Having tried a dozen of different ad managing systems, ranging from WordPress Plugins to Google Ad Manager I am giving BuySellAds.com a spin.

BuySellAds.com is an advertising marketplace for small to medium sized website owners and publishers. Once approved, which takes about 24 hours, you can create adzones for your website or blog and add them to your website by simply copying and pasting code. If you blog or website is powered by WordPress, you may also consider using BuySellAds WordPress Plugin by Thaya Kareeson of Omninoggin.com. I personally have not tried the plugin myself yet, however I am considering using it in the future. The plugin includes ati-adblock measures to prevent AdBlock as well as other similar software from blocking advertisements from Buy Sell Ads.

The user interface on BuySellAds.com is rather straight forward and it took me no more than 20 minutes to create and implements ad zones for this blog. Visit Go Beyond MLS ad listing page on BuySellAds.com to see more details about ads available on this blog. The listing page provides some useful information for potential advertisers, such as Alexa Traffic Rank, Compete Rank, Twitter Subscribers etc.

One of the reasons I have decided to try BuySellAds.com is that they have decent marketplace which is very easy to use by potential advertisers to find and purchase ads on desired websites and blogs.

Should you decide to give BuySellAds.com your payout will be 75%. For example if the cost of your ad is $10 ($10 is the minimum you can price your ads by the way) your pay out will be $7.50. You can choose the payment option to be PayPal, Check or Wire Transfer.

If you have used the BuySellAds.com for your website as well I would love to know your experience with them, so don’t be shy – leave a comment! Similar Posts:

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Soon after discussing the use of framesets by newly relaunched LeapFish I received a question from dozen of readers and visitors asking me how they can prevent their website from “being framed” by other websites.

To prevent your website from being from being viewable in a frame of another website you can add the piece of the following code just above </head> tag on your website:

Before you do it you need to really be sure it is what you want it. There are many good websites out there that use frames to view your website- StumbleUpon is one of those good sites.

The above code also relies on whether or not your visitors browser is configured to support Javascript, you would be surprise how many users out there do not enable Javascript support on their browsers.

The above Javascript code “forses” user’s browser to open your page in it’s own window. Before my previous post I have never considered using it on my website and still do not think there are any huge benefits from implementing it on yours.

I would like to hear what you have to say. What are the reasons for using the above code? If you don’t recommend to use it – why not?

Of course I would also love to hear about any other way to “kill frames” – please share them in the comments if you know any.Similar Posts:

• Testing BuySellAds.com Advertising Marketplace.
• New and Sexy LeapFish: But Framesets Can Present Issues.
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Update Nov. 9, 2009: It appears that LeapFish is no longer using framesets on their website.

A mention by US Today, stream of hundreds of Tweets , mentioned by hundreds of blogs, a “cutting edge” video on youtube- LeapFish.com relaunch can certainly be seen as enormous success, except…

The leading technology blogs continue to give LeapFish.com nothing short of a “cold shoulder”.

All the buzz surrounding the relaunch is focused on how sexy and nice looking the new website is, no one seems to be trying to “flip beyond the cover page”.

I would like to write about LeapFish’s implementation of framesets on their pages that may actually spook an unseasoned Internet user into believing that they are visiting unsecured websites.

If you search LeapFish for “Read Write Web” for example, the website returns nice clean results with the most relevant link in number one position:

Considering the average user expectation, most of us would expect to land on http://www.readwriteweb.com/ – it is however not the case with LeapFish. After clicking the the link you end up on a nice lookng LeapFish page which embeds (via frameset) the content from The Read Write Web and the LeapFish bar at the bottom of the page:

While visitors to The Read Write Web may not care at all. Visitors to websites like Amazon can get confused and and may be led to believe that shopping on Amazon and other websites are no longer secure. Let me show you an example of what I mean. The following shot is of my Amazon account page while accessing the website directly (typing http://www.amazon.com into my browser):

The HTTPS as well as the lock icon are the basic signs by which an average internet can identify whether or not website is secure.

Now the screenshot of the same page but via frameset on LeapFish.com:

Both HTTPS and lock icons are missing. And the URL clearly says you are still on LeapFish.com. Even though I consider myself an above average Internet user, before I logged into my Amazon account via the frameset on LeapFish I had to check the code of the page first:

I wanted to know if my Amazon login info is safe with LeapFish. How many users do you think will do that?

