Tuesday, January 24th, 2012, 8:36 pm

President Obama said in his State of the Union address Tuesday that he will submit to Congress a plan that gives responsible homeowners the chance to refinance and save roughly $3,000 a year on their mortgage.

“No more red tape,” he said. “No more runaround from the banks.”

The legislation, he said, would be funded by a small fee charged to the largest banks. It will expand on the already widened Home Affordable Refinance Program. The Federal Housing Finance Agency eliminated barriers in November for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac borrowers to refinance into historically low interest rates.

Nearly 11 million borrowers in the U.S. are underwater, roughly 22.5% of all outstanding loans, according to CoreLogic (CLGX: 14.75 +0.75%). Another 2.4 million hold less than 5% equity in their homes.

In addition to the new assistance, Obama directed the U.S. Attorney General and leading state AGs to expand their investigations into mortgage fraud and other abusive practices that led to the housing crisis.

“This new unit,” he said, “will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

In 2010, a multistate coalition of AGs, the Justice Department and federal agencies launched an investigation into apparent foreclosure mispractices at the major banks. More than one year later, a settlement draws near. But Obama said Tuesday the investigation will now span across lending and securitization issues.

New York AG Eric Schneiderman will head up the task force, his office said in a statement. Schneiderman was previously removed from the servicing negotiations because he wanted to shift the talks to securitization and other problems at major Wall Street firms.

“Some financial firms violate major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a repeat offender,” Obama said. “That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the right thing.”

Write to Jon Prior.

Follow him on Twitter @JonAPrior.

Why Worry About Keywords?

An online business that ignores keywords and search phrases will surely struggle.

Why?

Because the internet is based on information. That information is sorted and organized based on the topic or keywords that best describe the information. That’s how the search engines work.

When you embrace keywords and search phrases, you’re better able to position your website competitively.

Here’s 7 Reasons Why Your Keywords Matter

Search phrases help you achieve good page rankings. When your website shows up on the first page or two of search results, you will get more website visitors. Each website visitor is a potential customer. That means search phrases are directly related to your profits.

They help you target specific customers. Appealing to a broad audience can be difficult. There’s a lot of competition. However, when you narrow your focus and target specific keywords and search phrases (known as “long tail keywords”), you can focus on appealing to a smaller audience. You can be the big fish in a little pond. That often results in more financial success than competing for the other high demand high supply keywords.

Keywords and search phrases help you learn about your audience and prospects. Keyword research helps you learn what your audience is looking for. Entering your keywords or keyword phrase into a keyword research tool will generate other relevant keyword phrases. You can use the supply and demand data to learn what your prospects are searching for.

Keywords and search phrases help you organize content in an effective and meaningful way. They help you organize your website navigation by tier one, two and three pages. You can use them to create a streamlined navigation system. This improves both SEO and the overall reader experience.

They help you create content and provide value. Keywords can give you content topics and topic ideas. Simple keyword research will generate potentially hundreds of content ideas. Simply searching through a keyword research tool can reveal a lot of topics you can blog about to both build your SEO while also providing quality content to your community.

Keywords help you profit through PPC ads. You can target specific keyword phrases and profit from placing PPC ads on your website. They can also help you attract traffic and other advertising or affiliate profits.

Keywords help you market and advertise. Finally, keywords and search phrases help you create targeted advertisements. They help you market to your audience. When a PPC ad, for example, contains the keywords it’s targeting, it’s been shown to be more effective than an ad that doesn’t contain keywords.

Finding keyword search phrases is a matter of research. Utilize keyword research tools. Install and review analytics. Pay attention to trends. Participate on social networking sites and other blogs and websites. The more you integrate keywords into your overall blogging strategy, the more success you’ll achieve. If your new to learning SEO for WordPress, I suggest you check out my WP SEO 101 course as well.

As you can see, paying attention to keywords can give you a huge boost to leverage by letting your content do double duty… being great for your community of readers while making the search engines love you!

Author: Kim Castleberry    Kim Castleberry on the Web Kim Castleberry RSS Feed

View full profile

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.