Go Beyond MLS – Page 5 – Internet Marketing Tips

Greetings Earthlings

After such a great introduction by Vlad I feel rather ashamed that it has taken me seven days to even write anything. These things happen and when I figure out a fool proof way of making sure that life never slows you down I will let you know. My name, as you might know, is Matt and my mission here will be to bring my rather British perspective to the topics at hand.

During the next few months I shall be taking a look at promoting your website using various tools that are freely available. With each one I will be taking this blog’s own presence (or lack thereof) and using it as a case study. You should be able to expect me to report back on the effectiveness of the different methods and techniques that I will be talking about in a series of follow up posts.

The first thing I will be looking at is the creation and promotion of a facebook “page”. There is a lot of ground to cover which is where I have been and what I have been doing. The first case study is almost ready for you. So, as they say, watch this space.

Thesis Theme Supercharges Your WordPress

As a WordPress user, I have come across many premium themes. Some were good, some were not so good. Several tims I was close to buying at least one of the premium themes (I believe it one of them was called “Revolution”) but none of the premium WordPress themes satisfy my website’s needs. So instead of going with a premium one I used to chose a free theme, and then tweak it, and tweak it, and tweak until I was satisfied with what I saw. The problem of course was that some WordPress theme developers have their own style (an some have no style at all) when it comes to coding the theme. The end result is that in many cases, one can waste considerable amount of time looking for example at CSS files and trying to figure out what controls what.

When I first heard of Thesis, I pretty much dismissed it as one of those premium themes that will not do much for my websites. However I was fortunate enough to have a closer look at this theme on a website of a friend of mine. Needless to say Thesis is on the top of my shopping list. The video (subscribers might need to visit this post to see it) bellow explains better than I ever could why I am falling in love with Thesis.

Click here to see more videos about Thesis, including video about it’s Design Flexibility and SEO benefits.

When trying Thesis on the website of a friend of mine, I immediately realized how easy and intuitive Thesis is. Most of the changes I made for example to the original theme that powers this blog, can be done via “options” in theses without need to modify themes files nor CSS. In addition it also can eliminate number of plugins you might be currently using. If you are looking for a suitable theme for your WordPress site, Thesis should be given serious consideration.

Matt Brown To Co-Author Go Beyond MLS

In the past I asked a few guest bloggers to write posts for this blog. Today I am absolutely thrilled to welcome a permanent co-author and contributor. You probably have met him on Twitter and Facebook already and can recognize him by his signature hat.

Matt Brown (also known Lord Matt around the “Interwebs”) is an incredibly talented blogger, web hosting and domain management guy, SEO and Content Marketing professional and most of all my friend.

Matt offered to co-author this blog after I revealed to him that I was planing to part with this blog and put it up for sale. Yes Go Beyond MLS was on my mind when I was making my new year’s resolutions. But now I will hold off selling this blog at least for another 6 month or so.

According to Matt, my intention to prepare this blog for sale was nothing else but an attempt to put a coat of “cheap paint” to make it more shiny. I could not agree more.

With that said, I look forward to Matt’s contribution and future posts. If you are interested to learn more about Matt, you should follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

More Spam From LeapFish???

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

UPDATE Feb. 5, 2010: It appears LeapFish is no longer showing the link in the footer of their website to their “directory” I wrote about bellow:

This change must have been implemented today as Bing.com’s cached page of LeapFish from yesterday February 4, 2010 still has the link:

LeapFish has also implemented robots.txt file on their website disallowing web crawlers from indexing the directory:

Few days ago I tried to to get attention of Google’s Anti-Spam Czar – Matt Cutts via his FriendFeed account. I wanted Matt to comment about LeapFish’s latest directory- but I realize, it may not be Google’s practice to comment on these sort of things publicly. That or you need to be Michael Gray, Aaron Wall or Andy Beard to get some one like Matt Cutts to listen to you.

So what is my latest beef with LeapFish? Their spammy directory located at http://www.leapfish.com/dr/ – my apologies for not providing a live link, I consider LeapFish to be an unsafe website. It also appears by my estimates that Google is indexing this new directory at the rate of about 50 pages a day- there are about 200 pages in Google’s index from this “directory” as of this writing.

So I invite those who are still with me to explore some of the pages from the above mentioned directory. One of the first pages from the directory that jump at me was “Shopping”:

Clicking through to the page on LeapFish.com you are given opportunity to “narrow” your search- so I decide to narrow mine to “Death Care”:

What do you know?!!! Now you can narrow your search geographically- naturally I selected New Jersey the state I live in:

How about that?!! LeapFish knows all the counties in the state of New Jersey- naturally my next selection would be the county I live in:

How about that?!!! Turns out LeapFish is so intuitive it knows about every city in my state- so just for the heck of it I decided to check and see what kind of death care shopping I can do in Jackson, NJ:

And the relevancy of my final destination in LeapFish directory? Google search results associated with the death of Michael Jackson?

What can I say? I am extremely disappointed. I am sure few results of local funeral directors or even a local WalMart with the line of their latest caskets would not be as disappointing. Since LeapFish is using some APIs from Google, they could have really impress me by showing me a few relevant products using Google Base API.

So yeah, I am desperate for the attention from Matt Cutts. Matt could you please explain to me how this sort of “directories” improve the State of The Index? In my opinion the LeapFish Directory does just the opposite- LeapFish pollute the Internet.

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.

Should I Cross-link My Websites?

This is something many web-masters struggle with. You create a new website that is going to knock every one socks off, but now you need Google and other search engines to notice it. The quickest way is to slap a few links on other websites you have that may already rank well and are well indexed by the search engines. But is it good idea? As Matt Cutts of Google explains in the video bellow, it all depends. If you have few minutes it is well worth watching: