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As always, we here at Positive Real Estate Professionals try to stay on top of the latest tools and integrations for our real estate network. Today is no different as we are prepared to offer The Events Calendar to each and every one of our members for FREE. We have tested this events calendar to see how it would integrate with our online real estate network, and frankly I am pleased to announce that it has passed each and every test that I have thrown at it.

Below is the description straight from the plugins page on wordpress:

The Events Calendar plugin enables you to rapidly create and manage events using the post editor. Features include Google Maps integration as well as default templates such as a calendar grid and event list for streamlined one click installation.

Looking to track attendees, sell tickets and more? Go download the Eventbrite for The Events Calendar plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eventbrite-for-the-events-calendar/). Eventbrite is a free service that provides the full power of a conference ticketing system. This plugin upgrades The Events Calendar with all the basic Eventbrite controls without ever leaving the wordpress post editor. Don’t have an Eventbrite account? No problem, use the following link to set one up: http://www.eventbrite.com/r/simpleevents.

The Events Calendar

• Manage event details right from your post editor
• Upcoming Events Widget
• Provides full template out of the box (month and list view)
• Extensive template tags for customization
• MU Compatible
• Google Maps Integration
• Posts are automatically moved to the top of the loop on the day of the event
• Calendar Month view with tooltips
• Includes support for venue, cost, address, start and end time, google maps link
• Optional Ticketing With Eventbrite Integration – http://www.eventbrite.com/ – though the Eventbrite for The Events Calendar plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eventbrite-for-the-events-calendar/).
• Support for international addresses, time and languages: ** Swedish ** French ** Italian

Upcoming Features

• Option to disable re-posting of event
• Ical Feed
• Improved international features (calendar start day)
• Option to exclude events from main loop
• More bug hunting and support (huff puff)
• Improved error checking and reporting
• Calendar view widget
• Reoccuring events
• Sync with facebook events
• Saved venues
• Global event maps
• Dynamic categories (rather than requiring the use of event)
• Event subcategories

Now, here is how you can access this neat tool. First, contact our office if you are interested in using this tool as we have to turn it on individually. Then, login to your dashboard and scroll down to the “Settings” and look for “The Events Calendar”. Once there, simply click on it and set your options. When that is done, contact our office for your Events Calendar page to be set up on your navigation bar. We will structure it and then setup the redirection that is required to make the page appear correctly. Once it is done, we will test it to be sure that it works properly.

With that said, here are a few things that I see that will be a HUGE benefit. For any REALTOR® that uses this calendar and lists their open houses, the post will display a Google Map automatically to the listing. This feature is available for everyone that uses this new calendar. Another GREAT benefit to this calendar is it is managed right from your posting screen. This means that all you need to do is go to write a new post just like you normally do, add a prelude, and then simply input the day, time, location, and any other info that is important to this event. The tool will do the rest for you.

If you want to see one being used on our network, simply click here.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Positive Real Estate Professionals adds The Events Calendar is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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As always, we here at Positive Real Estate Professionals try to stay on top of the latest tools and integrations for our real estate network. Today is no different as we are prepared to offer The Events Calendar to each and every one of our members for FREE. We have tested this events calendar to see how it would integrate with our online real estate network, and frankly I am pleased to announce that it has passed each and every test that I have thrown at it.

Below is the description straight from the plugins page on wordpress:

The Events Calendar plugin enables you to rapidly create and manage events using the post editor. Features include Google Maps integration as well as default templates such as a calendar grid and event list for streamlined one click installation.

Looking to track attendees, sell tickets and more? Go download the Eventbrite for The Events Calendar plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eventbrite-for-the-events-calendar/). Eventbrite is a free service that provides the full power of a conference ticketing system. This plugin upgrades The Events Calendar with all the basic Eventbrite controls without ever leaving the wordpress post editor. Don’t have an Eventbrite account? No problem, use the following link to set one up: http://www.eventbrite.com/r/simpleevents.

