Spoken Gently's Blog: All Categories

The Home Depot store at Richland's City View development calls itself the West Richland store, and that hasn't escaped the attention of the West Richland City Council.

The council said Saturday it once again is thinking about the city's need to distinguish itself from its nearest neighbor by considering a name change.

It's just an idea at this point, and the council isn't ready to float any potential names past residents. But one thing was clear from the conversation at a council workshop at Three Rivers Transit Center -- it won't be Red Mountain.

A controversy brewed early in 2006 when Councilman Merle Johnson brought up the name change concept at the local chamber of commerce. Owners of Red Mountain wineries and vineyards accused the city of trying…

I have read a ton of stuff on linkbait over the past year, I thought I would put together a list of the linkbait articles I have come across. Pay particular attention to Andy Hagens Ultimate post, and I like Brian Clarke of Coppyblogger too for his copywriting....[more]

Great read on garnering links through linkbaiting.  Everything anyone ever needed to know is in this one blog entry!

Joe and Colleen Lane are Southeast Washington State Realtors® specializing in Real Estate Tri Cities WA buyer/seller services for Kennewick Real Estate, Richland Real Estate, Pasco Real Estate, and surrounding areas.  Search the MLS for residential houses, multifamily homes, commercial buildings, vacant land, and condos.  Professional service providing real estate…

Life is looking pretty sweet in the Mid-Columbia, officials said Wednesday at a state of the Tri City luncheon in Pasco.

The mayors of Pasco, Kennewick, Richland, West Richland and Prosser, Wa -- as well as the leader of the Greater Connell Area Chamber of Commerce -- told more than 300 members of the Tri-City Regional Chamber of Commerce gathered at the Red Lion Hotel about happenings and accomplishments in their communities.

Representatives of each city touted their population home growth, expanding commercial sectors, parks and outdoor recreation and dropping crime rates.

Growth in Connell is being driven by the anticipation of new jobs from the expansion of the Coyote Ridge Corrections Center and Lamb Weston potato processing plant, said Gene…

Andy Hagans writes, ""My recently published article, 101 Ways to Build links, shows that you have many, many link building tactics at your disposal. For any given website, you probably need to use at least a few dozen link building different tactics over the course of a year or more to rank for anything remotely competitive.

One thing I didn't mention in the article, though, was that for a brand new site you need to build certain types of links first. Why? Thank TrustRank/the sandbox. To even get fully indexed (now that we have sandbox crawling), let alone ranked, you'll need to get the domain some trust right off the bat, and this is only going to happen by building certain types of links in a certain way.

OK, so what is "certain types of links in a…

The City of Pasco exercises the Council-Manager form of government with an elected body of 7 council members, 5 of which are from specific districts within the city, and 2 from at-large. The council semi-annually elects amongst itself a Mayor that runs meetings, signs certain documents, and acts in ceremonial capacity; and a Mayor Pro-Tem that acts in the Mayor's absence. The City Manager is chosen by council as a professional administrator and runs day-to-day operations of the city including management of staff. Council members are considered part-time legislators. Those elected in 2006 and after receive $900 per month and mayors receive $1,100 a month.

The City also has a number of advisory boards appointed by the Council and includes citizen volunteers…

Can you invest your IRA funds in Washington Real Estate? Yes! You can.  Many retired people have been wrongly made to believe that they cannot. Who is responsible for this? The culprits are financial establishments, banks, brokerage houses, credit unions, etc. Why?  They don’t stand to make money when you invest your IRA funds in West Richland Wa homes. That’s why.

In fact, when you withdraw your IRA funds from investments they sell, they lose money! So, they fabricate stories and don’t allow you to invest your IRA in Real Estate, do not allow you to achieve your retirement goals, and do not allow you to make money in your golden age. These bankers and brokers even tell you that it is illegal! And they talk you into putting your money in investments…

John Battelle has a short interview with Google spam fighter Matt Cutts. The most interesting part I found was news that the W3C has added a meta nofollow tag to their page with paid links, which Matt seems to say is the same as the completely different nofollow attribute and thus something acceptable for to do by those selling links who fear the wrath of Google.

Let's back up. You can put a meta robots tag on your pages with the value of "nofollow," as described here. This tag, about 10 years old now, long predates any concerns about link selling skewing search results or the nofollow attribute. It is supposed to tell a search engine not to follow any links on a page, for purposes of indexing those links...[more]

With the housing market starting to slow up a bit in some areas of the country, sellers are using more tools at their disposal than ever to get a house sold in a timely fashion. While these methods for selling homes vary greatly by region, nationally there has been a rise in the amount of real estate auctions seen. Naturally, auctions are not a new phenomenon, but to see them increasingly used as a primary tool in selling real estate is.

The potential pitfalls are many in the home auction business and while it is certainly one of the quickest ways to liquidate a home, it is often wrought with a great deal of uncertainty. What if your home doesn’t sell for the price you were looking for? What if the auction fees take out such a hunk of the selling price…