Potential Issues With Google?

AdSense users can tell you how tough Google is when it comes to enforcing terms and condition and how easy it is to get banned. Google Search API TOS do not address the use framesets- so if you know if use of framesets allowed please enlighten me:

• Real Bird Introduces New Feature: RealBird Virtual Tour
• “Kill Frames” Javascript Code. Do You Really Need It On Yur Site?
• Hittail Is Helping Me Save $1,725 Each Month
• LeapFish In The Words of Other Bloggers
• Make Your Images Understandable To Search Engines
• Google Local Business Center Now Offers Reports and Statistics

WordPress, being one of the most popular publishing platforms and content management system also is the most frequent target for spammers. Google reacts quickly to identify the hacked sites – as a result your traffic and sales can drastically drop. The good news is that Google will try to make reasonable attempts to notify webmasters about potential problems via Google Webmasters Tools. However if you do not act quickly, it can be truly a devastating blow to your online presence.

So how do you prepare yourself for the event such as your blog being hacked by injecting code into your theme files or even database? Here are the steps that I would recommend to anyone using WordPress as their publishing platform or CMS:

• Register with Google Webmasters Tools. Not only Google Webmasters Tools can be useful in identifying the attack. You can also use the tools to resubmit your website for reconsideration once your dealt with threat and cleaned up the mess.
• Create Google alerts to notify you of a possible threat. While it is impossible to foresee every possible spam keyword you can create alert for the most common ones such as “viagra” or “port”. How do you create such an alert? Simple. Lets presume your domain is “yourdomain.com” your Google alert the will be for the search query “viagra site:yourdomain.com”. Of course relying on Google Alerts alone is not a good idea.
• Check the code yourself. It does not really take that much- right click your mouth and view the page source. Generally when attack is carried out the code is injected somewhere in common files and will be visible on every page of your website.
• If you modify your theme yourself- keep the back up of the version that includes your most recent updates. It is always good idea to keep a back up of your theme files no matter what.
• Keep the latest back up of your database. I find that WordPress Database Backup Plugin (HT: Andy Beard) – is one of the most useful plugin to have. You can tell the plugin to mail you the SQL file to the e-mail of your choice on a regular basis. I am doing it on a daily basis if you publish many posts per day you can chose for the back up to be made every couple of hours.
• Do not broadcast to the world the version of WordPress you are using. I have seen WordPress theme developers inserting a code that displays the current version of WordPress, most of the time it that code is found in the header.php file loog for the code and remove it. There is no reason for anyone to know what version you are using.
• Keep your WordPress and plugins updated. Current version of WordPress allows one click updates from withing your dashboard- there is really no excuse for us any longer.
• Keep your files in a directory that no one besides you knows about it. You can install or move your WordPres files to a directory that only you will know about- I will try elaborate on it in future especially on how to move your WordPress to another “secret” directory.

I have cleaned several WordPress installations for my friends over the period of last year. The hacker attack can be devastating if your are not prepared to deal with it. And yes it can happen to any one- even to the best of geeks.Similar Posts:

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Within minutes of publishing last post I had a visitor- a very pissed off visitor. Who managed to spew his venom on Bill Hartzer’s blog as well (Bill my apologies for the “nofollow” attribute, I do trust your website- I hate to give LeapFish any juice):

While I can speculate who this “Anonymous” may have been- the only certain fact I know is that he came to read the post via Twitter after an entry was posted in my account that announcing that I have written the post.

There is no point to communicate with anonymous trolls like that. Most of the time they have no interest to hear what you have to say. They can’t contain their anger and spew their venom using bogus names along with bogus e-mails. I find it difficult to describe what do I feel about trolls like that- fortunately there are people out there who have their way with words (HT: Lord Matt) and I can’t agree more!

As sad as it is their behavior cast more shadow of suspicion and does more damage to themselves and the interests they try to defend and the companies they work for. Sad really but from now on……..

NO TROLLS ALLOWED!

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Update: The new LeapFish has finally launched. You can read my analysis on LeapFish implementation of framesets and how confusing it can be for users.

