Archives for narissa

Why Use Real Estate To Create Long-Term Wealth?

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Regardless of how difficult it may seem to purchase real estate, given your particular situation, it is something that you should consider as part of your master plan to create financial wealth for yourself, as well as for your children and grandchildren. Did you know that one of the main reasons why many people never seem to achieve their financial goals is because they don’t own any assets; real estate or otherwise?  They do not have anything to borrow against to fund any other endeavor; like another real estate purchase, to pay for their children’s education, or the use of the equity in a current home to step-up into a better property, in a better neighborhood.

Beverly D. ChandranOwning real estate (and insurance) are the two most fundamental ways to create and transfer wealth from one generation to the next. Therefore, it is imperative that you take a strong position within your family and teach your children and grandchildren the responsibilities that come along with inheriting wealth, during their young years. Too many times, parents do not transfer knowledge or wealth to their children about financial matters because they do not trust their children to help build the family dynasty; however small or large it is. Consequently, many parents do not integrate their children into the process of learning how to make the right decisions around sustaining the wealth created within a family, early enough. This is why many young adults who inherit wealth make a multitude of wrong decisions which negatively impact their ability to better their financial position and to hold on to what is rightfully theirs. Some of these unfortunate decisions include, but not limited to:

  1. Constantly paying bills late even though you have the money.This behavior leads to a bad credit/FICO score that will have a negative impact for years until the behavior is corrected and the bills are paid;
  2. Over spending on trends, clothing, jewelry.This behavior leads to a high debt-to-income ratio and spending more than is SAVED. This behavior limits the capability to create additional wealth; and
  3. Lazy about taking on any type of responsibility.This behavior type is always looking for someone else to do the hard lifting while they benefit from it.  It also leads to people taking advantage of them in a multitude of ways that have a negative impact on creating future wealth.

You may be thinking, “I don’t fall into the category of inheriting anything from my parents.” Neither did I.  If this is the case, like me, may this be the beginning for you to change the course of history within your family and take the first step to create the wealth that you would like you and your children to experience in future.

Take the next step to mapping out a new financial strategy which involves the purchase of real estate by attending my real estate seminar on Saturday August 20, 2016. Register by connecting with me via FB and/or registering via Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.com/e/real-estate-seminar-with-home-and-lifestyle-pro-tickets-3538861831.  Search for my name and you’ll find my latest seminar if you missed one or contact me via Bev@PurchaseSellRealEstate.com and request a meeting to discuss your specific goals.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Article authored by Beverly D. Chandran who is affiliated at the time of this writing with Coldwell Banker Preferred, Center City.  More information about Beverly can be found at www.BeverlyChandran.com

Coldwell Banker Preferred, Center City is located at 1401 Walnut Street, 8th Fl, Philadelphia, PA 19102

Office:  215-546-2700 | Direct: 267-238-2876 |Cell: 301-204-2292

SEO Basics: What is SEO? Part II – Technical Accessibility

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Written by Anitra (DSN Content Contributor)

Technical accessibility refers to the internal structure of your website and how a search engine interacts and “sees” the website. What a search bot “sees” is not necessarily what a human sees, so technical SEO are steps to take to give your website a fighting chance that it will be among the relative few websites that appear on page 1 or 2 of search results. There are many opinions on what elements or “signals” should be covered under technical accessibility, but here are a few of the more common measures:

HTTPS

Google favors sites that take basic security precautions such as using https secured servers

URL Structure

Best to keep these short and descriptive. And status codes (301/302 redirects, 404 page not found, etc.) need to be accurate and up-to-date

Page Load Speed

How fast a web page loads is a ranking factor because neither search bots, nor people, have time to wait for a slow web page to get itself together. There are many tools available to test page load speed. Here’s Google’s https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Crawl

How easy it is for the search engine’s bots to “see” what’s on a web page. Not all elements (images, links, plug-ins) can be seen or followed by the web crawler so running a sitemap test is the best way to find out what is working and what needs work. A sitemap helps bots and humans find other pages on your website. There a many free sitemap generators available online. Here is one that you can use to submit the sitemap directly to Google or Bing after it’s been created https://freesitemapgenerator.com/

Mobile Version

People are using mobile devices to access the internet more than desktop these days, so Google is really favoring sites with a mobile version. You can check to see if Google considers your page mobile-friendly here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Duplicate Content

Search bots don’t like having to decide which web page it should return in search results if they all have the same content, so it downgrades web pages with content that it has seen over and over (I’m talking to you with the celebrity’s picture on your page! You know you didn’t style Rihanna’s hair!) There are programs out there that will check to make sure nothing on your website is duplicate content, but the easiest way to avoid using duplicate content is to just create original content yourself.

