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This Modern Ulster County Farmhouse takes you back to yesterday when life was a little simpler and homes were simply built with spaces and forms that offered excitement. The combination of a modern innovative approach that offers class with the smart urban style makes this American Farmhouse unique and mesmerizing. The textures, forms and shapes utilized in the creation of this iconic farmhouse reflect fondly upon the classic upstate rural homes of yesterday. It is as if those who traveled the country roads pulled this home from tantalizing memories where huge white homes rested upon hills and were only gazed upon by those who dreamed of inhabiting them.

This home was designed to make you feel right at home and yet offer that sense of discovery that…

If you are in the market for real estate in New York it will be essential for you to do some research before purchasing.   You will want to find the best deal available and capitalize on it.   In today’s real estate market, with property values consistently falling, it is increasingly important to ensure that your investment will be a good one.  There are some steps that you can take to guarantee that you have indeed made a sound investment.  One of the top things you can do to protect yourself is to invest in New York foreclosure listings.

Typically, most individuals in New York who are looking to purchase real estate go through a real estate agent.  However, most do not know that they can purchase New York foreclosure listings at a public auction…

The history of New Paltz begins with a small group of French Huguenots, refugees from Mannheim, Germany, who came to the New World in the mid-17th century.  In 1677 they negotiated the purchase of 39,000 acres with Native Americans in the area, obtained patent to that land from England, and in 1678 founded the present-day village of New Paltz.

Their hometown of Mannheim was the capital of an area called the Rhenish Palatinate or, Rhein Pfalz in German.  The founders discarded the “f” in the name Pfalz as it was silent, pronouncing it “Paltz”.  Oddly enough, the first recorded name of the village was expressed in French as “Nouveau Palatinat”, according to records from the New Paltz Reformed Church, itself founded in 1683.

The settlers of New Paltz…

Here in Ulster County, because of our easy access to New York City, we get a lot of celebs coming out here for a bit of country living. The celebrities we get as buyers usually demand absolute privacy using corporation names on office documents and meeting in absolute secrecy. The funny thing is that when it comes time to sell they use every branding tool available to them including telling the world who they are.

Among those celebrities is actor Willem Dafoe who is currently listed at 850,000 for his rubber-clad Modernist house located in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York. Dafoe has been twice nominated for an Academy Award for the movies "Platoon" in 1987 and "Shadow of the Vampire" in 2001. One of his latest work includes the part of the Green…

It's a tortoise actually and he has made his new home in a back corner of the real estate office opposite my desk. A few weeks ago he was brought in by one of the owners, so we could keep an eye on him while they were on vacation. Moet used to be the household pet of the Sweeneys who along with Tom Jackson own and operate Prudential Nutshell Realty . The name "Moet" was undoubtedly chosen by Tim Sweeney who also owns a local wine shop and has nothing to do with the toroises choice in champagne.  Now Moet enjoys being fed constantly by every real estate agent that passes by. His diet is made up of brightly colored fruits and vegetables with his favorites being tomatoes and strawberries.

What's the difference between a tortoise and a turtle?

According to…

I want to apologize in advance for getting a little ranty, but I have to get this out.

I was shut down by my email marketing vendor for the second time because I exceeded an abuse threshold of .04 percent. What constitutes  abuse you ask? According to my vendor, abuse is when a user flags an email as spam using either an independent anti-spam software or built in protection provided by the ISP handling the mail. The abuse rate has nothing to do with the users who use the UNSUBSCRIBE link located at the end of the email. Now the next question on your mind is how bad did you exceed the threshold. My level of abuse was .08 (double the maximum allowance).

Just so you know . . .

I am well aware of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 compliance requirements and adhere…

According to most SEO professionals I have read and followed, it is their advice to always write web content naturally on the subject (keyword term) you are targeting and the link juice will flow.  Other say that you should work on the title and just be sure you use the keywords a few times in your content.  I'm not so sure.

Where do we spend our time?

I listened to a pod-cast today where Mike Marshall (creator of the Theme Master LSI tool) talked about not spending your time on trying to figure out what Google is doing rather it more important to figure out what your competitor is doing and do it better. He used the analogy "When being chased by a bear, it is not important to out run the bear but to out run the others who are also being chased by the…

Now I know some of you more advanced SEO types are probably aware of this trend already, I just wanted to drop-a-post putting it out there for others like me that are a little less "SEO Savvy".  Lately I have seen increased traffic in some of my longer keyword phrases in my analytics account.  Naturally, I go to my favorite keyword research tool to see what was going on and discovered that the search volume on my 4,5 and 6 word phrases  were up significantly when compared to some of the shorter terms that used to be the money makers.  The trend I am seeing is that users are beginning to abandon the use of short phrases for a more direct and efficient search using more words.

Right away I begin to theorize as to why users are increasing their use on more…