dcmeagle

If the links page on the persons site is not linked to from some other page (which I see from time to time), then the spiders will never see it and it will never help you. File names are definitely important. Google can read full PDF documents and the file names help with optimization. There shouldn't be a reason your stat program doesn't pick up a referral from another site. Even if the person has a "nofollow" tag on it (which tells the search engines not to count it as a link, sites like Wikipedia do this), your site should still pick up the referral. It's possible if it's a javascript or a flash link your stats program is having a hard time picking it up. Give me an example and I'll check it out.

I've installed it on over 500 computers at a High School I consult at (used to teach and run their computers). It's all I run on my machines, I don't own MS Office.

I've always referred people to PrimoPDF as well. I've had a problem getting it to work with 64 bit Vista so I've been using Bullzip PDF Printer instead which is also free and works well.

Thanks Steve, It's been great having your input as part of our beta team over the past year. I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving! Dominic

Hi Kevin, Both the Mike's are great guys. Mike Brown from InspectExpress who hosts the site on their server doesn't have a problem as long as the competition (like us) pay to advertise on the site which I think is only fair. They foot most of the bill for the server the forum runs on, so it makes sense!

I got this approved by Mike Brown before posting. Home Inspector Pro is running a huge holiday sale on our home inspection software from today until December 25th. We understand that times are tough for many inspectors and have already reduced our prices from $650 to $499 over the past few months. Now all inspectors will receive an additional $150 off for a total of $349! We even have payment plans if you are interested. Check out the free 90 day trial. We are around 7 days a week and often late into the night (our last call last night was at 1am). The Coupon Code is HOLIDAY150OFF Watch our Interviews on NACHI.TV http://www.nachi.tv/users/vgreen/videos/35 http://www.nachi.tv/episode55 http://www.nachi.tv/episode36 http://www.nachi.tv/episode24 http://www.nachi.tv/episode18 Home Inspector Pro runs on a Mac and Windows!! It was developed 100% by home inspectors and continues to be developed by home inspectors. Check out our site testimonials to see the comments from many happy inspectors currently using the program. We release a new update every 3-4 weeks because of the constant feedback we are getting so new features are being added frequently. Home Inspector Pro is currently being used in at least 10 countries and 5 different languages! http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/Home-Inspector-Pro/How-to-Perform-an-Inspection-with-Home-Inspector-Pro.html Here are some of then top features of Home Inspector Pro: * Runs on Mac, Windows & Linux * Batch photo feature to add all your photos in 2 clicks. Photos can be inserted within the report or at the end, your choice. Hundreds of photos can be resized an inserted in seconds. * Add an unlimited number of documents and photographs into your report. * Annotate your photos with arrows, rectangles, adjust brightness & more from within the program! You can ever fuse Infrared images within the program! * Completely customizable from the menus at the top of the program to the comments within each section. Add unlimited comments into each section. * Summary page is automatically generated and integrated into a table of contents. * Create your own template or use our own. Inspectors have created templates for Residential, Commercial, EIFS, Pest, Marine, Condo, and anything else you can think of. There is no reason to buy separate programs when you can do it all with Home Insepctor Pro. You can also download templates other inspectors have made on our message boards, free. * All reports are written straight to pdf creating a high quality report in seconds. Files sizes are minimal due to the process. PDF files are 128 bit encrypted to prevent editing and include bookmarks for quick navigation. * You can customize all the colors, borders, headers. * You can include ratings, rename them or remove them. * Reorder pages, exclude pages or create your own with ease. * Lots of animated tutorials to help with any questions you may have. * Reports can be printed on site, emailed to your client, or uploaded from within the program to our servers for your client and their agent to receive. * Report upload service automatically uploads the report and notifies all parties involved. To download the trial go to http://www.homeinspectorpro.com and click on the Download Trial button If you have any questions or would like to work out a payment plan, please email us , use the Live Help feature on the website or call us. http://www.homeinspectorpro.com. Check out our Message Boards for discussion about the latest features in Home Inspector Pro! Sincerely, Dominic Maricic - President Home Inspector Pro http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com Toll Free: 1-888-750-4777 MSN: Support@HomeInspectorPro.com ICQ: 513303 Yahoo Messenger: dcmeagle AIM: dmaricic