The Events Calendar

• Manage event details right from your post editor
• Upcoming Events Widget
• Provides full template out of the box (month and list view)
• Extensive template tags for customization
• MU Compatible
• Google Maps Integration
• Posts are automatically moved to the top of the loop on the day of the event
• Calendar Month view with tooltips
• Includes support for venue, cost, address, start and end time, google maps link
• Optional Ticketing With Eventbrite Integration – http://www.eventbrite.com/ – though the Eventbrite for The Events Calendar plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eventbrite-for-the-events-calendar/).
• Support for international addresses, time and languages: ** Swedish ** French ** Italian

Upcoming Features

• Option to disable re-posting of event
• Ical Feed
• Improved international features (calendar start day)
• Option to exclude events from main loop
• More bug hunting and support (huff puff)
• Improved error checking and reporting
• Calendar view widget
• Reoccuring events
• Sync with facebook events
• Saved venues
• Global event maps
• Dynamic categories (rather than requiring the use of event)
• Event subcategories

Now, here is how you can access this neat tool. First, contact our office if you are interested in using this tool as we have to turn it on individually. Then, login to your dashboard and scroll down to the “Settings” and look for “The Events Calendar”. Once there, simply click on it and set your options. When that is done, contact our office for your Events Calendar page to be set up on your navigation bar. We will structure it and then setup the redirection that is required to make the page appear correctly. Once it is done, we will test it to be sure that it works properly.

With that said, here are a few things that I see that will be a HUGE benefit. For any REALTOR® that uses this calendar and lists their open houses, the post will display a Google Map automatically to the listing. This feature is available for everyone that uses this new calendar. Another GREAT benefit to this calendar is it is managed right from your posting screen. This means that all you need to do is go to write a new post just like you normally do, add a prelude, and then simply input the day, time, location, and any other info that is important to this event. The tool will do the rest for you.

If you want to see one being used on our network, simply click here.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Positive Real Estate Professionals adds The Events Calendar is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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With the tax credit coming to an end for new homeowners, now is not the time to be fence sitting. The only thing that I know that it will truly get you is some splinters. Get off the fence and get with your REALTOR® today. There is no reason to be regretting not moving quick enough.

Fence Sitting Can Cost You is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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One of the daunting feats that we all want to do is to keep people on our page. One of the newest ways to do that is to embed Google SERPs (search engine results pages) in your site. This way, when someone comes to your site looking for your informative post and want to do research, they can with the click of the button and never have to leave your site. Now, before you all say that this is old news, let me go into it deeper. The picture to the right is actually OLD news. However, that is not quite what I am talking about here.

For those of you that do not know, Google now has a feature through Adsense that allows for you to have the Google search engine results pages show up inside your website. This way, a reader or consumer can stick around on your site for some extra time. The one thing that I am not keen on with this product is the fact that it has to be at least 800 pixels wide. For most people, this is a majority of your content display. For people that employ the 1200 pixel themes, this really would not be a problem if you have a single sidebar or two that are less than 400 pixels total.

In closing, it is still a great tool to add to your site if you want to keep people hanging around. If you click on the picture to the left, you will be able to view a site that has this in action. If you notice, the header is still active. If you want to see it in action for yourself, visit SEO Info Now. For any PREP member that would like to add this feature to your PREP site, contact our office at 865-951-0522 and we will help you walk through it.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Embed Google SERPs In Your Site is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com now offers Video Blogs in conjunction with an account on our real estate network. The Video Blogs, just like the Photo Blogs and other additional blogs, can be purchased for a one time fee of $100. One of the greatest benefits of having this additional blog is that the page with all the blogs would be indexed and followed by the search engines, unlike tags or categories. In addition, you will be able to set the keywords for the Video Blog as well as each and every individual post that occupies space on the Video Blog. Any of these three blogs can be purchased from the main page of PREP.

So, what is a Video Blog, you ask. Video Blogging is also referred to as vlogging. Vlogging uses videos to create your articles as opposed to text. This creates a sense of internet television. Entries include videos or a link to the videos, supporting text, images, and other metadata. The best vlogging is done when the author provides a transcript for the article. These particular articles are drown with search engine juice. While it takes a little bit of work, the transcript can be keyword intensive.