After rather a painful year LeapFish.com- a meta search aggregator site just like Dogpile.com or Mamma.com, is ready to launch what they call it “LeapFish 2.0″- claiming that it will solve the real-time search.

Believe it or not I, of all people, was on of the “few privileged” to view their “test” products. However I could not keep quiet about my discovery:

And of course LeapFish killed that subdomain few minutes after my “Twitter broadcast”. Did they find my viewing of their new product not welcomed? Or is it also possible I “tuned in” at the end of the exhibit of their product to their supporters? I will never find out.

The new design has many flaws and way too many Ajax widgets- it felt as I was looking at the dashboard of WordPress. It will cause a huge load time issues if released as it was seen by me yesterday. Sometimes less means more. The notion that LeapFish will solve the real-time search is a myth to say the least. It is no briner that search engine gurus like Danny Sullivan would never consider LeapFish as contender to solve the real-time search problems.

If you have never heard of LeapFish.com before here is a short history rundown…..

LeapFish launched about a year ago and was given a somewhat cold shoulder by TechChrunch. Instead of trying to appeal to the hearts and minds of the technology and online marketing crowd they were focused on their business more and got caught with their “pants down” by the same TechChrunch. After firing the employee who engage in the alleged click fraud described by TechChrunch, the leapfish CEO still tried to blame TechChurnch for disliking LeapFish:

I am disappointed at this post by you and by TechCrunch. You never contacted us to verify the information you posted or even checked to see what our position was as a company around such behavior before you published. You apparently called in but didn’t make the effort of speaking with someone about this. Frankly put, I find your post’s title and content irresponsible and distasteful. – Ben Behrouzi, CEO of LeapFish (you can find the full text of his rebuttal at http://www.benbehrouzi.org/2009/02/04/leapfish-gets-second-lashing-from-techcrunc/ - apologies to my readers for not providing a click-able link).

Dealing with criticism in an adult matter is not a virtue of LeapFish, instead CEO of LeapFish decided to go on a domain shopping spree – threatening to expose the “real’ Vlad Zablotskyy. I have to say that I am surprised they never threatened to sue TechChrunch- or Michael Arrington just laughed at the threat if they did in fact receive one. However is I was Robin Wauters I would make sure I own forever the .org .net and other variations of his name.

But the past is just that- the past. The true test for the company will be the future and in particular next few weeks and months. The first advertisers and investors are about to reach their first anniversary and their credit cards will be charged the renewal fee- it will trigger many to reexamine their “investement” in LeapFish. It would be in LeapFish best interest to have as few disappointed “investors” and “advertisers” as possible, and the only way to do so is to send your advertiser top quality traffic. While they may have been successful in selling their inventory (keywords)- the increase in traffic was and is disproportionately slow. Even the most favorable statistics from Compete.com (showing LeapFish as having almost 500,000 visitors in September)- do not justify an investment of $1,000+. Especially if LeapFish.com indeed has “hundreds” of advertisers in their system. I will do some math about LeapFish statistics in the upcoming posts. I doubt however the launch of their new product will stop the upcoming wave of dissatisfied clients- for LeapFish’s own sake and their future I hope I am wrong. Nor do I think this upcoming launch will bring the necessary volume of traffic to justify the price of advertising. Again I hope LeapFish proves me and other critics wrong for their own good.

If they don’t take drastic measures to purchase or otherwise increase traffic to their site- LeapFish, or at least their business model, will not survive beyond 2009.

Disclosure: Everything written above is my personal opinion and my interpretation of events as I see them. You are free to form your own opinion which may or may not agree with the above post. You are however asked to show some manners (aka “being polite”) if you decide to leave comment below. The comments from LeapFish management will be moderated and may be removed if I find them inappropriate.Similar Posts:

• LeapFish Caught Red Handed Spamming TechCrunch
• LeapFish In The Words of Other Bloggers
• CEO of ePerks and LeapFish Ben Behrouzi Purchases VladZablotskyy.org
• LeapFish Sells Keyword “Viagra” For $7,104?
• Google Local Business Center Now Offers Reports and Statistics
• Hittail Statistics Overview

A while back I wrote an article pointing out one of the features available to webmasters at Google Webmaster Central – ability to set a custom crawl rate. At the time I thought it was an outstanding idea. It is still is a good solution should googlebot visit your site too often causing issues with bandwidth (even though I have never heard of such scenario).

