Category Archives: Bedford Corners NY
The Sales Game Has Changed: Here’s How to Adapt | Bedford Corners Real Estate
Grass is getting greener every day in Bedford Corners NY | Bedford Corners Homes for Sale
Wikipedia: Redefining Research [Infographic] | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate
It took Wikipedia only a little over a decade to force the 244-year old Encyclopedia Britannica out of print — such is the power of a crowd-sourced product. To date, there are 21 million articles in more than 280 languages sprawled across the Wikipedia universe. The fact that all of this is available for free (and ad-free) easily makes it the crowd’s favorite source for research materials. Sustainability of the site depended largely on donations from the public. At the last fundraiser carried out, the public donated $16 million to the foundation so it can continue doing its good work.
While Wikipedia is not without its controversies, its popularity and relevance to online research methods warrants an inside look into the makings of its success. Fortunately for us, open-site.org has made this telling infographic littered with titbits of infromation you may or may not know of the online database giant and how far it has come since its conception in early 2001.
Celebrity Real Estate: Tim Tebow House Hunting in New Jersey | Bedford Corners Homes
EDITORIAL: The housing market’s non recovery | Bedford Corners Real Estate
Freddie Mac issued a report Wednesday claiming the housing market may be emerging from a long slump. The government-backed mortgage giant happily cited the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo confidence index, which is up for the fifth month in a row. The home builders forecast increased home sales for the coming year, based on an expectation of higher economic growth. Unfortunately for Freddie Mac, the real data provide little reason for such optimism.
Freddie Mac also cites the related reports that jobless claims recently reached a four-year low. Nonetheless, both joblessness and the level of new claims remain at historically high levels, which is particularly troubling at this point in a recovery when the economy should be growing rapidly. More than 7.1 million Americans still claim unemployment benefits, and millions more aren’t counted because they have simply given up looking for work. Even with the four-year low, there were 359,000 new applicants for unemployment benefits in the third week of March, not much lower than the previous week’s 364,000.
Housing sales actually fell 1 percent in February. Home prices have been dropping for several months, with the Case-Shiller index declining 0.8 percent in January, the fifth consecutive month it has fallen. Home prices have tumbled 3.8 percent over the past 12 months. February might prove to be an exception, with initial estimates showing an uptick of 0.3 percent in the price of existing home sales. Such a small increase, especially when accompanied by a decline in sales in almost all the major metro areas in the nation, is not a signal of a sustainable recovery.
The fundamentals remain bleak. A lot of foreclosed homes await legal resolution. Freddie Mac is entangled in litigation, for example, with a number of local governments, about what transfer taxes it is obligated to pay on foreclosed homes. Their intrusion into the market will depress prices further still.
With the economy growing a bare 2 percent this quarter, the economy is rightly described as weak. If inventories are excluded, that rate drops to 1.1 percent. Profits also plunged this quarter, to less than half of the level of last quarter. Gasoline prices have hit record highs and continue climbing, triggering fears of inflation that follow the Federal Reserve’s ongoing easy money policy.
There is another, deeper problem with the housing market: ballooning student debt. Young people are graduating from college (or not – graduation rates for four-year colleges are shockingly low) with non-dischargeable debt that is the size of a mortgage. The grand total of student loan debt has reached about $1 trillion. It is pretty hard for young families to buy a house while loaded down with such massive obligation, even if they are lucky enough to be gainfully employed. Locking out the buyers at the entry level of the market makes recovery of the entire housing market that much harder.
Government intervention in the housing market and in the student loan market have converged to drag down the recovery. And thanks to those student loans, the young and comparatively poor won’t be able to help get the real estate market back on track.
Bye-bye granite, hello green – The Red Wrap | Bedford Corners Homes
Current Trends in SEO: From Tactics to Strategy | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate
Out With The Old & In With The New!
The SEO market is changing. As I mentioned in “3 SEO Changes Rattle SEOs and Bloggers Alike“, these changes are for the better but not necessarily easy!
When SEO first started, you could rank just by keyword-stuffing your meta tags. Once that was phased out, there was a period when you could easily get ranked by link spamming. Those days are over as well. Both of those practices will now get you penalized not rewarded!
Today, SEO is rapidly moving in a new direction. Here are some of the many trends active in today’s world of SEO.
==> Moving Away: Keyword Density, Keyword Strategies
There were a few strategies that were popular a few years ago that simply don’t matter today.
Keyword density more or less doesn’t matter anymore. A few years ago, experts recommended trying to keep your keyword density somewhere around 3% to 6%. Today, it truly doesn’t matter so much.
In the past experts also recommended bolding your keywords in places or using your keywords in your subheads. Again, this doesn’t play as much of a role as it did in the past.
Like keyword stuffing of old, today severe “over-optimization” can actually hurt you!
Keywords still matter however and being smart about them will help you in many ways.
==> Moving Towards: Multimedia
Using videos, audio and web presentations is becoming an increasingly effective way to gain rankings in the search engines.
Building a strong reputation using multimedia takes time. The idea isn’t to try and launch one viral video and be set for life. Instead, the idea is to do a podcast every week, or a video every week until you have a solid reputation built.
The more often you can publish, the better. High quality videos and audios generate a lot of backlinks, especially once you have a strong reputation.
Not only is YouTube’s voice recognition technology leading to increased SEO relevance for videos… but the ability to upload a “closed caption” text script gives Google everything it needs!
==> Moving Away: Low Quality Links
Many of the low quality link tactics that worked even just a year ago are weighed very lowly today.
For example, links from article marketing are weighed very lowly today. Writing a bunch of articles and sending them to EzineArticles or GoArticles simply won’t do all that much for your rankings. In fact, EzineArticles itself was hit very hard by Panda in 2011 (though it is starting to recover).
Another example is social media profile links. Links from easy-to-create profiles no longer send much link juice. The same goes for comment links when compared to editorial links.
Many people think link building is dead which is far from the truth. Plentiful, high quality backlinks remain a leading factor in SEO but the old methods of attaining them such as link farms and purchased links are dead.
==> Moving Towards: Quality Indicator Metrics
Google is using more and more metrics to try and determine whether or not your site is a high quality website.
How does Google do this?
One metric it looks at is how often people come back to your site. It looks at how often people stay on your website. It looks at the ratio of content to advertisement on your site.
Another way is to look at social indicators such as number of tweets, number of Google+ shares, number of Likes…. and in particular if any of those came from “influencers” in your industry.
Google looks at literally hundreds of different factors and tries to determine whether or not your site is high quality.
As I mentioned here, there are a number of ways to improve the way Google views you and it important to keep this in mind!
It’s very hard to fool Google’s artificial intelligence, especially since so little is known about it today. The best way to rank in the new world of SEO is to just give Google what it wants: high quality content and real relationship connections.
This article originally appeared on Just Ask Kim and has been republished with permission.
Find out how to syndicate your content with Business 2 Community.




![Wikipedia: Redefining Research [Infographic] wikipedia redefining research Wikipedia: Redefining Research [Infographic]](http://media02.hongkiat.com/ig/wikipedia-redefining-research.jpg)