Header Tags

These are descriptive phrases on the page of the website that explain what that specific section of content is about. Basically, it is the title of the paragraph or content. It is backed by HTML header tag code <H1>Section Topic</H1>. The search bot uses the coding to figure out how to index the page

Title Tags

These are brief text description (just a few characters) explaining what the page is about. It will show up on the search results page

Meta Description

Search engines don’t actually rank this element, but it is used on the search results page. If you don’t include meta description, or it’s not accurate, then you’ll only be hurting yourself because people will scan this paragraph to see if they want to visit your page. You enter this information on the back end of your webpage. There is a character limit, so if you go over it, you’ll see…

 

SEO-Basics-2

Next Up: On-page (and some off-page) SEO

All of the effort you put into making sure search bots find and index your site is for naught if a real live human being doesn’t like the content enough to link to it, refer to it, or care about it. What other people think about web page content is a huge factor into whether search engines return your web page on page 1 of search results or page 298. You can start the process of improving ranking with meaningful content. In the next installment of “SEO Basics: What is SEO?” I’ll review what you can do to improve the quality of your web page content for a better chance at creating engagement.

SEO Basics: What is SEO? Part I

Posted on by in Industry Trends | 2 Comments

Written by Anitra (DSN Content Contributor)

For today’s digitally connected society, if you have a business, you get a website. Great! Now you and 50-11 others have a website. How do people wade through all of the Internet noise and find yours? SEO. And what exactly is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is a focused, series of steps website owners take to improve the chances that customers, potential customers and search engines find their web page. SEO is not pay-per-click advertising, it is not social media marketing, it is not content marketing. But SEO is used to boost the effectiveness of all of these efforts. If you don’t mind your web page coming up on page 194, then SEO is not necessary. But if you want your web page to be indexed by search engines, and found below paid search ads, maps and local listings, then you’ll need to incorporate SEO best practices to compete.

Does Your Business Need Match Making?

When people use a search engine to look for information, services and products, a search engine will return pages of a website it believes are relevant to the person’s search query. This list of results is called “organic search results.” It is called “organic” because these pages, theoretically, are popular because people like them versus the paid results and search engine chosen results. I liken SEO to match-making – your website is in search of a sponsor, patron or client – and SEO is the behind the scenes primping that will present your website in the most attractive way to gain popularity with search engines and people.

SEO in SERP

SEO in SERP

Getting Found By Search Engines

Once you publish a website, you may be online, but that doesn’t mean that search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go have found your web pages. Even if they do find 1 page of your website, it doesn’t mean that it’ll find all of your pages or even bookmark any of them. Optimizing your website for search engines involves taking actions that increases the probability that search engines will file (index) all the pages of your website and return them in search results and also that when people visit your page, they like what they experience. SEO can be broken down to two fundamental undertakings: Technical Accessibility and Meaningful Content.

Learning The Basics

In the next part of this series, “What Is SEO?” we’ll look at some of the technical measures that SEO specialists take to help ensure that your website finds its match! In the meantime, head on over to Moz for a great tutorial on SEO basics. And if you have any specific questions, let me know in the comments or visit my website and drop me a line.

Philly Tech Week 2016

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Written by: Narissa Wallace (DSN CEO)

It was really good to see the number of sistas attending the Philly Tech Week festivities this year.  Due to my schedule, I haven’t been able to attend the last few years, but I made a concerted effort to attend at least 3 events this year.

The first event that I attended during the Philly Tech Week was a Women in Tech Workshop that was organized by The Professional Women’s Committee of The Pyramid Club which was held @ on Monday 5/2 from 6 – 8.   The focus was on “Gender and Equality in Tech” and how Philadelphia could position itself to lead the way.  It started out with a very nice networking session from 5 – 6 and then a brief opening by City Councilman David Oh followed by a lively discussion on “Gender & Equality in Tech” by 5 female and 1 male panelist.  This panel was moderated by Franne McNeil, president of Significant Business Results. and consisted of Eileen Gadsen, owner of E-Region Enterprises and former president of the local chapter of Black Data Processing Associates, Brigitte Daniel, Executive VP of Wilco Electronic Systems, NaTasha Richburg, an IT consultant, author and adjunct professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Tiffanie Stanard, founder and CEO of Prestige Concepts and We are MENT, and the only male panelist, Philip Jaurigue, President of Sabre Systems, Inc.