Webmasters however should exercise caution when increasing the crawl rate via Google Webmaster Central. A few weeks ago I was involved in an upgrade of a website with 2000+ pages. One of the side effects of the upgrade was that we ended up with 2000+ new urls. Unfortunately there was no easy way to implement 2000+ redirects on the website. But, since most of the traffic came from PPC campaigns, we decided to let Google re-index the website on it’s own. Exception was of course that we used Google Webmaster Central to implement request for a more frequent crawl by Google. We increased the crawl rate by some 3000% only to receive the following notice a few days later:

Dear Webmaster,

Google has algorithms that determine how much to crawl each site. Our goal is to crawl as many page from your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, as we can without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth.

For your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, you have set a very low crawl rate which is preventing us from accessing your great content. We recommend you set the crawl rate option to “Let Google determine my default”, or, if you prefer to maintain a custom setting, increasing the rate.

Thanks,

The Google Web Crawling Team

In fact the Google had not indexed a single URL from the new sitemap. Not even the home page (which is/was the strongest page of the website) was re-indexed. So we followed Google’s instruction and within 24 hours our new pages began to appear in the index.

So if you are thinking of increasing the crawl rate in Google Webmaster Central – exercise caution or you may run the risk of not increasing the the crawl rate enough for Google to do it’s job. Similar Posts:

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Leap Fish CEO Ben Behrouzi has sent several threats to my attorney, accusing me to stalking his employees sending him personal threats, phishing and finally today accusing me to have authored negative reviews on Alexa. Here is the copy of his e-mail:

Karl,

Fake negative reviews on Alexa.com by a fellow that sounds awfully like our friend J

Below you will find a screenshot of 2 reviews starting from the top. The next screen shot you will see the author details of one of the reviews. The authors name is Mark Mark, which obviously is not real, but probably is pointed at Mark Kithcart our Director of Marketing… Lastly, you will find a 3rd screen shot where our friend mentions on twitter that an Alexa negative review was successfully made online. With pride mind you. Coincidentally his twitter remark and the recent Alexa negative review took place within 1 hour of each other according to Alexa. And he was the first to report it on twitter? Talk about real time news J Added to the list, clearly he is digging a bigger hole for himself with these back alley mob activities.

The following two images Behrouzi is referring to in his e-mail:

image001
image002
image003

Ben, I have always put my name to everything I ever said about your companies. And in my opinion they are crap. I do not need Alexa to tell you that, Ben. So go ahead sue me, but for goodness sake stop harassing me and my attorney!

Update: If my memory serves me well, there were few other bloggers who, after being encouraged by me left reviews with Alexa. Alexa have since removed those reviews as well. Similar Posts:

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I am not a huge fan of Alexa traffic statistics. For the smaller sites Alexa’s statistics are completely irrelevant. For the last few months I have been helping a friend of mine with their website – TheChocolateBelles.com. Alexa is showing that site to have less traffic than Go-Beyond-MLS.com. The reality however is that The Chocolate Belles receives 20 times of traffic comparing to the traffic to this blog.

One of the way to improve their relevancy is to get more people to use their toolbar. So the move to allow Facebook and Twitter users to share their statistics with their friends and followers maybe in the right direction. After all Twitter and Facebook are among the most popular websites today:

Alexa recently re-introduced site reviews has not attracted needed attention and have indeed become a place for shameless astroturfing for some but mostly a place for the irrelevant rant and plain spam for others.

Introduction if the new sharing widget will definitely spark a lot of attention and traffic. But will Alexa statistics be anymore relevant? Time will show.Similar Posts:

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Not so long ago Janet Meiners Thaeler graciously agreed to write a guest post for my blog. She was extremely busy writing her book and I would understand if she declined my invitation to write a blog post for Go Beyond MLS.

Today I am happy to let you know that Janet’s Book is now available on Amazon.com and it is available in print and in digital format for Kindle users- I Need a Killer Press Release–Now What???: A Guide to Online PR

Who may be interested in Janet’s Book?

