Senators split on White House fiscal cliff meeting | Bedford Hills Realtor
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Charging for tenant-inflicted property damage | Bedford Hills NY Homes
via inman.com
Reduced Immigration and Births Slash Population Forecast | Bedford Hills NY Real Estate
Fifty years from now the US will have 20 million fewer residents than previously forecast, according to the Census Bureau’s new national population projections released last week, which will translate in reduced demand for housing than expected
The bureau’s new projected population of 420.3 million in 2060 is below its previous projection of 439 million for a decade earlier, in 2050. The bureau’s new projected population for 2050 is 399.8 million. The 2060 population figure, which represents a 34 percent increase from the U.S. 2012 population of 314 million, assumes that annual growth will range from just below 2 million to 2.5 million rather than about 3 million to 3.4 million people each year, as previously assumed. The new estimates lowers the Census forecast by 4 percent.
Most of the 39.2 million gap in the total population forecast is due to scaled-back assumptions about the level of new immigration to the U.S. But another notable factor in the lowered population projection was that the bureau also lowered its forecasts for birth levels. Immigration levels have come down since a peak in 2001, and unauthorized immigration began falling around 2007. Birth rates, already decreasing in recent decades, declined sharply after 2007. The Great Recession that began in 2007 has helped to slow immigration and births
In its new projections, the bureau assumes that the U.S. population will gain a total of 41.2 million net new international migrants from 2012-2050. In its 2008 projections through 2050, that number was 65.6 million. As this chart shows, the difference-24.4 million-represents more than 60 percent of the reduction in total U.S. population size for 2050 in the 2012 projections compared with those in 2008.
Not only did the bureau lower the number of new immigrants it expects to arrive, it also changed the way it calculates its immigration forecasts. Instead of using only U.S. data, the bureau incorporated information on population trends in sending countries, which it collects in its International Data Base.
Overall, the projections estimate that net immigration levels will rise to 1.2 million a year in 2060 from 725,000 in 2012. In the new projections, the growth of the foreign-born population increases less and less rapidly over time and virtually levels off by mid-century. In the 2008 projections, annual net immigration was about 1.3 million in 2012 and increased to 2 million in 2048, growing briskly each decade. (Net immigration from abroad includes a small number of people born in the U.S. or its territories, but not enough to affect totals.)
Local Market Reports: Highest Homeownership Rates | Bedford Hills Real Estate
Foreclosure funds slow to get to homeowners | Bedford Hills Realtor
via usatoday.com
Bedford Hills Realtor | URL Be Sorry! Google Cuts Back on Top-ranking Exact-match Domains
Regular Google users will know that one of the easiest ways to get a good ranking in its search results is for your web address to exactly match the search query.
Get it spot-on and, until recently, you’ve been almost assured of a position close to the top, and often in the number-one slot on page one of the SERPs.
But Google’s continuing mission to put right what once went wrong in their algorithms is now targeting what Matt Cutts calls “low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains”.
This adds to the work done by the Panda update, which filtered out poor-quality web pages, and Penguin, which tackled spammy pages.
According to a Cutts’ tweet on September 28th, 0.6% of English-US queries will be noticeably affected.
This might not sound like many searches in the grand scheme of things. However, the latest comScore figures show that Google sites were responsible for 11.3 billion individual search queries in the US alone in August 2012, meaning that 0.6% of queries amounts to almost 68 million searches per month.
What they said
Cutts’ full announcement of this update on Twitter read as follows:
The immediate response was positive, with one Twitter user simply replying with “Yippeeee!,” and another joking “I suspect that won’t be a ‘minor’ weather report to the vast majority of affiliate marketers.”
Moving on from EMDs
So just what does this mean for online marketing and SEO? Well, it goes considerably further than simply meaning that EMDs won’t be so prevalent in the search results, because it opens up that top spot to other websites that are able to compete using the remaining “acceptable” methods of SEO not yet targeted for penalisation by Google.
There are as many webmasters out there who are frustrated by always ranking second to an EMD as there are site owners who will be negatively affected by this change. So it’s the perfect opportunity for us to re-optimize any of our pages that could use a bit of attention.
Poor quality content is already a no-no, as are paid links or those created by spamming blog comments and discussion forums. Now EMDs are out too. So renew your focus on legitimate PPC platforms and the remaining on-page SEO opportunities.
Where to focus for better position
Good-quality content will always be favoured by Google, and they’ve never stopped saying that well-placed on-page keywords are a good thing, as long as they don’t damage the overall quality and grammar of the page they’re placed on.
Look to your best-performing pages for inspiration, and you can’t go wrong: you’re likely to find a strong structure with keywords and phrases repeated a couple of times in appropriate places on the page, possibly helped further by your choice of anchor text for hyperlinks on the page, text used in image captions, and so on.
With these Google-approved locations for keywords, you can make sure your pages are viewed in the best possible light by the search robots, even if they’re hosted on an EMD. Hopefully, you’ll be able to snag yourself that top spot in the search results once the dust settles.