A lot of you guys have started blogging and that's great. Blogging increases your exposure in many ways. First, blogs turn up on search engines. Blogs make your sites larger which search engines like (makes you look more authoritative), and it gives your clients and agents something to read and a way to know more about who you are. One thing about blogging is that it's important to get your blog out there. Depending on how your blogging, your blog might be publishing a RSS Feed that others can subscribe to. People can add your RSS Feed so that when they open up their Google, Yahoo, etc home page, your latest blog entry comes up. More importantly you can tell search engines about your blog and they'll start scanning your site. I'm going to use two examples here. The first is Active Rain. Everyone who blogs on Active Rain is actually producing an RSS News Feed. You'll see the RSS image which is an orange box with several white arcs inside it you're on a page with a feed. The location in Firefox is in your address bar, in other browsers its on the status bar at the bottom of the browser. So on Active Rain, my blog PAGE is: http://activerain.com/blogs/homeinspectionsoftware . When you go to the page, find the orange feed button (by the way NACHI has one up top too), and right click on it and click view feed, or subscribe to feed (depends on the browser), and you get shown this: http://activerain.com/blogs/homeinspectionsoftware/rss This link IS the feed. Now, what can you do with this feed? You can use Tip 11,12 below to add the feed in to your website. If you host your site with us, or possibly other hosts, you can add this feed to your News Feed area. You can also submit your feed to RSS Feed directories which will then get your blogs on out the web. The biggest one of these is called technorati. You can create an account on technorati, then submit your blog feeds from differents places you post blogs (your website, active rain, etc) and then they'll be indexed. When people search for info you'll come up, people can comment on your blogs and more. There's many other directories, just do a search on the web for rss feed directory or news feed directory and get your feeds listed. The second example I'm going to use is from Brian Doles site as he's done a lot of blogging on his own site for Atlanta Home Inspectors . If you visit the page you'll see his first blog with arrows to view more, but you'll also see the RSS feed button towards the bottom which is http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com/blog/20/feed . That feed can now be taken and added to directories to increase exposure, increase rankings, and increase business. If you have any SEO questions, let me know!

The answer for you is, it doesn't matter. Any new machines is going to handle more than what you need to perform inspections on whether it's an Intel or AMD processor. If you're going for a cheap tablet that isn't too fast, get XP, especially if you only have 1 gig of ram. If you're getting a dual core laptop/tablet (which almost all are now) with 2 gigs of ram, get Vista. The only caveat is to make sure that whatever software you're using works ok on Vista. I believe there's still a few out there that don't work on it yet, but most do.

Acer has new laptops for about $400 too. So does ASUS.

Depends on what else you plan on using the tablet for. Will this be your main computer at home as well? If not, like MThomas said, you can get a $400 tablet on Ebay that will work for almost any inspection software out there. If you break it , it won't be a big deal. New tablets though shouldn't cost you more than around $1200 if you're just doing inspections. You don't need a super video card or extra large hard drive. You might also consider a UMPC like the Samsung Q1. It's a full windows machine with thumb keys and a 7" screen that will run all the current software out there. Tablets by definition are supposed to have keyboards. They are basically laptops where the screen swivels and lays flat. I know many guys who use them in this mode 90% of the time, it just depends on your style and the program you're using. The screen only without a keyboard is referred to as a slate. 99% of Tablets have touch screens. I've run in to one that didn't. Their reasoning was that it was meant to watch movies on (made no sense). So just double check that it's a touch screen. Forget the Macbook Pro, get the Mac Axion Tablet with built in GPS. That thing is beautiful

From a programming standpoint, how are you managing to connect to your bank and compare it with your books? What programming language are you using? Even for us to setup credit card processing for home inspectors using our software involved us signing lots of contracts to get an API to work with. To be honest, every bank is different, requiring different info to connect to them. The reason no inspection software vendor would touch this is it would be a huge amount of work for little return (remember there is a very small amount of inspectors worldwide). It makes much more sense for an inspector to use Quickbooks (which is made by a billion dollar company, 100x the worth of all the inspection software companies combined) which will do more than any inspection program could ever do. You don't want inspection vendors writing accounting software for you! The best thing for inspection programs to do is to provide an easy way to get information in and out the program and in to Quickbooks (or another accounting program) so you don't have to duplicate info. I know there are good inspection packages out there right now that will do this. Honestly, ours isn't one of them, but it is something we hope to get added into a version in the next few months (other features to add in first).

I actually have a EEE PC as several of our users started using them and I have had to make adjustments to our software to fit the screen better (they run at 600x480 resolution). They aren't too bad, but they aren't touch screen YET (those are coming soon, though right now there are a few hacks you can make to solder a touch screen in for about $80). So you lose out a little on the time advantage of having a touch screen system. Also, our software is the only software that will run on the Linux version of the EEE, so make sure you get the Windows XP version if you're using any other inspection software program.

You said you've tried laptop's & tablets. There is one other class of computers between tablets and pda's called UMPC's you might not want to forget about that are becoming popular with inspectors. Examples of these are the Samsung Q1: http://product.samsung.com/micro_manual ... ng_Q1.html (7" screen) and the Fujitsu U810: http://store.shopfujitsu.com/fpc/Ecomme ... eries=U810 (5" screen). PDA's average about 2.5". Then run the full version of windows xp or vista so they can run any inspection program your normal computer can.

Lol, I wouldn't want to be listed on that guys page for personal reasons, but that's a different story. You can probably read about it in the archives here or on a few other forums. Here's a loose definition of a link farm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm . Link Farms used to be purely sites where every site linked to each other, but it's really become a term now for pages with just tons of links listed, usually automatically. As Google is quoted at the bottom ,they penalize people who are on link farm pages. There is no 'exact' number that's been given on when a site crosses the link and a page has too many links. It is known that the more links on a page, the less valuable having a link on that page is. Google might start calling a page a link farm at 20 links or 100 links, no way to know for sure. That's why I say, play it safe and break things up into different categories. Right now that site wont hurt you. If he gets a lot of links all listed on that one page, it might.

Hey John, I thought I had responded to this last week, I must have not hit submit or something. 1. You don't want your browser title to be longer than 64 characters. Google will show the first 66 but will crop to the last complete word. 2. Do not put more that 25 or so links to other sites on one page. That turns your site into a link farm, hurting your rankings and theirs. I always suggest to the guys using our hosting service to split up the categories by State or Province. 3. The only way is to actually put a different site up on each name. Read this article I wrote about multiple domain names: http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/Search- ... sites.html 4. To be honest, I doubt it would hurt it. Search engines should delete the extra white space anyways so they wouldn't notice. Run your site through a spider simulator like this: http://www.iwebtool.com/spider_view to see what your page would look like. Dominic

Hey John, I'm still here The way you have the hyphens should be ok, though I know commas would be ok. Sometimes I see guys who try Baltimore-Annapolis which I advise against as the search engines might look at that as one word. You have Baltimore - Annapolis which the search engines should definitely be able to differentiate between. Dominic

I made this offer on the InterNACHI board and want to extend it to all other associations. If any association chapter wants a website, we will set you up via our hosting service for free. You get the normal stuff noted above plus the ability for members to post on a message board, blogs, photo galleries, and more.

Thanks. I know what it costs to run a forum. I have a separate site (from home inspections) that I started about 10 years ago. It has about 800,000 messages and 18,000 users. Servers are expensive!

Hey Mike, Thanks for allowing this to be posted here.

Visit our Home Inspector Website Hosting Website for more information We created a website hosting service for home inspectors after many inspectors came to us complaining that they could not edit their own websites without paying someone, or even if they could, they couldn't make the changes necessary to get their site to the top of the search engine rankings. With our new system you can do that and a lot more. We spent a lot of time working with a large group of inspectors to create a powerful, yet easy to use system. Now, for the best part. We are so confident that you'll like the system that we are giving ALL home inspectors 3 MONTHS FREE to try out the service, no credit card required. After the 3 months the service will only be $24.99 a month (or $20 a month if you pay for a year). Many home inspectors are now choosing to have multiple websites as the more sites you can get to the first page of Google, the more jobs you'll get. Also, each site targets a certain geographical area. A few of our inspectors have 3 sites! We currently have 25 themes from you to choose from, with more on the way. You can change your entire sites theme within seconds, on your own. To view all the current themes you can go to http://www.HomeInspectorPro.biz . Each theme can be customized with your own images. You will find a Theme selector on the left where you can flip through the different themes. We have many animated tutorials which you can get to from the left menu of our home page with more on the way. There are also multiple written tutorials up on the message boards. To see some a few examples from our current users currently using the system check out http://www.sehomeinspection.com http://www.arrowepi.com http://www.daytonthermalinspection.com http://www.owlhomeinspection.com http://www.wisemanhomeinspections.com http://www.tennesseeinspector.net http://www.chicagohomeinspection.info . If you'd like to see more examples, you can visit the message boards on http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com where the bottom 3 boards are all about the website hosting service and many people have posted their sites. You should be familiar with the message boards anyways as a lot of discussion about Home Inspector Pro goes on there. Current Features: * Ability to add an unlimited number of pages to the site * Edit your web pages whenever you want * Make changes to all your keywords, descriptions, page titles that are necessary for good search engine rankings * Change the page URL, also important for SEO (search engine optimization) * Start up your own blog and allow users to comment on it, great to keep the search engines looking at your site * Integrate news feeds from services to pull in fresh content daily (check out http://www.owlhomeinspections.com and look at the right side of any page but the first). * Upload sample reports and other documents. * Create Photo Galleries * Create Slide shows ( check out http://www.sehomeinspection.com ) * Link directory system makes it easy to manage your links to other websites. * Add your own forms and surveys. Get emailed the results and view them online. * If you are doing pre-inspections/sellers inspections you can create real estate listings on your site and offer this as an extra incentive to your agents & clients. * Certain portions of each theme are fixed, but you can add content & images all over the sides and often in the header of the site. In most (and eventually all) the themes you can replace the header and footer images as well with your own. * Support through email, live chat on website and our message boards where our staff and other users will help you out. Upcoming Features: * If you use the Home Inspector Pro report upload service, we are planning on making it so clients and agents can get their reports through your site. * A new service coming to the report uploads is the option to receive a credit card payment before a report is viewed. * Accept credit card payments on your own site. * Much, much more! To get signed up, Click Here to fill out the form and start your FREE 3 months. If you don't have a domain name yet, don't worry, we'll help you out. Choosing a domain name is VERY important for good rankings, lets discuss what name you're about to choose before you get it. Sincerely, Dominic Maricic President of Home Inspector Pro http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com Toll Free: 1-888-750-4777

