The Google Penquin updates started in April 2012. These updates are aimed at decreasing the rankings of sites that use black-hat techniques to increase rankings. In addition to good content, navigation, and a solid backlink strategy, it is now very important to have a proper mix of generic, brand, and target anchor text linking. It is even more important to know where those links are coming from. 

1 Generic Links

Anchor text links that have nothing to do with your website or your target keywords. ‘click here’ and ‘more information’ are examples of generic links.

2 Target Links

Anchor text links that contain your targeted keywords. An example of this is 'My Area Real Estate'. An excess of these types of links may get your site de-indexed by Google.

3 Brand Links

Anchor text links that include your URL or specific words from your URL. An example of this is if your url is 'myareahomes.com' then 'myareahomes' is a brand link.

If you have a high concentration of any of the three types of links discussed above, then this is a priority area that will need to be addressed immediately. 

The Penquin algorithm also looks for black-hat techniques such as participation in link-pyramids, link-schemes, keyword stuffing, cloaking, and manipulation of duplicate content such as 'spun' articles. Link farms, fake links, paid links, comment spam, and other shady methods of getting higher ranking on Google are a thing of ancient history. Paying $5 on Fiverr for 10,000 links to your site will do nothing more but get your site removed from Google’s indexes. Choosing the wrong SEO Company could mean irreversible damage to your site. 

A Proper Balance is Essential!

Too much of one and not enough of another and you could lose out to your competition very quickly; possibly overnight. While there is still much debate on the exact balance ratio, keeping these three balances even will help to avoid any problems with Google Panda updates. Too high of a concentration in any one area will lead to indexing problems. 

(Sample Data of a Well-Balance Site Used for Graph) 

How is your site doing? Find out for free

Google Panda Updates & One Simple Trick

 

It has always been important to make sure that you have quality backlinks with proper anchor text, but now the Google Panda updates (started in February 2011) have taken it even further. Google updates have FOREVER changed SEO. In Fact according to Matt Cutts they are not going away. The updates are aimed at lowering the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites" with very little useful content, and rewarding higher-quality sites with near-the-top search results. 

 

The Google Panda algorithm is concerned with quality. It is based on human interaction with websites and looks for similarities among sites that users prefer to use. While most ranking algorithms previously used by Google were aimed at the ranking of individual pages, the Panda slammed entire sections of a website or even entire domains if they were outside certain parameters. 

 

This doesn't mean that the Panda was only concerned with 'junk' sites. The Panda also penalized sites that were over-optimized. Essentially the update cleared out the top and bottom of the best and worst to make for a more level playing field. Sites that were over-optimized and had a less-than-informative website were hit hard. Junk sites specifically designed for delivery of advertising were also penalized harshly.

 

The 'Trick' to beating the Panda updates is simply to provide high quality content, on a navigable website, and make sure a human would actually stay on your site. 

 

1. Good HIGH-Quality Content

If you don't have good high quality website content, then you are not going to do well in the search engine rankings. Your conent must be unique and bring something new to the table. If the search engine has seen 1,000 other sites like yours with the same content... forget it.

 

2. Solid Navigation

If a search engine cannot find its way around your website, then chances are that humans would have trouble too. Your site must be designed with both humans and search engine robots in mind. Make it easy to navigate, find information quickly, and drop the 25 fancy widgets.

 

3. Keep it Easy on the Eyes

You have probably seen enough websites yourself to know what websites make you want to puke. Simply put, dont be 'that' guy.

 

By concentrating on delivering high quality content, good navigation, and a pleasant website experience, you 'trick' the Panda into thinking you have a good high-quality site.... or do you? Panda wonders.... 

 

In video 1 we went over the URL, title and description and then we put our targeted keywords in the page metadata. Now we need to work on on-page optimization.

On the page itself we have a few things that we can optimize, but the key thing we are concerned with for this video is the content. Now before we get started, let’s go back to the title of the page. We need to put this title into what’s called a header tag. Now there are several header tags that can be used, but we are going to concentrate on our header 1 and header 2 tags.

This is a transcript. If you do not see the video above, press f5 to refresh the page

But first.. What is a header tag and why do I need this on a real estate website?

