How many of us really have the time to actually read that legal jargon anyway?  I felt it just wasn’t important enough either to bother with as a youth and got burned as a result. Make the time. That old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” couldn’t be more true.

If you haven’t rented much, you’re going to find out real quick that most rental agreements overwhelmingly favor  landlords. Since you are going into this from an inferior position, wouldn’t you like to know your rights beforehand?

Also, with all this new video phone technology, you’d be foolish not to record every flaw of your new diggs with the owner/manager the day you inspect it. Be sure they can actually see you recording everything because they’ll remember that the day you ask for your deposit back. When it came time for me to get my own later on, no questions were ever asked.

Be really careful with extended leases of six months, a year or more. Our society is more mobile than most yet thousands of people keep breaking their leases, and their pocketbooks, every month anyway. Consider the greater flexibility and money you could save with a monthly lease instead.

Both the real estate bubble that burst and our anemic economic recovery have altered the fortunes of millions. Having been born while most of our currency was still made of silver, I”ve seen the economic highs and lows over the years.  But this protracted and slow recovery has been different from all the others I’ve seen.

I, like millions of Americans, could be bearing witness to the permanent collapse of our country as we’ve known  it. But, that’s for another blog post. If you haven’t been negatively affected by what has been going on lately though, consider yourself one of the lucky ones.

I thought about including all the pros and cons about buying vs renting.  But, I felt that if I did that, I’d be doing a disservice by regurgitating old material that can already be found easily on the web. Instead, I thought I’d impart some thoughts about our values. Values that drove millions of people to attain home ownership and that may be forever altered as a result of what has been happening  for several years now.

To rent or not to rent. What should you do? Well, way back when, there was a time when I too, like most of you, could only afford an apartment. Over time, that evolved into a mobile home rental, a condo rental, a house rental and finally the opportunity to buy.

The reasons people buy are varied and numerous but most do it because, over time, you’re just better off financially in the long run and who couldn’t be happier with a place they could finally call their own? Well, that just hasn’t turned out to be true for a lot of people anymore; even if you followed the rules.

There have been huge job losses recently with the biggest now being among public sector workers; teachers, postal workers, etc. Theirs had job security that was once second to none. Not so anymore. This is the new economy.

Speaking of the private sector, I have a friend who was a pilot for a major airline for 18 years. Unfortunately, he only actually worked for them for five. He was furloughed the other 13! This is the new economy.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been foreclosed upon, left unemployed and declared bankruptcy. Many are living with mom and dad again. The advantages of home ownership, while still applicable for many, are just a distant memory for others and somthing alot would rather forget. Those who are too old, will never recover from it either. Maybe renting wasn’t so terrible after all.

Most current and former renters will tell you that they were able to travel a heck of a lot more when they had the disposable income to do so. They also had a lot more freedom. Most have the option of socking away more cash every month because expenses are just lower too.

 As an owner, you can look forward to much of your disposable  income getting eaten up with mortgage  and maintenance bills. Pride of ownership, right? Just remember that every time something breaks. Don’t forget about the property taxes, insurance and upkeep either. 

Renting comes with alot more freedom but the uneviable subjugation of having to obey owners while owning  come with a loss of that freedom and its increased costs; costs that are  higher than many could have ever imagined.

I just can’t help but wonder how much longer websites that do charge to advertise rental homes will be around. What about you? What sites or services have worked best for you and why? Let us know.

I, like a lot of people, thought that my  money might be better spent paying a professional SEO company to optimize my website rather than doing it on my own. The perception of promised results over time was, naturally, a powerful one so I forged ahead.

My first mistake was assuming that SEO was just one of the costs of doing business. All of the successful sites were doing it, right? I could not have been more wrong.

Not only don’t all companies pay for SEO services, I learned that the main job of an SEO company is to generate income for their success, not yours. More importantly though,I learned that no SEO company knows your business or cares as much about your website as you do.

In spite of my own experiences though, I know that there are a multitude of excellent SEO providers out there. You do get what you pay for; just not always. I also need to say up front that I am no SEO expert, or even close. I just know a little bit more about SEO now than I did when I started.

I have to admit that most of the blame was my own. As a complete webmaster newbie, I made a lot of assumptions back then, and only found out later how wrong they we’re. But, the lack of timely or correct information provided to me, from any of these SEO professionals along the way,  is what really surprised me.

One of the first, and biggest mistakes I made starting out, was selecting keywords that were really popular. I would have no chance of ever being found with them.

A lot of people make this mistake when they start out. No only was it a complete waste of my time and money, the SEO company, that I had hired in Boston, didn’t bother passing on that little detail to me, as they gladly collected the $500 monthly service fee while my organic traffic activity remained virtually dead.

Later, when I realized the mistake on my own, I selected a different SEO company. This company said that they could optimize five non-premium keyword phrases for $350 per month so long as each term did not exceed 300,000 monthly searches on Google. So, as I spoke with the SEO representative, I chose five phrases.

For months, I believed that the big number on the top right of Googles’ search results page was the monthly search volume. Wrong again! Not only had I never heard of Googles keyword tool back then, if I had, I would have discovered that all but two of my keyword phrases had monthly search volumes at all. The rest were so low that they didn’t even register a number!

While I wondered why my long-tail phrases were not generating organic traffic either, this second SEO company continued to collect their monthly fee too. None of the SEO professionals had bothered to check my keyword phrase volumes correctly or tell me just how worthless they really were. The SEO pro who had helped me select my keywords on the phone, was just as clueless as I was.