If you are the owner of small to mid-size business and would like to learn the power of online press releases you need this book. This book will teach you how to capture attention of news publications and deliver online visibility your business needs.

Janet has written hundreds of press releases for businesses across spectrum of niches, you can follow her work at http://www.newspapergrl.com/ and I hope you seriously consider using her services the next time you are ready to write a press release.Similar Posts:

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Links

A Brief Tale Of Sleaze- LeapFish should take Rob Shore’s advise and never lie to their potential clients.

Three Scams and Rip-Offs to Report – Kit Eliot describes his “encounter” with LeapFish.

Leapfish Review – Is LeapFish.com an opportunity, scam, or just another meta search site?- short but to the point rundown about advertising on LeapFish- needless to say the author passes on the opportunity to advertise or invest in LeapFIsh.

Leapfish: Google Competitor or Flash In The Pan?- i think it is rather funny, or insane, to think that LeapFish can actually be viewed as Google’s competitor. But it sure makes a good headline. Well put article, a must read.

LeapFish Affiliate Program. Can Giveaways Keep It Afloat?- a post by yours truly. I thought it was a mistake to link their affiliate program to the basic function of their website- the search function. Their widgets also contain SEO friendly links back to their website- my conclusion their affiliate program is really a linking scheme to gain rankings in search engines.

Leapfish is a scam…maybe?- Patrick Sullivan Jr is offering his opinion about leapfish. The blog have attracted number of comments- well worth reading.

LeapFish Sucks- a take on LeapFish by Cole Pannell- a web designer and a SEO professional.

LeapFish.com advertisers beware – yet another account of dealing with LeapFish sale people.

Leapfish.com is it worth it? A rip off? Let the numbers do the talking.- the numbers indeed can do the talking, something LeapFish is terribly afraid of.Similar Posts:

• CEO of ePerks and LeapFish Ben Behrouzi Purchases VladZablotskyy.org
• LeapFish Caught Red Handed Spamming TechCrunch
• Vacation Rentals Web Directory
• Real Estate SEO
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• 5 Tips for Killer Online Press Releases

A while back, hen I’ve heard about development of LeadPress, I was both happy and skeptical about the final product. Happy because a dear friend of mine was the mastermind behind the project. Skeptical because I knew very little how the final product will look like. All I knew is that LeadPress will be based on WordPress, my favorite blogging and content management software. Of course the question I had about the future LeadPress was how can it benefit mortgage professionals versus just using your own WordPress installation.

Now that LeadPress is live, I am certain it will become an ultimate solution for lead generation for mortgage professionals. LeadPress is far from just another WordPress. While it uses the flexibility and power of WordPress it is specifically designed to meet the needs of mortgage professionals.

Video Tour of LeadPress

Watch the video tour of some key features of LeadPress.

With LeadPress you are in control of your website’s lead generating capabilities and no third part lead generating companies get a piece of the action.

Disclosure: I am an active affiliate with LeadPress. If you sign up with LeadPress using the links in the above portion of this post, I will receive a commission for referring you to LeadPress. If for some reason you would not want me to earn this commission, here is direct link to LeadPress: http://leadpress.com/Similar Posts:

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Have you ever considered allowing your client to schedule appointments with you? In search for such solution for my and for my friends and clients websites I came across Appointy, a Florida based startup. You can see the implementation of Appointy scheduling feature on my other website where I allow clients to reserve my interpreting and translating services online.

While Appointy offers an easy integration for WordPress websites via a plugin, their system can be implemented just on about any website through an “ifame” code.

Appointy comes “PayPal ready” allowing you to charge a fee for the appointment at the time of scheduling- either full amount or partial. You are of course free to not charge your clients for appointments, as it would be the case with most real estate agents I know. But if you would like to prevent “no shows”, you might want to implement a minimal fee refundable at the time of the appointment.