Header tags tell search engines what is most important on a page and they are numbered from 1 through 6 with 1 being the most important thing on a page. So going back to elementary paragraph structuring... Let’s just say that your h1 tag is the main idea or topic sentence for the page and for the h2 tags we are going to brainstorm 3 ideas from the main idea. This is the same thing with the h3 through h6 tags, but to keep this simple we are just going to use our one h1 tag or main idea and then three h2 tags or supporting ideas

It’s important to note here, that just like in paragraphs; you can only have one main idea or H1 tag. You can have as many h2, 3, 4, 5, & 6 tags as you would like... but the page can only have one main idea.

So let’s get this page optimized for content...

Our h1 tag is going to be what we used in our page title – we have already told the search engine in the URL, title & description that this page is about collier county real estate, so let’s not confuse it by changing the h1 tag to anything else.

Now we are going to take our keywords that we chose in the last video and use these as our three supporting ideas or H2 tags.

Our three h2 tags are collier county homes for sale, collier county property listings, and collier county land for sale. All three support the main idea of the H1 tag.

Now we get to the hard part. Writing content.

What we are going to do for the content is write at least 100 – 200 words for each section here. It’s like writing a college paper. You will have your introductory paragraph, three supporting paragraphs, and a summary paragraph. If you follow this rule for every page you write, you will always have a minimum of 500 words per page and a well-structured, well-optimized page that search engines will be able to easily index. Doing this across your entire site will help to get you ranked highly in search engine results.

While you are writing your content you will be using keywords and key phrases, so check out the next video  - video series 3 on keywords and key phrases, and what not to do..

CONTINUED IN NEXT VIDEO

 

http://www.cherylwaller.com How Google Works, The Secrets of Getting RANKED. 

SERP Tool in Video: http://www.cherylwaller.com/SEO_SERP_Tool.html

 

Other video topics are:

 

Video Series 1 - Introduction to Basic SEO - What is Search Engine Optimization?

Video Series 2 - How Google Works, The Secrets of Getting RANKED

COMING SOON:

Video Series 3 - Keywords and Key Phrases - What Not to Do

Video Series 4 - Dodging the Dreaded Panda - Avoid Being Penalized by Google

Video Series 5 - Undiscovered High Traffic Keywords in Your Own Backyard

Video Series 6 - Content Confessions of a Strategic Internet Marketing Consultant

Video Series 7 - The Do's and Don't EVERs of Website Organization and Navigation

Video Series 8 - Simple Optimization Techniques that SEOs Don't Want You to Know

Video Series 9 - Sneaky Yet Powerful Social Links and How to Get Them

Video Series 10 -  How to Leverage The Social Blogger that Never Sleeps

Video Series 11 - The Secrets of Google Analytics and How to Apply Them to Your SEO

Video Series 12 - Planning Your Strategic Internet Marketing with a Predictable SYSTEM

 

Subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow me @cherylwaller, subscribe to me on facebook.com/cherylwaller, or simply check back often to make sure you never miss a video in this incredible new 2012 video series!

 

Ok so you have a real Estate website but you have no idea what to do with it. You want to reach a wider audience... But you don’t want to reach the whole world. You need to target your audience by appearing on the first page of results for your specific specialties in your area. You hear people talking about how to get a website on the first page of Google and there’s a million different suggestions on how to get your site ranked all over the web... so what do you do as a real estate agent to get a better understanding of where to start?

This is a transcript. If you do not see the video above, press f5 to refresh the page

First we need to understand how Google works.

You see it’s not just your website that is indexed by Google, it is each page on your website. And each page on your website has an equal chance to rank highly for its specific keywords. So when we are trying to search engine optimize a website, what we are actually doing is optimizing each individual page on a website for its specific keywords and then tying all the pages together under a common theme across the entire website.

So let’s break this down and search engine optimize one page.

First we have to decide what key phrase we are going to target. Now that is a whole other process that we will be going over in later videos, so for now... let’s just say that we did our research and we came up with the keyword ‘collier county real estate’... The first thing we are going to do is name our new page with our key phrase in the URL, so our new page is going to be called ‘mycoolwebsite.com/collier-county-real-estate.html’

Now what we need to do next is name the page again, but this time in the title. So the title of the page is going to be “Collier County Real Estate | Homes and Land for Sale in Collier County”. Now notice that is exactly 70 characters which is the max you should ever use for a page title... write that down, that’s important.