Due to my exasperation over time, I began discovering some free tools for website optimization myself like Googles keyword tool, alalytics, page rank and Hubspots’ website grader. I also found a minutiae of other free SEO related information on blogs, and on forums. As time passed on, I was coming to the realization that if my website was going to succeed, without breaking my bank account, I was going to have to do it on my own. It was time to cut the cord.

I became alittle more familiar with the meanings of on-page and off page optimization, metadata, html, javascript, serps and php. I also began to discover the many flaws with my own websites on-page optimization, even though I had been paying for SEO for some time by now with two different providers:

1- Half my title tag included my website name instead of my chosen keywords. Your website name will usually appear at the top of the search list anyway when people type it in. The exception being a more competitive expression in which case it’s probably a good idea to have it there.

2-Having more than 10 keywords dilutes the effectiveness of those words. I had over 20.

3-Your H1 and H2 header tags should include your keywords, if you want header tags. You don’t have to though. I did, and only one of my 6 header tags had any of my keywords.

4-All your keywords should be included in your websites content description. Most of mine were not.

5-If you do want header tags on your homepage, make sure only one is H1, with your most important keyword or keyword phrase inside it. I had four H1 tags before. Let the rest be H2 or H3 depending on their importance to you.

6-Have your keywords placed in the alternate text for your images, if you have or even want them. I had two images on my homepage with no alt-text keywords for either of them.

7-Have your main keyword located on the top left, inside your only H1 tag when people see your homepage.

8-Consider having your main keyword also located and just typed, uncapitalized, on the bottom right of your homepage, maybe to the right of your copyright information, because this is the last thing Googles’ crawler will read.

Regarding off-page optimization, I learned the following:

1-On-page optimization (website specific improvements, keywords, etc) are not weighed nearly as heavily by the search engines as off-page optimization (article writing, blogging, commenting, and link building.

2-Exchanging links with sites that rank higher than yours and are complimentary to your website can be far more helpful to you than just exchanging links with every site that asks you to.

3-Every day, websites somewhere are being banned by Google because these sites are linked to a bad neighbor. These webmasters have changed nothing about their own websites yet they have no clue as to why they are no longer indexed by Google at all.

4-One-way links back to your website carry a-lot more weight with Google than link exchanges.

5-I learned just how advantageous it can be for a new webmaster to use keywords that only show up on a competitors sub-pages for page one on Google, i.e, not their homepage, when starting out.

6-Finally, I learned just how crucial an analysis of your competitors page rank really is before any keywords are even selected. For me, the value in using an SEO company initially, was the peace of mind that I felt the moment I got started with one. They are, after all, the experts, right?

I’d like to conclude by saying that there are several individuals at the second company I had hired, who have continued to help me. I am indebted to them as I continue this journey of self discovery on my own.

Free has generally equated to lesser or poorer quality. Same for their results. If you look hard enough though, that’s not always the case anymore. Some of the best rental information out there now is free and on par with the websites that do charge. Free has turned out to be a powerful marketing weapon.

I had read a blog post recently that had really caught my eye. A property owner had complained about the dangers of listing a rental property with one of those free rental advertising sites. The title of the post was the eye catcher for me. It said, “Free rental ads. More harm than good?” A title like that could give someone the mistaken impression that any of these free websites are just not worth the risk. It worked! I believed it myself, for a moment.

What was interesting though, was that none of the harm had been caused by the website itself, but by the information the property owner had submitted to it! Go figure.

Renters want properties. Property owners want results. Will you get the same results listing your apartments or properties with a free site as with a paid site. Maybe, if you’ve done your homework.

Many of the free sites are just not that old or as established yet. But, that’s changing. Although they have a ways to go in capturing more market share, inroads are being made. Probably the biggest obstacle they have to overcome though is building consumer trust.

What builds trust? For a rental listing site, there are several things: The total number of rental property listings they already have, the number of new listings they are getting daily, word of mouth and proven results. By the way, website quality doesn’t play as big a role as you might think in capturing customers. A certain “……..list” site has over 13 million views per month. The sites that do charge continue to provide solid results for their users. For many, peace of mind is worth the extra cost.

These are just some of the items people take into account when deciding where to advertise their own apartments and rental properties. If the traditional sites are going to maintain their competitive edge though, further improvements might be required.

Business alliances are a powerful tool. The market share of these chains  have  grown considerably as a result. Since the benefits are obvious, then why haven’t these alliances been fostered amongst the larger realty chains? From a collaboration standpoint, and even with social networking, they’re still stuck back in the 1970s’ offering the same things now as they did back then. That needs to change.

Some might argue that the business model of  a realty company is just too different from a hotel chain. That may be so, but, in this tough economy where innovation gets results, isn’t it worth a second look?

People get excited when they hear the word “free.” I know I do. Whether it’s buying gas, shopping for groceries, buying an airline ticket, or traveling out of town; the points earned bring me and millions of people like me back for more of the same services again and again.

Almost everyone has a credit card of some sort. Should that be the angle? A part of it should be. The closing costs on just one real estate transaction would take months or even years to match by shopping or filling up a car. Why can’t someone earn a free stay somewhere with their lender or card company if they just spent a bundle of money on closing costs alone?  I don’t need to remind you where people tend to go with “free” as an incentive.

The realty companies and lenders need to explore what incentives like these could mean to their bottom line. Instead of competing amoungst themselves, they need to find that niche that can bring their businesses to the next level too.