On Tuesday, Tuesday, 5/3, I attended an event hosted and coordinated by The ITEM.  This event was titled “Technology & Talent Development” and focused on skills (technical and soft) that employers are looking for to fill existing employment opportunities within their firms and that potential candidates need to have to acquire those positions.  This panel included Tom Elliot, API Engineer from Thomson Reuters, Anthony Clabaro, Principal Software Engineer, Momentum Dynamics, Christopher Coor, Director of Technology, Tonic Design and Tiffanie Stannard, founder wearement.  The panel was moderated by Arie Mangrum, IV of Agile Hires.

The last one that I had the pleasure of attending was the 2nd Annual Women in Tech Soiree, held on Wednesday, 5/4 from 6 – 9 pm.  This networking event was a collaborative effort coordinated by Girl Develop It Philly, Candidate Philly and Mogulette.  The keynote speaker at this event was Amanda Steinberg who was followed by an all-female panel that included Darla Henning-Wolfe, Desiree Peterkin Bell, Amber Wanner, Tiffanie Stanard, and Simone Berkower (NYC) and was moderated by of  Yasmine Mustafa.

As a former Technology Coordinator of the Workforce 2000 Advisory Council and Project Manager for the Mayor’s Commission on Technology for the City of Philadelphia from 1996 – 2007, I used to be very active in the Tech scene in the city when it was just in its infancy.  Now there are start-ups all over the City and the industry appears to be booming.  Although I’m still looking forward to the day when the crowd is more diverse, it was still great to see more young African American women, and men among the crowd and to have the opportunity to move around in this circle once again.

Since I’m currently pursuing several endeavors in addition to the DSNetwork, my schedule stays pretty busy, but I have been making an attempt to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the Philly Tech scene.  It is my hope to identify the sistas who are actively engaged in the Philly Tech scene and get them to share their experiences, successes, achievements as well as their struggle to position themselves accordingly within the industry.   The workshops that I attended barely scratched the surface of the number of the informative workshops scheduled.  However, I can say that I acquired some valuable information and made some great connections.  Hopefully next year the members of the DSNetwork will be able participate in the planning process as well.

Check out the slide show developed by our own DigitalSistas Network member, Bernetta Ayers on our Facebook page!

 

 

Keep Your Head in the Cloud

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Written by: Karen Scott (DSN Content Contributor)

Contrary to popular belief, keeping your head in the cloud is especially prudent if you are a technologist.  While the cloud has been quite the buzz over the last couple of years in IT, use of the cloud solutions is still very much a market positioned to grow.

What is cloud computing?  Simply stated cloud computing services can be private, public or hybrid. Private cloud services are delivered from a business’ data center to internal users. This model offers convenience, while preserving management, control and security.

The public cloud model, is when a third-party provider delivers the cloud service over the Internet. Public cloud services are sold on-demand. Customers only pay for what they consume.

Hybrid cloud is a combination of public cloud services and on-premises private cloud Companies can run mission-critical workloads or sensitive applications on the private cloud while using the public cloud other applications for easy scalability.

The three broad models of cloud computing include:

Software as a Service (SAAS) – delivers a single application to customers through a web browser to customers.  Provides a lower cost model since the business does not have to provide software or hardware costs, just licensing and implementation.

Platform as a Service (PAAS) – This form of cloud computing delivers development environments as a service. You build your own applications that run on the provider’s infrastructure and are delivered to your users via the Internet from the provider’s servers.

Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) – IaaS providers such as Amazon Web Service(AWS) or Microsoft Azure supply a virtual server instance and storage, as well as application program interfaces (APIs) that let users migrate workloads to a virtual machine (VM).

Many organizations have not adopted the cloud, waiting for others to take the lead.  Many companies have decided to implement a hybrid solution retaining some of their hardware and solutions onsite while venturing into the cloud.  One of the main concerns heard frequently is the security of sensitive and confidential data.  If the data is stored in a cloud solution will it be more susceptible to data and security breaches.

Staying abreast of the latest developments in cloud computing and solutions to issues (real or perceived) is one way to retain your marketability in the ever-changing fast-paced technology arena.  Keep your head in the cloud!!!