Cool... now we move on to the description. Now search engines may or may not use your description under your title so it’s best to keep this as descriptive as possible. So for our description we are going to put “Collier County real estate. Search for homes, townhomes, duplexes and land for sale in Collier County Florida with local expert real estate agent Jane Doe.” This time notice we used 155 characters with spaces. The max we want to use for a description is 156 characters. Write that down too.

Search Engine Optimization - Search Engine Results Pages Tool

Ok so now we have our URL, Title, and description. Now we are going to add our keywords. Now Google doesn’t use keywords in your metadata, but other search engines do, and it’s good to get in the habit of always writing out the keywords that you intend to use for a page. Now for this page our keyword is collier county real estate, but we want to add a few other keywords in that are similar to our keyword without targeting other keywords from the website. For this page we decided we are going to use Collier County Real Estate, Collier County Homes for Sale, Collier County Property Listings and Collier County Land for Sale. We put these in the Meta mostly as a reminder to ourselves what we want in our content, but also for use by other search engines besides Google.

CONTINUED IN NEXT VIDEO

 

http://www.cherylwaller.com How Google Works, The Secrets of Getting RANKED. 

SERP Tool in Video: http://www.cherylwaller.com/SEO_SERP_Tool.html

 

Other video topics are:

 

Video Series 1 - Introduction to Basic SEO - What is Search Engine Optimization?

Video Series 2 - How Google Works, The Secrets of Getting RANKED

COMING SOON:

Video Series 3 - Keywords and Key Phrases - What Not to Do

Video Series 4 - Dodging the Dreaded Panda - Avoid Being Penalized by Google

Video Series 5 - Undiscovered High Traffic Keywords in Your Own Backyard

Video Series 6 - Content Confessions of a Strategic Internet Marketing Consultant

Video Series 7 - The Do's and Don't EVERs of Website Organization and Navigation

Video Series 8 - Simple Optimization Techniques that SEOs Don't Want You to Know

Video Series 9 - Sneaky Yet Powerful Social Links and How to Get Them

Video Series 10 -  How to Leverage The Social Blogger that Never Sleeps

Video Series 11 - The Secrets of Google Analytics and How to Apply Them to Your SEO

Video Series 12 - Planning Your Strategic Internet Marketing with a Predictable SYSTEM

 

Subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow me @cherylwaller, subscribe to me on facebook.com/cherylwaller, or simply check back often to make sure you never miss a video in this incredible new 2012 video series!

 

 

You are sitting there on yet another Thursday evening reading a tutorial on how to build your Twitter followers. Or maybe this time it is an article about how to get your YouTube videos to post on your blog. It could be a Facebook page or a LinkedIn post... And you are thinking to yourself, “Why does this all have to be so difficult? Why can’t I just get back to real estate?”

As a busy real estate professional, with luxury properties and high-end clients, you need an online presence that matches your level of service. You know that you can’t sell ‘Beverly Hills’ with a ‘10th street’ style website but you simply don’t have the time to get your internet presence together. You don’t even have time to figure out that first step and it seems that every day there’s another social network… another application… another way of marketing on the internet and you just don’t have the time to keep up with it all.

You can spend all the time in the world learning how to market yourself online with social networks, social media, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google search engine results etc. etc. or you can hire a professional to do it for you. It all comes down to time or money. Whichever you choose to invest; invest yours wisely.

Optimization and automation of your social networks significantly helps improve your ranking on Google (and other search engines) by feeding consistent and relevant content across these powerful social networks.

Consistent and relevant content ATTRACTS consistent relevant visitors. That is what is important here. You are not going to get consistent relevant visitors with some plugin for WordPress or a magic ‘doo-hickey’ for $19.95. The only way to optimize and automate your online presence is to spend the time or money to get it set up right in the first place. If you have the time to do it…  then great. Learn about it, read blogs, watch tutorials and spend the time getting your social presence set up once and for all.

In fact, I will tell you exactly how I do it in social max boot camp… no charge...

(if you sell luxury real estate or are an elite agent/broker, request an analysis, mention that you saw this on AR and I will send you a free copy… $147 value)

BUT wait… you didn’t ask, “How much time?”