Currently Appointy offers four different plans:

• FREE plan- this basic plan has some limits and you have no option to charge your clients for the appointment at the time of scheduling. Appointy also will inject some ads into your calendar – hey they need to pay their engineers and developers.
• PLUS plan comes at $9.99 per moth and is ad free but it does not allow you for branding nor accepting pre-payments.
• PRO plan will set you back about $19.99 per month- the plan I am looking forward to use. You can brand your calendar and accept pre-payments with this plan. This plan includes e-mail marketing tool that allows you to send different e-mails to confirm, remind or even cancel the appointments. The best thing of course that when you sing up for Appointy, you get to try this plan absolutely free for 30 days.
• Finally the BUSINESS plan wich comes at $39.99 is the top level plan from Appointy. I would recommend this plan for businesses that have several staff members accepting appointments, the plan allows a separate logins for administrator and for the staff.

If you are looking for a solution that would allow your clients to book an appointment with you right on your website, Appointy should be given frist consideration.

As I have pointed out, I am using Appointy myself, although I am only beginning to test many of it’s features and probably have not seen yet what Appointy can really do for my business. I will report on the results about one month from now, so stay tuned.Similar Posts:

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I have always been a huge fan of Google Local Business Center- a free way to drive foot traffic to your business. When you list your business with Google Local Business Center, you business is likely to show up alongside a Google map for certain search terms. Let say you need to find a dentist in Jackson, NJ- all the listings along the map are result of dentist offices taking advantage of Google Local Business center. I have written in the past how a friend of mind noticed increase of visitors to her shop after we listed her business in Google Local Business Center.
I also wanted to see more statistics and reporting inside the Business Center account. My wishes have finally came ture. It appears that Google is now providing some insightful statistics for your business’ local ads and coupons associated with your listing. Just go to your account and you should see a link to your report as shown in the image to your right.

The port shows the graph of impressions and actions associated with your business:

If you are a business owner and are looking to drive “foot traffic” to you store or business location you should definitely look into taking advantage of Google Local Business Ads- it is absolutely free!Similar Posts:

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If, over the period of last few days, you noticed a sudden increase in the number of subscribers to your blog reported by Feedburner, there is a simple explanation – now Feedburner includes the number of subscribers to your Friendfeed:

For many bloggers, especially the ones that are active on FriendFeed, this can translate into a significant increase of readership.

For many blogs out there, the number of subscribers is an important factor in determining the price for advertising and the value of the blog. Needless to say the Feedburners decision to include FriendFeed subscribers may help to diminish the value of readership on blogs.

For example two days ago the number of subscribers shown for Go Beyond MLS was in 90s – today that number is 326 which includes the subscriptions to my FriendFeed.

I would have been pleased with such increase of the number of subscribers if Go Beyond MLS was the only blog I author. Unfortunately majority of FriendFeed subscribers tend to gravitate around SageBlogger.com as well as my other blogs. But for the most part the interaction remains within FriendFeed itself.

Id don’t find the new numbers to be accurate nor helpful. Do you?Similar Posts:

• What To Do With Unverified Email Subscribers On FeedBurner?
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• Give Your RSS Feed A Huge Hug!

As of today you can subscribe to Go Beyond MLS using Amazon’s Kindle, or try it out for 14 days – the free trial.

If you would like to know how to publish your blog to Kindle as well, visit Kindle Blog Publishing for details. It takes about 10 minutes to set set your blog and once approved, Kindle users can subscribe to your blog using their device.

Now, am I going to get any subscribers? Very unlikely, but of course I would be grateful to anyone who would consider subscribing to my blog that way. I know however many outstanding real estate blogs that probably can end up with hundreds if not thousands of users. Giuve it a spin, it’s does not cost you anything and can bring some extra cash into your pocket.Similar Posts:

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If you followed my blog lately you know that a friend of mine, Trace Richardson is faced with anonymous coward who posted false and defamatory information about Trace’s company LeadPress on Ripoffreport.com.

I would like to thank every one who linked to my articles from two weeks ago, linked to Trace’s websites and online profiles, stumbled, mixed, propelled, tweeted, retweeted and otherwise tried to promote posts about Trace’s predicament. Thanks to you you we are beginning to see some results – http://tracerichardson.com/ now ranks number one on Google for “Trace Richardson” and rightly so!

Trace however still can use your help. In my previous post I listed a code which you can copy and paste into your articles. Please consider helping Trace. Do not let a fellow blogger to be attacked by these faceless cowards!Similar Posts:

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It has been long time since I have reviewed a real estate website. When I was contacted by Crossroads Realty to review their website, I knew that I have an opportunity to offer some spotlight to another New Jersey business. But I also hope that suggestions I am about to offer will be welcomed and used to improve their website and their Internet marketing efforts.