Nice site design overall. It has a nice look. A couple of notes. 1. Your urls should be changes to be SEO friendly. http://sanantoniotexashomeinspector.ipo ... hoose.html is not as powerful as http://sanantoniotexashomeinspector.ipo ... tions.html Note the second one gets keywords into the url which must be separated by hyphens for full effect. 2. Why do you just have a subdomain of .ipower.com. You won't rank as high as if you had your own domain. Hosting is chaep and one inspection difference could cover a year of hosting. 3. Your keywords and page description could use some work, read my comments above or the articles on my site for more. Other than that you're not looking too bad. There's some more thing you can do like alt tags to your images and stuff, but the above is the most important.

Hi Zibby, Sure thing, I'll check it out some time today when things quiet down here.

The priority stuff really doesn't do much of anything. What's going to determine what pages are returned are #1 the page that other websites link to (your home page), and #2 the page the matches the search best in all ways. Changing the frequency won't really affect your site either as a home inspection website typically is not going to change very often (unless you get some news feeds going). As far as importance goes (this is my opinion and observations, neither Google nor any of the search engines will ever tell you exactly what's most important): 1. URL 2. Title Tab 3. Description Tag 4. Heading Title Remember though that any words you use in #1-4 HAVE to be contained on the page in the main body text as well to make it effective.

Hi John, Having Maryland Home Inspector - Rates at the top is a good idea. You can go further by saying 'Home Inspection Rate in x,x,x, and surrounding areas'. As far as the naming goes, I'd make a small change. Instead of arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-7.html , I'd use arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Rates.html , arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Sample-Report.html , etc. The numbers don't really help you out. Excellent, and thanks again Dom. On your suggestion of the small change to the url titles, there is problem. I tried to do it like you suggested. For some reason, godaddy's website tonight limited the number of characters I could use. I felt that Maryland-Home-Inspector is the most important part so that is why I did it that way. I could drop "Maryland" to provide enough spaces but I think that that word is more important to me than "samples" for instance. Keeping the word "Maryland" in there will get me more localized hits. Is my thinking correct on this? I would make sure Maryland is on a few of the pages. But for the rest I'd go with things like home-inspection-sample-reports, or get some of the city names in there. Or even Washington DC if you inspect down there. I'm surprised GoDaddy limits the number of characters, that seems silly. I know there's no limitation on our system as I've seen guys with REALLY long titles (too long). Make sure you have Maryland and your city names, in your description tag, your keyword tag, and throughout your entire site. I'm worried that Google might see having Maryland-Home-Inspection in EVERY page's url as spamming (I'm not sure, but just a guess). That's why with guy getting new sites I tell them to get it into their domain name, like http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com . That way the page url's can focus on cities or other terms. If you've had your site for over 6 months though, you want to keep the domain name as age is an important factor in rankings as well. Dominic

Hi John, Having Maryland Home Inspector - Rates at the top is a good idea. You can go further by saying 'Home Inspection Rate in x,x,x, and surrounding areas'. As far as the naming goes, I'd make a small change. Instead of arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-7.html , I'd use arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Rates.html , arundelhomeinspection.com/Maryland-Home-Inspector-Sample-Report.html , etc. The numbers don't really help you out.