Without going too much into detail (because I am telling you this to make an important and dramatic point) it takes me about one full month to setup a new real estate client with a website, blog, Facebook page, twitter account, YouTube channel, LinkedIn account, and then automate the entire process of social networking. That is without reading tutorials, without watching videos and without fumbling through unfamiliar processes. That time is spent by someone who knows exactly what they are doing, has done it over and over, knows how to optimize the content for search engines, knows how to use anchor text linking, understands how the social networks work together and just does it. 

If it takes me a month, how much time would it take you?

Answer: How much time do you have? 

Really. I am not saying that to be funny either. Think about that. Or look at it this way. Why do homeowners hire you to sell a home and pay thousands to brokers and agents in the process? Is it… because they got ‘suckered’ into it… or… is it because YOU know what you are doing? They are paying for expertise. They are paying for peace of mind. They are paying YOU to save time. Who really wants to sell their own house? People do it all the time because they want to save money. 

Am I right? 

And then when do they call you? They call you when they realize it’s costing them time… they are getting frustrated… and as a result it is costing them more time and more money in the long run. They just want to sell their home and get back to their career, get back to their life, and save some money in the process.

So, I will ask again. How much time do you have? Do you really want to spend your time trying to become an internet marketing consultant or do you want to get back to real estate?

If you chose, or are even considering the latter, I urge you to request an analysis and at least find out where your marketing could be. Find out what ‘it is’ that could launch your internet presence and draw more internet leads: Qualified, relevant, and consistent leads. 

Within a few days of requesting your analysis, you will receive your 20+ page analysis and proposal with pricing. Within the proposal will be a selection of packages from which you can choose. Each package is designed to put your internet and network marketing on auto-pilot and each includes custom personal branding which is based on your current marketing brand and image.

Logos, images and styles will be imported from your current website design or completely re-vamped depending on your package. Your blog, Facebook business page, Twitter background and YouTube channel will all be customized with your branding. Blog feeds are imported into your blog from sources such as the Wall Street Journal, National Association of Realtors and local feeds from media sources in your geographical area. Your blog is then automated with Facebook and Twitter. Your YouTube channel is customized and also fed into your blog for automated updating of your blog when videos are uploaded to YouTube.

Depending on the Package You Select, Your Strategic Internet Marketing Package May Include:

•Personal Branding

•Custom Facebook Business Page (NO Templates)

•Custom Social Network Integrated Blog (Domain name & hosting available)

•Automated Blog Posts

•Automated Wall Posts

•Automated Tweets

•Introduction Video

•Blog / Facebook / Twitter Integration

 

 

Once I begin on your agent or broker project, I work in the background to increase your website traffic, conversions and get you more leads. You look like a super tech-savvy agent on the internet and the process is completely hands-off. You sell real luxury estate; I get you leads on the internet.

There are never going to be those long drawn out explanations that make your head roar when I talk. We communicate 99.9% by email so that we both can glance back at where we are in the project. I explain everything in easy to understand English and if there is ever anything you do not understand, then just ask.

There are 4 steps to getting results as soon as next month:

•request your analysis

•select a package suitable to your budget

•supply your image, logo and other required marketing materials and/or broker guidelines

•I get to work on your website, blog, social networks and internet presence

Then, you can get back to luxury real estate, stop wasting your time ‘learning’ social networking and rely on my expertise.

I look forward to speaking with you soon.

-cheryl

 

Cheryl Waller

Strategic Internet Marketing Consultant

 

 

Note: yes, this was posted on ActiveRain as an advertisement ;)

 

Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is a method for making certain that your content gets as close to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) as possible. No matter what your website is about, whether you're in real estate marketing or you're trying to get wider coverage for your apartment search website, SEO is a necessary part of your Internet marketing campaign. However, it isn't a skill that you can just learn overnight. As such, it's often in your and your company's best interests to get a professional real estate SEO expert to help you maximize your content's potential.

SEO is made up of several different components, all of which need to work together to create a functional and seamless whole for luxury real estate sales and marketing. You have to use the proper keywords in the proper density to ensure that when your content is crawled by a search engine that it sees all of the words you want. Additionally search engine optimization is made up of backlinking, creating links to your content on other websites to increase how popular your content looks to a search engine. The more popular you look, the higher you'll rank on a search. Professionals know how to use Internet bookmarks, social network marketing and other tools to make sure that your real estate SEO is done correcly.

