dcmeagle

As stated: Not much. Install FoxIT, I just put it on a school recently for 500 computers. It's a LOT smaller than Acrobat, loads a lot faster too. Get it at www.foxitsoftware.com for free Note that FoxIT might not show 100% of what Acrobat is supposed to but you'll get about 99.99% Now , Adobe Flash you're stuck with as there's no alternative and you'll miss some good content without it.

No problem. Too bad you're not closer, I'm giving a 5 hour talk on SEO on Sunday in Vegas.

No problem. Glad to help! I have notes for a few more articles I need to write and will post as I finish them.

This one's very simple. Believe it or not, photos can actually be used to improve your search engine rankings. How? You might ask. Especially since I've repeated the mantra that search engines cannot read images and therefore sites with images for buttons are hurting their rankings. Well, here's how. When a search engine spider looks at your site they actually skip over the images, BUT it will look at the image alt text. When you add an image the html looks like this: Obviously the URL is the image address. The ALT text is what would be read aloud to someone who was blind or shown if an image was not available in a normal browser. The ALT text is a great place to put some keywords but MAKE SURE the text is still relevant to the actual image. If you show your logo you could put ALT="Houston home inspector logo". If you show some photos in a photo album, make sure to put the city name of where the photo is from, thereby increasing ranking for that city. Ideally you should have an ALT text for every image on your site. If you have any questions about this or other tips, let me know!

I use AVG Free on my desktops and their commercial version of my servers. Uses a LOT less resources than McAfee or Norton AV do.

Jeremy, I've been designing sites for inspectors for years. This year we started doing tests with different inspectors in the same cities and similar Google rank (i.e. both page one). Some had detailed pricing, some gave nothing but an intro price and told to call to get exact pricing due to variations due to age, size, etc... The inspectors that gave as little info as possible had their calls go up several hundred percent within a week (anyone wants to know who shoot me an email and I'll give you some email addresses). The moral here is you need to get the client to call you. Then you can sell yourself to the client. You'll hear some inspectors on the phone talk to clients in such as way that the client practically forgets to even ask the price. Ask them about the property, show familiarity with the area and connect with them.

You stated: Quote: North Carolina does not allow Recommendations in the required Summary section. Recommendations can only appear in the body of the report. My quote in the previous post is from the new Bill 1007. I don't read it as preventing an inspector from recommending a repair on the summary. I don't read the worksheet as saying that either. Am I just missing something obvious?

Are you sure about that? After talking to quite a few inspectors in North Carolina, I was under the impression that what you're saying is what the Agents wanted, but not what they finally got. Looking at the form you posted it says: In the summary.. "Are there any improper recommendations to upgrade or enhance?" To me, this does not say anything about recommending a repair or replacement of an item. Are you going off of another source, or just the worksheet? This seems a bit ambiguous to me and is from current legislation http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2009/Bill ... 1007v5.pdf: PART IV. HOME INSPECTION REPORTS 6 SECTION 4.1. G.S. 143-151.58 is amended by adding two new subsections to 7 read: 8 "(a1) Summary Page. – A written report provided under subsection (a) of this section for 9 a prepurchase home inspection of three or more systems must include a summary page that 10 contains the information required by this subsection. All other subject matters pertaining to the 11 home inspection must appear in the body of the report. The summary page must contain the 12 following statement: 'This summary page is not the entire report. The complete report may 13 include additional information of interest or concern to you. It is strongly recommended that 14 you promptly read the complete report. For information regarding the negotiability of any item 15 in this report under the real estate purchase contract, contact your North Carolina real estate 16 agent or an attorney.' 17 The summary page must describe any system or component of the home that does not 18 function as intended, allowing for normal wear and tear that does not prevent the system or 19 component from functioning as intended. The summary page must also describe any system or 20 component that appears not to function as intended, based upon documented tangible evidence, 21 and that requires either subsequent examination or further investigation by a specialist. The 22 summary page may describe any system or component that poses a safety concern.

Randy, I'd have to suggest checking out Google Docs, depending on the types of files you're trying to keep synchronized. I use 4 computers each day between home and work. I keep all my Spreadsheets and Documents in Google Docs so they can not only be edited on multiple machines at once, but you can roll back the changes and see updates live across all machines. You can import and export Word, Powerpoint and Excel document. You can also synch the Google Calendar and contacts with your cell phone which I use daily. All of this is free and you don't have to worry about connecting to another machine and transferring files around. There's a few other programs out there that will help keep files synchronized if you're going beyond the simple documents listed above. I'd have to look them up as I haven't used them in awhile. Remote Desktop and VNC (which is what I use along with dydns.org) are great for remote controlling a machine, but not transferring files.

I think it's great that Troy has posted his report for review and so many people gave great input. I just came across this today, but have seen him post the same report on two other message boards. He obviously wants to get as much input as possible to improve his report.

Just keep working on what you know will improve it in the long run. Yes it takes a few days to a few weeks for the changes to take affect in both directions. Google doesn't want to give anyone instant gratification as it would make it too easy to learn their game.

There are several possible reasons. Google is constantly reworking their algorithms. Whenever they make a change you'll jump around as they recalculate as they're not only resetting your sites ranking, but all the sites that link to you. Then the changes have to propagate across thousands of their servers. Another reason is if you'd made changes to your site. This causes your site to usually dip for some reason for a day or two then it jumps back up. Third is a recent thing I've seen with people thinking they're much higher than they are. If you are logged into Google (you can tell in the top right corner) then your site will move higher on it's own as it's trying to give you custom results. Make sure you've logged out to see your real results.