Website’s usability – user’s prospective…

When you visit Crossroads Realty’s website, it is hard to be confused as to where you are. You know immediately that you are on website of a real estate firm. It is very easy to search for properties or if you prefer you can search real estate agents.

Crossroads Realty website offers visitors to register a user account where they can save and organize the listings they are interested in- good feature for those of us whose browser’s favorites are miles long.

If there were any improvements to be made to the website, I would highly recommend adding additional “sharing” channels for visitors to use. Currently visitors can share listings with their friends via e-mail.

But there is no option to share listings (or agent profiles) on social networking website like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and many others. There are many solutions that will allow you sharing the content of your website on social networking website- ShareThis, AdThins, AdToAny just to name a few. Most of these solutions offer a simple “copy and paste” implementation.

Marketing, SEO/SEM suggestions…
The current state of traffic.
Quick comparison to another local real estate websites reveals that although Crossroads Realty ties with Diane Turton Realtors – it has some catching up to do with Gloria Nilson’s website:

Pay Per Click advertising…
It appears that Crossroads Realty has reduced pay per click advertising budget in October 2008:

Incoming Links…
Search engine optimization requires a long term effort and dedication. But it of course has a potential to bring great results. One of the first thing I look analyzing a website is the amount and quality of incoming links. Comparing to the other two above mentioned real estate websites (Diane Turton and Gloria Nilson) Crossroads Realty has half the number of incoming links (source: Yahoo! Site Explorer). Use online press release distribution services such as PRWeb.com can help to increase incoming links as different publishers may feature company’s press releases.

In addition I would recommend that Crossroads Realty would start a corporate blog and increase presence and interaction on social media websites. Crossroads is poisoned well against the competitors, improving on certain aspects of online marketing can dramatically improve their visibility and reach online.

Disclosures: I briefly worked for Diane Turton Relators in the past under the management of Margaret Ann Cesta -currently the office manager of Crossroads Realty in Brick, NJ.Similar Posts:

• Diane Turton, Realtors- NJ Website Review.
• Pay Per Call- Phone Leads over the Internet.
• Great Website but no visitors?
• Working With Hittail Suggestions: Short Guide For Real Estate Agents
• Your Website Is Useless If It Has No Visitors: PPC Advertising and Real Estate
• New Jersey Realtors Are Beginning To Use Pay Per Call

A while back I have written a post about a friend of mine Trace Richardson, who had been subjected a to vicious attack on RipoffReport.com. Due to the nature of Ripoffreport.com and the ability to post anonymously, it is difficult to come to conclusion who is behind these attacks. But it doesn’t really matter who is writing these posts about Trace on Ripoffreport.com. What matters is that any one can be subjected to such underhanded attacks. It is still wonder to me that no one used Ripoffreport.com to post false allegations about my interpreting and translating business. But to be completely honest I see it coming and will not be surprised at all to see the allegations popping up after I publish this post.

Some of the complaints posted on Ripoffreport.com are aimed at LeadPress, a company founded by Trace. The interesting part of it is that LeadPress has not yet officially launched and as far as I know there is not a single paying client as of today. Yet the lies about Trace continue to be posted on Ripoffreport…

The unfortunate effect that Ripoffreport.com benefits from is it’s ability to rise in the search engines. Since Rioffreport.com does not provide a way to address the false accusation, the only other option that we have to our disposal is to try outrank them for the keywords they are ranking.

I would like to thank Matthew Brown (aka Lord Matt) who wrote about Trace Richardson on his blog after my first post with the call to link to Trace’s online profiles.

If you would like to help trace, use the code provided below in this post to links to Trace’s profiles and pages. I have chosen these particular pages about Trace around the Interned because I feel they have the best chance to beat Ripoffreport. Feel free to copy and paste the code when you write a post, but if you think there are other pages that can be brought to the top of the search results fee free to link to them as well. Here are the links:
Trace Richardson on LeadPress

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And here is the code, again please feel free to modify the code by adding the links that you think will help Trace:

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LeadPress get’s bad press, it’s fake and I think I know why.
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