In closing, if you are looking to increase your SEO without having to add a bunch of extra steps to do it, look into adding a Video blog or any of the other blog products that we offer to your PREP site. The additional potential for search engine juice is yours for the taking.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com Now Offers Video Blogs is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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Marketing properties with a listings blog just became easy. Imagine walking into a listings presentation appointment armed with the ability to have your client’s property reach the top of the search engines quickly. The great thing is, there are no black hat tricks used to accomplish this. Another great thing is, you do not have to log out of one site and into another to post to this additional blog. Everything is done on the same platform and is almost seamless.

One of the things with Postlets and VFlyers is that they require more room that what is typically on a page. To make sure that we have enough room for this to set up properly, we just remove the sidebars all together. Therefore, the property is front and center and is getting all of the attention that it requires. Also, once a property is listed in PREP, it does not take long for it to climb to the top of the search engines.

Now, before many of you ask why “categories” or “tags” cannot accomplish this, let me explain this; neither of these are indexed by the search engines. If they were, the bots would crash any network once they started to crawl them. So, having the additional blog gains the ability to have ALL the listings found in a search in one spot. It also allows for ALL the listings to be ‘index, follow’ and this is huge as it will increase your SEO.

As with any additional blog add on, there is a one time charge of $100. Once that fee is paid, it will take a couple of hours to be setup. If you have questions, please call us at 865-951-0522 or email me.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Marketing Properties With A Listings Blog is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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Add a Photoblog to your PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com site today and start reaping the benefits. What are the benefits you ask? Well, let’s see where I should begin. First, you can garner SEO juice from Google Images. Second, you will have ANOTHER blog indexed and followed by the search engines on your site. Third, you only have ONE login to update all the blogs. And let me dispel one myth here and now, if you think that you can do the same with TAGS or CATEGORIES, think again. Neither of these are indexed in a blog network platform like ours. When you are dealing with an online real estate network like PREP, you will find they do not allow for Tags or Categories to be indexed as it would crash the network.

Okay, now that we have gone over the benefits in a nutshell, let’s talk about photoblogs and what benefit they have for a real estate professional’s site. First off, for a Realtor®, having a photoblog would allow you to show off your community. If you are like me, you love taking your camera EVERYWHERE that you go. Adding a picture a day gives the consumers the ability to see what the surroundings have to offer. Adding an ALT Title to the picture gives Google and the other search engines the ability to place them in the searches that they should be in. For a home stager, you can add before and after pictures that can demonstrate your work. For home inspectors, you can add pictures of issues that you come across on a daily basis. It does not stop with these three professions either, but for the sake of boring you, we will leave it there.

Here are a couple of articles for further reading on the importance of proper formatting of pictures and the impact that additional blogs can have on your site:

Say It With Pictures – Photoblogs

Increase your SEO with multiple blogs on one site

At this point, PREP is the ONLY online real estate network that is offering this feature. Unfortunately we have to charge for this feature. However, the one time fee is only $100. It takes us a couple of hours to get it installed on your site, but then you are up and running.If you have questions or would like to order this, email me or call the office at 865-951-0522.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Add A Photoblog To Your PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com Site is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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Keeping up with the momentum of bringing new and powerful tools to our online real estate network, I am pleased to announce that we have brought in two new tools pertaining to copyright. In today’s age of syndication, duplicate content, and scraping, the staff here at Positive Real Estate Professionals thought that we needed to bring in some tools that will benefit and protect our members. With that said, we put our focus on COPYRIGHT.

The first tool is a copyright for the entire site. It is designed to automatically update as the years change. While it can have a custom “Rights Reserved Message”, once set this feature will never need to be followed again. As for the second tool, it pertains to each and every post that our members write as well as page content. This tool is designed to place a link into your RSS or Atom feed that will direct back to the original article. With this particular tool, you get the year, blog name, and All Rights Reserved right in the RSS or Atom feed. The blog name provides a link back to your site.