Do you have a separate address listed for the 2nd site, or is it the same as the first?

Nice job! All 100 impressions are directly related to home inspections. I haven't see that yet, everyone else has at least a few unrelated fields.

You will only have one site listed per business address. A few guys have used P.O. Boxes they have to get a second site listed.

Google has released a new tool to allow you to connect with you Google Map listings, improve them and help bring you more business. Last year I told everyone how to make sure you were listed on Google, Yahoo & MSN's local business listings. If you haven't already done this and verified your account, read the article here: http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/Search- ... tings.html to get yourself listed first. Google now allows all of us to get statistics based on these listings! Go to http://www.google.com/lbc and log in with your Google username and password. If you don't have one, you need to claim your site by following the article above and create an account at the same time. Now for the fun stuff, once you're logged in. The first thing you see is a graph of the last month showing Impressions and Actions. Impressions are how many times your site was shown in the Google Map area in. You're given the overall count for the month (for a comparison our site was shown 1837 times in the last 30 days). This is an important number as it lets you know how active your area is for the searches you're targeting and how often you're showing up. Actions are how many times somebody actually clicked on something to do with your map listing. This could be them clicking on the link to your website, a link to more information about your company or driving directions to your site. I don't know who it is that wants to come visit me be 35 people got directions to drive to our office in the last 30 days, 40 clicked to see our website and 14 wanted more information on our business. This makes sense as we have had quite a few calls in the lately for people asking for a home inspector. I guess they don't realize the business name says software. I just give the names of some of our local users. For you, actions are very important. They show the conversion rate of the number of times your site is showing in the maps versus the number of clicks. I would expect your Actions numbers to be much higher than mine (people don't look for software in Rancho Cucamonga, CA but they are looking for home inspectors in your cities). There are several changes you can make to your Google maps listing. Make a few changes, watch your Actions and Impressions for the next month, then make changes again to try and improve them. Google also displays the keywords that your listing is appearing for. This is important and I'd like to hear what words your sites are being listed for. This is a great way to finally find out if Google Maps is properly locking into search terms for home inspectors. Most of the terms our site came up on the maps for had to do with home inspections or house rentals (remember they have to be searching the local area for your site to even appear in the maps). Along the top you can also click on Coupons and add a coupon. Even if it's a $20 off coupon, or a coupon just for seniors and military personnel, it's an extra reason for people to click on your Google Map listing. On the top right Your Business Info is listed as Google knows it. For me , it showed my information was 82% complete. Since I filled everything out in the past , they must have added more. I'm assuming most of you will be in the same boat. Click the Edit button to complete your profile. Add a photo to your info of yourself and your business info. This will help you connect and differentiate yourself from your potential client. If you've added video testimonials to your site like Ben suggested recently, you probably uploaded them via YouTube. Add your YouTube video to your listing to really draw people in. Make sure to list your business hours. The fact you inspect on a Saturday or Sunday might be the deciding factor to someone. Make sure to pick the categories closest to home inspections (more than likely real estate). Watch the video here for more information: http://maps.google.com/support/bin/stat ... uide=21029 So, lets hear it! How many times has your listing been shown, been clicked on, and what phrases are your sites appearing for?

As Mike said PDF's get indexed, but only if there's a link to them that's publicly visible on your site. I point this out as I've had people concerned that reports they posted on their site would be found. If you only email a link to a client of a page you've uploaded a report to, that page will never be indexed as there's no way to get from your home page to that site. So that report is safe from being indexed.

Don't chicken out! Putting a computer together is as simple as working on your car. I like using newegg.com to purchase all my parts, but the CompUSA deal doesn't look bad!

Like Mike said, technically a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and your rankings shouldn't be affected. In practice your new site WILL have 0 pagerank and start out at the bottom of the rankings for at least 3-6 months before the search engines redirect and recalculate the new site. Remember that domain name age is a HUGE part of your sites ranking and your new site will not have that. Websites are cheap, and they are the most cost effective return on investment you can have. Your best bet is to have 2 sites (we have guys with up to 5). Target 5 cities on each of the sites. You can get a new site for $6 a month on a host like GoDaddy or $25 or so inspection site hosts. So less than one inspection off the site covers you for a year. In the end, you end up with double coverage and possibly 2 of your sites showing up for certain phrases on Google.

I've been using Cobian Backup for about 6 years for our company to schools, law firms and other companies I've done consulting for. I use it to not only backup from my computer to an external drive, but to a website, AND to backup my website back down to the local computer. It can do it all and it's free. http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

I've been telling a lot of the guys that host websites with us to get .biz (for business) because the perfect optimized names are available (and .com's aren't) , i.e. springvillehomeinspector.biz . Getting those keywords in the name is a huge boost.

Oh, and get the .com if they are both available. Sorry I didn't respond sooner. I haven't found a way to get auto notifications of board posts on here (am I missing it?).

They would be 2 totally different websites. Technically the domain extension shouldn't matter as long as it's not a country specific domain name. For example .ca will get better rank in Canada than in the US.

Hi John, We have quite a few plumbers and other contractors using our system. I even had a company that makes water fountains out of steel setup a site a couple of weeks ago. All they need to do is change the images at the top or bottom of the theme to suit their own needs. I can help them if they need help with that. Dominic

We've extended this deal to December 31st because of the good response and a lot of request from people who haven't had enough time to fully try it out (too much Christmas shopping I guess, hehe) . This actually may end up being more than $150 off if you wait until next year as there's a good possibility we'll be raising our prices soon.