 

This is a lot to keep track of, even if you have a good handle on real estate website marketing and social network marketing. And this is all in addition to your regular work, website content updating and all of the other requirements that you face. And if you intend on keeping your Internet backlinks up to date, making sure that your content has all of the best keywords included then you're going to be spending a lot of time trying to perfect the details. On the other hand if you hire a professional for search engine optimization then you not only free up all of the time that you would otherwise spend on the details, but you open up the search engine optimization process to someone with enough experience to make sure your content gets all of the attention it deserves and that it brings you the hightest percentage of Internet traffic possible.

I don't usually post rants, but this is such a common scam that I just had to post a recent email I received this morning from one of my long time clients. I have left out the name of the client and the name of 'the guy' that approached her to sell her a blog because it isn't the point to attack anyone in particular here or embarrass my client. She shouldn't be embarrassed anyway, because this is a really convincing scam.

 

I am going to summarize for clarity, but basically her email was:

 

Hey Cheryl, check this out. This 'guy' is going to build me a blog for $300 and get me #1 on Google overnight. [link to 'this guy'].

 

My Answer... (i.e. my rant)

 

Considering that he is using a common scam to sell you a blog… yeah.. no.. don’t buy a thing from him...

 

I can put up a blog right now for ‘yourtown florida buy houses 34999’ and get #1 too.. for that matter I can put a blog up for ‘this is the most common scam ever 12345’ and get #1 overnight… but the problem therein lies that NO ONE is entering search terms in that order… its cool to be #1… but who cares if it’s NOT something that people search for.. I don’t personally know the guy nor have I heard of him… but I just hate people that say ‘I can get you #1’ on dumb search terms

 

Heres proof… go to https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer

 

Enter in anytown anystate buy houses [ZIPCODE]

 

Now… at position #1 you get 42% of all traffic searching for that term… let's look at how many people are searching for that term …. none… and how much traffic is 42% of none… well… none… so how much traffic will I get you if I create a blog with that search term… um… you got it… none…

 

BUT hey… you will be #1 for $300

 

 

SURPRISE... 

while I was writing this rant, my client actually had 'this guy' call me on my cell phone to 'explain' what he would do for my client... after about 3-4 minutes of listening to a one-way sales pitch he asks, "are you still there". Wow, i guess it was my turn. So, i ask him... "What search terms are you trying to sell to my client for position #1" and he replied 'anytown anystate buy houses [ZIPCODE]' (and three other dumb search terms). I politely explained that we were not interested in buying 42% of zero traffic for $300. Then after my face came back to a normal color I came back to finish this rant. That just aggravates me.

 

The point of all of this is this: Be CAREFUL out there. 'This guy' is just like many 'other guys' out there. Now, I dont expect you to know right off the top of your head which search terms are bogus. I do this everyday so I just 'know' when something sounds like a zero traffic term. But, It only takes a few seconds to go over to a tool like https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal 

 

Just click on that link, enter 'that guys'search terms and check out not only the potential traffic for your selected key phrase but also other suggested key phrases that might be a better fit.

 

You can also click on the traffic estimator and see exactly how much traffic a key-phrase would attract. Take that number and multiply it by .42 to get an idea of how much traffic a potential site would receive at the number one position. 

 

Then you can politely tell 'that guy', "Thank you, but I don't want to buy 42% of zero traffic for $300."

As part of Strategic Internet Marketing, there are four ‘Golden Rules’ that I have to follow to get clients the best results possible. Each search engine, each social network and each website has its own algorithms (or ways of indexing content) which change all the time, however we need to concentrate in what does NOT change. These four ‘Golden Rules’ never change, so as long as we stick to them… we win every time. When I begin a client's project, I choose the top 15 keywords that we will be targeting. Over the course of their project these keywords will not change.

It’s important to me that my clients understand ‘why’ I chose the keywords chosen for their project. I spend a great deal of time analyzing different keywords. Sometimes they are the keywords you ‘think’ will work and sometimes they are not. Let’s go through each of the criteria to better explain this:

Golden Rule #1 – Talk About what’s Relevant to Draw an Interested Crowd

There is a reason this is number one. Simply put; if it’s not relevant to your real estate business we are not using the keyword/phrase. Maybe this is because you and I decided that you don’t want to target a specific community or maybe it’s because the keyword draws 90% of its traffic from another part of the country. It really could be any number of reasons. Whatever the reason may be, we have decided that the 15 keywords chosen will bring you a relevant crowd.