This blog was written by Rob Henry, marketing specialist at K2L. K2L Marketing is a full service marketing agency offering a unique approach to your marketing needs.
via problogger.net
Chicago housing permits reach highest level in four years | Bedford Hills Real Estate
via housingwire.com
Guy Kawasaki Dishes On How Hard It Was To Work For Steve Jobs | Bedford Hills Realtor
via readwrite.com
‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ franchisor wins domain name dispute | Bedford Hills Homes
The company behind the slogan “We Buy Ugly Houses” has prevailed in an arbitration proceeding against the previous owner of a domain name that allegedly used the company’s trademark to offer links to competing services.
Dallas-based HomeVestors of America Inc., which claims to be the “No. 1 buyer of houses in the U.S.,” has been franchising since 1996 and has about 276 franchises in 37 states. The company claims its franchisees, who are authorized to use the “We Buy Ugly Houses” trademark, have spent more than $100 million advertising the brand.
In August, HomeVestors filed a complaint against the registered owner of the buy-ugly-houses.biz domain with the National Arbitration Forum, which helps resolve domain name disputes in accordance with the policies of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) .
HomeVestors alleged the domain name was “confusingly similar” to the “We Buy Ugly Houses” mark, and that the owner didn’t have any rights or “legitimate interests” in the domain name. The owner of the domain name registered and used it bad faith, HomeVestors claimed, offering links to services that compete with those of HomeVestors.
The owner, Stewart Taylor, never responded to the complaint. A panel assigned to the case therefore accepted HomeVestors’ allegations as true and granted the company’s request to transfer the domain name to HomeVestors.
“The frequent infringement of HomeVestors’ trademarks — including both of the ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ and ‘HomeVestors’ marks — is evidence of the vast goodwill that HomeVestors has built in those marks,” said HomeVestors litigation attorney Darin Klemchuk of Klemchuk Kubasta LLP, in a statement.
“In order to protect that goodwill, HomeVestors can and will pursue every infringement of which it becomes aware.”
The company said it has submitted another filing for domain name dispute resolution it expects will be decided in the next few weeks.
via inman.com
6 Lessons From the Social Media World Forum | Bedford Hills NY Real Estate
If you go to as many social media conferences as I do, sometimes it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. At least that’s the excuse I’m going to give for having my associate at Renegade, Merlin Ward share the six unique lessons he gleaned from the recent Social Media World Forum (SMWF) conference in New York City.
1. Pair Your Social with Ads
Chris Thorne, Vice President of Social Media & Media at EA, the sports game developer, found that content was more effective when coupled with Facebook advertising. They put extra care into creating content that users could “play” with, essentially gamifying their Timeline; then they made the monetary spend to promote it to as many users as possible. The result was more than just extended reach—they increased virality and sales.
2. Your Content Doesn’t Work Everywhere
Morgan Baden, Director of Social Media and Internal Communications for the book publisher Scholastic, shared their failures and successes with Pinterest. Pinterest is a natural social network for this brand, but they found that not all content is created equal. While female users enjoyed sharing book covers and special quote memes from books, photographs for events and other physical spaces didn’t attract the same interest. It seems that content made for collecting does the best on Pinterest, while amateur point-of-view photography is better left on the shelf.
3. Branch Out Beyond Your Brand
Felicia Yukich, Manager of Social Media Worldwide for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, discovered the secret to using social media in the hospitality industry. The fundamentals of hospitality – thinking about your guests’ stay in and outside of the hotel – translates well into social media. Therefore, Four Seasons curates content far beyond the hotel brand, such as wedding planning ideas, sight seeing destinations and recreational activities. They get into the minds of their audience and focus on their interests, just like a good concierge would do.
4. Build Social Into Your Product
In keeping with one of the conference themes, Jesse Redniss, Senoir Vice President of Digital at USA Network, noted that social works best when it’s anticipated in the product creation phase. Brands should leverage natural user behavior by building social sharing into products and providing seamless social activity around their brands online. The consensus was that users are going to be social anyway, so why not enable them?
5. There is NO Crisis Plan
Morgan Johnston, Manager of Corporate Communications at Jet Blue, and Paul Fox, Director of Corporate Communications at P&G, talked about addressing crisis as a brand. The short of it is that there is no cure for crisis, but brand openness speaks volumes. P&G invited bloggers to their shop to talk about anything they wanted and write anything they wanted—good or bad—after negative news surfaced around a certain product line. After a dramatic employee exit, Jet Blue posted on their website that they didn’t know any more than anyone else about the situation but were trying to find the answers. These clear and open lines of communication helped bring the correct information to light in the end.
6. Brands Can Talk to Other Brands
Shane Steele, Director of Sales Marketing at Twitter, shared examples of brands talking with each other, which, in turn, created viral content and brand adoration by users. Oreo and AMC had a Twitter exchange about sneaking snacks into theaters, and Taco Bell and Old Spice had an exchange about their “spicy” ingredients. These conversations were both genuine and humorous and left the door open for consumers play along.