getting around privacy concerns when you store data remotely. It comes down to trusting your provider.

The technology underlying each type of application is not reflected only in the environment requirements and user experience, but also in the implementation costs.

The major difference between the two types of SEO solutions can be seen in the way costs are spread across a long time:

One-Time Purchase

With desktop tools, the initial cost is more consistent, often based on the number of licenses you will need. But, once the system is running, you can put a lock on your wallet for quite a while.

Spreading the Purchase Cost

Web app generally are sold like subscriptions, minimizing initial costs, but making them a recurring expense.

Here’s an example:

A good desktop SEO software license is about $400, depending on features and tools. A good web solution has an average price of $100 per month. Over a year, you will pay $800 more for a web app.

There are, of course, free desktop and web SEO tools to be had. However, these free often have limited functionality and no guarantees.

Conclusion

Each SEO solution comes with its advantages and disadvantages:

Desktop applications give you control over updates, better response time and high interactivity. But you’re tied to the computer on which the app’s installed, and training can be a bear.

Web apps are often packaged in a much simpler framework, and can be accessed anywhere. But you have less control over how the apps are developed, and features might be less customizable.

So, which one would you choose?

Or, maybe a better question is: Why do you think one is better than the other?

South Salem Realtor | Bing Gives a List of 18 SEO Fundamentals

Microsoft is systematically killing off the mystery of Bing-Yahoo optimization. In addition to a post on quality content that we covered previously, Bing has now told us the 18 fundamental things that webmasters need to know about search engine optimization. Here’s the basic breakdown:

  1. Make sure your site is crawlable by using an XML sitemap, a robots.txt file, and well-structured on-site navigation.
  2. Improve your site structure by using an HTML sitemap and linking to trusted sources both within your site and outside of it.
  3. Create a solid content hierarchy by doing basic keyword research and avoiding placement of your content in rich media such as Silverlight and Flash.
  4. Use a short meta title that has fewer than 65 characters and that’s unique to each page, and try to include the targeted keyword toward the beginning of that title.
  5. Use a unique meta description tag.
  6. Create quality content (following the guidelines Bing provided earlier).
  7. When you build links, focus on keyword-relevant anchor tags that link back to quality content on your page.
  8. Create an RSS feed.
  9. Use schema.org markup.
  10. Create a user interface that prioritizes the user experiences; the search perspective on things like page load time aren’t as important as how the user responds.
  11. Encourage social sharing with the use of social buttons.
  12. Don’t cloak your website.
  13. Don’t use link farms.
  14. Don’t engage in three-way linking.
  15. Don’t duplicate content.
  16. Don’t use auto-following on the social front.
  17. Don’t use thin content.
  18. Don’t buy links.

It’s always good when the search engines themselves tell us what they’re looking for. While this list is fairly basic, it does cover the most needed 101 ground. What items, if any, do you feel Bing is missing?

[Sources include: The Bing Blog]

Bedford NY Realtor | Google-Motorola Deal: Signaling “Free Phones”?

We previously discussed the Motorola Mobility purchase and the implications it had on patents, but we only just touched on the implications for hardware control. Now, in the aftermath of the announcement, analysts in a variety of tech industries have speculated what the move may signal for Android’s future. Most notably, some are pointing to the possibility of free or subsidized hardware.

This isn’t the first time this rumor has circulated; when the Nexus One was released, analysts thought much the same thing. The problem is that the Nexus One never gained much traction, probably because it wasn’t subsidized by the phone carriers – and was far from free. The Motorola line, on the other hand, is established and has carrier connections already. Control over the hardware in this regard would give access to carrier deals and brand reputation while allowing Google to further subsidize the cost of the “Google brand” phones to get them to customers for free.

We can also look at Google’s experiments in voice and internet technology; if Google wanted to offer a wholesale deal that gave users a carrier and device all at once, the Motorola deal certainly put them in a better position to do so.

However, that’s all pretty far off into the future, not to mention out of left field. The more important element of hardware control that many are ignoring is how this may speed along app development. The iPhone has been praised for its security and smooth app interface largely because Apple controls both the hardware and software elements. While Google has stated they’re interested in continuing to keep the platform open, having access to the hardware end will allow Google an armada of OS flagship opportunities, the ability to experiment with all level of their smartphones, and may give them a better setup for entering the tablet arena.

[Sources include: Google Watch & Xconomy]

Bedford Corners NY Realtor | House of the Week: Sun Valley Silver Dome

Welcome to Zillow’s House of the Week. Our site is filled with information on homes for sale and apartments for rent, plus we have data on more than 100 million homes in the U.S., so lots of homes catch our eye.

What do you picture when you think “creative retreat?” A cabin tucked away in the woods completely without modern conveniences? A tudor-style home complete with two-story library? Or how about a silver-dome concrete structure in the heart of ski mecca and vacation spot Sun Valley, ID?
This week’s home: Sun Valley Silver Dome

For sale by owner: $499,000

Location: Ketchum, ID

Year built: 2008

Details: 1 bed, 1 bath, 1,150 square feet

Looking for a bit of respite and a place to whittle away on his next piece, a New York writer bought a piece of Ketchum real estate with the plans to create his ultimate creative space.

One of the listing agents, Jeannie Kiel of Sun Valley Sotheby’s explained that the previous owner’s idea was to create a building that looked like an elevated lantern. Jim Holcomb of Sun Valley Sotheby’s also  holds the listing.

“Some people called it a silver lantern, some people called it a silver dome,” Kiel said.

The owner contacted EWorkshop out of Vashon Island, WA to draw up plans and a local construction company was hired. Unfortunately as the home was completed in 2008, the real estate market took a turn for the worse, dropping median Ketchum home values, thus leading the bank to foreclose on the home.

“It’s a sad story but it’s what’s going on in the U.S. today,” explained Kiel.

The bank split the half-acre lot and put the home up for sale $778,000. The home’s price was then slashed down to $585,00 and then again $499,000 before coming under contract in August just as mortgage rates dropped, providing an even bigger incentive.

Kiel said the buyer is thrilled about his new purchase, and like the previous owner, plans to use the home as a creative space.

“It’s gone from one creative to another,” said Kiel. “The gentleman under contract loves it and can’t wait to put his finishing touches on it.”

Although the home has only one bedroom and one bathroom, the home feels spacious with light-filled rooms and ceilings that are over 30 feet tall.

Built from steel and concrete, Kiel says the home is near indestructible as well as energy efficient with radiant heated floors and super insulated walls.

As for a creative space, Kiel says a lot of people, if they can work remotely, choose to do so in Sun Valley.

“They say that people move here for the winters but stay for the summers,” she said.