Golden Rule #2 – People are Creatures of Habit – Statistics & Traffic

I hated statistics in college… hated it. But the one thing that statistics show us is that over any given length of time a given group of people act the same in varying degrees. Remember the bell curve? Well that’s what we are focusing on here. What we want to do is look at HOW people are searching for real estate in your area. HOW are they entering search terms and HOW do they get to what they are looking for on the internet. When I choose your search terms for your search engine optimization because those specific words are entered into a search engine in that specific order to get to what they are looking for on the internet. If we target that specific phrase in that specific order we get a larger portion of the traffic. We get the fat part of the bell curve.

Golden Rule #3 – Competition is Brutal – Pick the Battles You Can Win

Chances are there are better search phrases than the ones I have chosen. The keywords/phrases that I haven’t chosen have much more traffic, much more relevance and are searched for in higher numbers. So, why haven’t I chosen them? Because I don’t like fighting the fighters. Sure, I can target those ‘better search terms’ but will we ever get close to page one on Google. Nope. Never. Not a chance. Because big companies with fat wallets started focusing on those search terms several years back and already have secured their standing for… pretty much… ever. So when I select your keywords I look for key phrases we can win. Starting right now today, if we focus on these keywords we can get really good traffic from many search engines. I don’t know about you, but I think I would rather stick with the fights we can win and get some good traffic flowing to your site. I pick the battles we can win.

Golden Rule #4 – Commerciality – Pick What ‘Sells’

Most SEO consultants will stop at the first three rules. As a Strategic Internet Marketing Consultant, I have one more little nugget that I look at when I’m choosing your keywords. Golden Nugget #4: How much are people paying to show up for that keyword? Often you will find that marketers (working on behalf of big pocket real estate advertising) will pay for a search term in AdWords if they don’t target it organically. Google actually provides data to tell us how much people are paying PER CLICK to get that traffic. If ‘Big Pockets Broker ABC’ is paying more for a search term then it is usually because ‘Big Invoice Marketing Company’ has determined that the key word/phrase brings more targeted traffic. I use this information to choose between several potential keywords and target based on the money other people are spending. So basically if rule 1,2, & 3 give me two variations (i.e. my county real estate vs. real estate my county) of the same keyword/phrase then I pick the one that people are spending more money on… end of the day we are getting the conversions organically and they are still paying ‘per click’. They pay for the research, we get the results.

What do anti-virus, anti-malware and anti-spyware have to do with SEO. Well, I include this important section in every website analysis and proposal I prepare for three very important reasons:

 1. As we are working together we will be sharing files back and forth via email, file downloads and possibly even FTP on my servers if the project requires. This gives us both piece of mind that we are not sharing viruses or malware.

2. Not many people are aware of how susceptible they are to viruses, malware and spyware. As my client, I want you to be protected. Malicious programs suck time and money out of our lives. The loss of either diminishes productivity.

3.   It’s just too important not to share this information.

 

Now, before I go any further, all of these programs are free, I don’t make any commission if you buy the upgraded professional editions and the links I provide here are trusted links. If you download these programs from any other source, then don’t say I didn’t warn you. There are so many programs and download sites out there that pose as ‘security programs’ and ‘trusted sites’ that I cannot even begin to list them.                       

 

Rule of Thumb

Unless you ABSOLUTELY know what you are downloading - DON’T. If it sounds too good to be true - it is. And if it offers to tell you ‘who has been stalking your Facebook profile’, gives away a free iPod, iPad, iPhone or cruise to the Bahamas for downloading it OR clicking on it, then it is a virus 100% of the time. (I haven’t heard of the Bahamas cruise one, but you get my point).

 

Another quick thing to mention is that when you install free tools, some will ask you to install their tool bar and set their home page as your default. It’s not an unreasonable request for a free program, but just read the install procedures and un-check the boxes for anything you don’t want.

