loudog's Blog: All Categories

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…

I know for a lot of you, page rank is an old blog topic that has been beat to death by SEOs and developers all over but for me, page rank still baffles me.  Currently, my website is a PR3 and it is my short term goal to get it to PR5.  Obviously, I would like it to be a PR10, but it is my plan to document my journey to PR5 here on this blog in hopes that some of the community can benefit.

Getting started

Although I have some ideas on how to start off, I am want to see what type of comments get posted in terms of advice.  Now before you guys tee of on whether page rank really matters or not, I have to say that I have read plenty on both sides of the issue.  My take on it is that improving my PR isn't really going to hurt anything (best case scenario is…

Go Green, Go Eco-friendly. It seems everywhere you look you see buzz words like Carbon footprint, Global warming and Energy-efficient. These catch phrases have become part of our every day vocabulary (especially if you are in the real estate biz like I am).  As local real estate agents, we here at nutshell are doing our part to help Ulster County Green Real Estate.

If you are looking to purchase or build a home, ask your builder or real estate sales person about energy efficient home features.  In my market (the Ulster County Real Estate Market) there are more and more energy efficient homes are coming on the market that are considered to be

If you are already a homeowner, there are some very simple and inexpensive ways you can make your home…

Pilfering through Google Analytics

So yesterday I was doing my thing, going through my GA reports @ 100 MPH when my mouse wheel came to a screeching halt (well maybe not screeching).   Usually when reviewing my keyword analysis I skip right over all the keywords that match or partially match my company name.  Today I took a closer look at that group of keywords and couldn't believe how much traffic was coming through those terms.  Currently, I rank #1 for the most popular term in my market and I am between 1 and 5 for the next 14 most popular (volume).  It turns out that I am getting more traffic for people typing my company name than some of the most trafficked (is that a word) keyword terms in my market.  Immediately, I run reports for 4 other web…