In closing, while these two tools might not seem like much, they are huge. The intent is to protect the original author from people stealing content in order to increase their blog or website’s rankings in search engines. Like always, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Copyright Done Right is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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PREP now offers broken link checker to it’s members. We decided to add this tool after running a number of reports on our online real estate network. For those of you that are unaware of what damage broken links can have to your SEO and your site, let me explain it this way. When a link is broken and someone clicks on it, they are directed away from your page. Sometimes you will get a “500″ error, but most of them come back as a “404″ error and state nothing was found. Not only are these errors encountered by human searchers, they are also encountered by search engine bots. In the end, neither are happy when they encounter this.

As part of full disclosure, when we ran ours on PREP, we found 144 broken links out of 1751 for just over 8%. For me, that is just too high of a ratio and damages our SEO. Once we figured that portion out for our site, we thought that the members would have similar issues. So, with that coming to light, we decide that this was a “must have” tool to offer to our members. It is free to use and can be located on your dashboard under tools. The first time that you run it, it might seem to be stuck, but let it do it’s thing. It will clear out.

Now, what causes broken links, you ask. Well, that is a simple answer. Links can be deleted over time. A website can expire over time or go corrupt. Even worse, a site can be moved from one domain to another. While there are other fixes out to preserve these links, you have to ask yourself if it is worth the effort to track down the new URL. Once the program runs, you will have the choice to edit the URL, exclude it, or unlink it. In most cases, the only real choice is to unlink it.

So, what all does this tool do? For that information, I thought that I would just turn to WordPress Plugins Directory for that answer:

Features

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).

• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.

• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.

• Also detects redirected links.

• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).

• Link checking intervals can be configured.

• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.

• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.

• Searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text and so on is also possible.

• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

Basic Usage

Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll), etc and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take a few minutes or even several hours. When parsing is complete the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress and set various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.

Note : Currently the plugin only runs when you have at least one tab of the Dashboard open. Cron support will likely be added in a later version.

The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of WP admin panel – Tools -> Broken Links. A notification will also appear in the “Broken Link Checker” widget on the Dashboard. To save display space, you can keep the widget closed and configure it to expand automatically when problematic links are detected.

The “Broken Links” tab will by default display broken links that have been detected so far. However, you can use the subnavigation links on that page to view redirects or see a listing of all links – working or not – instead.

There are several actions associated with each link listed -

• “Details” shows more info about the link. You can also toggle link details by clicking on the “link text” cell.

• “Edit URL” lets you change the URL of that link. If the link is present in more than one place (e.g. both in a post and in the blogroll) then all instances of that URL will be changed.

• “Unlink” removes the link but leaves the link text intact.

• “Exclude” adds the link’s URL to the exclusion list. Excluded URLs won’t be checked again.

• “Discard” lets you manually mark the link as valid. This is useful if you know it was detected as broken only due to a temporary glitch or similar. The link will still be checked normally later.

In closing, this tool is set out to benefit our members. Unfortunately, we do not have the time to run these for you. We also do not have the time to review your broken links to give you direction. Ultimately, this is something that you are going to have to make the call on. There is really no right or wrong answers.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

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PREP Now Offers Broken Link Checker is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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It never fails that I get 2 or 3 emails requesting link exchanges on a daily basis. Most of the requests are from people with low ranking sites that have some relevance to us. However, I typically turn all of them down unless it is a member of our online real estate network. The biggest reason that we do this is because we are not here to promote sites of non-members. We created this network to promote our members and that is what we try to do.

With that said, yesterday I received an email that was requesting a link on our site and even went as far as to state that they would pay for the link. I replied to the email and it did not take long for the person to respond to my email. I basically told them the ONLY way that we would accept a paid link is if the link could have a “nofollow” attribute added to it. The person said “NO” and ran away.

Now, why would I have told him that? Why not just take his money? Well, let’s turn to Google Webmaster Central for the answer to that:

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know. We’ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links.

In closing, I am hoping this will help to shed some light on how Google actually looks at paid links. Many of the other search engines are starting to follow this same path. Matt Cutts of Google once stated “The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails–the best links are earned and given by choice.” I have to 100% agree with him. Earning links or getting them because someone likes your site is so much better than obtaining them by having them built by paying for them, selling them, or even link farming.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

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Paid Links: A Love Hate Relationship is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

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