 

 

Avast Antivirus
Let’s start with Avast. I personally do not like Norton, McAfee or any of the other ‘common’ virus protection software brands. Most of the viruses out there are designed specifically to get through the more common virus programs simply because… well… they are so common. Dell ships their computers with Norton pre-installed and McAffee has been passed around so much that it has its own red light district. (Kidding) The point is that having these programs on your computer is a security risk in itself in my opinion. That’s why I use Avast. It’s not as common, it is used by a lot of geeks, and it’s a solid antivirus program with a free version that is simply stellar. You can download the free version here: http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download

 

NOTE: Remember to completely uninstall your current antivirus program with a thorough uninstall program such as Revo Uninstaller Pro before you install Avast.

 

 

  

Glary Utilities
Glary Utilities is a free and very simple program that is quite powerful. It cleans your registry, fixes broken shortcuts, checks your startup files, cleans out temporary files and removes (some) spyware in just one click. Although it is not an end-all solution, it is a good program that will help keep your computer running smoothly. My recommendation is to install it, run it three times in a row and then set it to run once a week in the background (paid edition only). It’s a helpful little program that I recommend highly. You can download it here: http://www.glarysoft.com/products/utilities/glary-utilities/

 

 

 

Malwarebytes
Another geek favorite, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a very powerful free program that is extremely good at determining the difference between a dangerous app and a false positive. It works great to prevent you from ‘accidentally’ visiting malicious sites. Now I do have to mention that the little ‘warnings’ that pop up every once in a while can get a bit annoying and you cannot shut them off, but for the most part they are unobtrusive. I would rather have little annoying balloons pop-up every once in a while then a really annoying malicious program any day, so I recommend this program highly as well. You can download it from cnet here: http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html. Please be sure to click on the button that resembles the button I have above. Cnet is a highly trusted download site, but the people that run ads on it are not always and they purposely use ‘start download’ buttons on their ads. Just be sure you don’t click on an ad. Here’s a screenshot so that you see what I am talking about here.

 

Don't click on the ads when trying to download anything from cnet:

 

Now, onto my next recommendation:

 

 

SuperAntiSpyware
SuperAntiSpyware is an awesome little program that detects and removes tracking cookies that are missed by most other programs. I do have to mention here that although I have used this program for many years, I have had problems with it locking up my system on reboot from time to time. I have had to disable it every now and then, so if you are not comfortable with shutting this down every few months then don’t download it. I love the program enough to put up with this annoying little drawback, but ultimately it’s up to you if you. If anything, I would install the free version run it once, reboot and then uninstall it. I have a lifetime professional version and it always recognizes my email address and installs my professional version when I have had to delete and reinstall it. You can download it here: http://www.superantispyware.com/index.html

 

 

BONUS PROGRAM RECOMMENDATION 

SnagIt

NOTE that SnagIt is not a free program. It is a free 30 day trial. Many of my clients ask me how I get and share screenshots so easily and this is it. It’s a $50 program, but it records on screen with sound, captures screenshots, lets me put in those neat little arrows & circles to point things out, and is just a general overall timesaver for me. I can’t give you screenshots of the screenshot program because it does a really good job of getting out of the way for captures, but it’s very simple to use so you will never need me to send you a screenshot or video of how to use it. (Oh… and it makes you look smart… lol)

 

Ok… that’s it for the recommended programs. I use Windows XP Professional with my system set for high performance so this is how my taskbar looks. From left to right are SuperAntiSpyware, SnagIt, Skype, Avast, and Malwarebytes. This way you can see that the little bug logo there… it’s supposed to be there and everything works in real-time to protect you (some require the professional versions for real-time protection).

 

 

 

Well, after less than a day, I am officially addicted to Google+. But, being the social networking addict that I am, I needed a way to share my Google+ posts on Facebook and twitter. Here is a quick way to add your Google+ posts to both Facebook and Twitter at the same time.

Create a circle and name it ‘ShareFB+Twitter’ (or anything else that you want). Go to your mobile page on Facebook and then copy/paste your personalized upload email as a new ‘connection’ in Google+ and then add that connection to your new ‘ShareFB+Twitter’ circle.

For Twitter, I used twittermail.com to create a unique email address XXXXXXX@twittermail.com and then added that email address as a connection in my ‘ShareFB+Twitter’ circle.

Now when I post on Google+, I can share with my ‘ShareFB+Twitter’ circle and my posts are automatically shared on both Facebook and Twitter.

 

Simple enough? See, I told you! I look forward to networking with you on Google+!