EcoMetro approves Simplefloors as local green company!

Simplefloors was reviewed and approve by www.ecometro.com as a local green company!

Eco-Metro helps keep you up to date with monthly green tips, green coupons, and local approved green listed businesses. Simplefloors is proud to be accepted as a green business!

See our listing below!

http://www.ecometro.com/eastbay/organization.aspx?orgID=03f371a0-fa79-47ce-8fb1-7c453fd6197a

Hard Surface Flooring vs. Home Sales

I recently purchased a new home and wanted to share my home shopping experience and what I noticed along the way in terms of hard surface flooring. We all know now is a great time to buy and there is a healthy inventory of homes for sale. That being said shoppers can be a bit pickier than normal in these times and a decision could be made purely on the flooring in certain cases. After viewing over 60 homes I came to the realization that a home with hardwood flooring definitely has a better sense of value and has a noticeably cleaner feel and look. When you walk in the door of a home with carpet you instantly can feel the difference in my eyes, and more often than not you can smell the difference as well. When you walk into a similar home with hardwoods it just feels nicer, and seems like it’s worth more like I mentioned before. When reviewing the homes with carpet and the homes with hardwood I noticed the asking price was higher almost every time with hardwoods. To give my point some justice when I walked into a carpeted home and my realtor dropped his card it was typically placed next to one or two others that were barely recognizable covered in dust. While walking into a home with hardwoods his card was placed on a pile that looked like that jar at your local sandwich shop to win a free lunch had been dumped out. It is obviously apparent these days that most knowledgeable homeowners are ripping out their carpet to replace with a hardwood floor. Bottom line you can list your home for a higher price, and have a better chance of selling it compared to the comparable home with carpet.

simpleFLOORS helps fight Breast Cancer!

simpleFLOORS helps fight Breast Cancer!

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the United States, aside from skin cancer. According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), an estimated 192,370 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed among women in the United States this year. An estimated 40,170 women are expected to die from the disease in 2009 alone. Today, there are about 2.5 million breast cancer survivors living in the United States.

simpleFLOORS was a proud Title sponsor this year of the Pink Ribbon Classic Golf Tournament at the River Club Golf Course in Suwanee, GA - where one of our partners resides, golfs, and is an active member within the community.

Some great websites to learn more-
Pink Ribbon Classichttp://www.pinkribbonclassic.org/index.htm
National Breast Cancer Awareness Monthhttp://www.nbcam.org/about_nbcam.cfm
Susan G Komen for the Cure
http://ww5.komen.org/
The Breast Cancer Site (click for free to help give free mammograms to women in need)
http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=2
Athena Bottled water
http://www.athenapartners.org

Blogging and Natural Search - flooring websites

Blogging and Natural Search
I feel blogs are interesting... a neat way to learn about what is important to specific companies, or groups of people that contribute to their particular blog.

That being said, I have been recently enlightened and dismayed by the current trend to post totally non-sensical and fake articles in company blogs purely to get better search optimization on search engines.

Although I agree that getting the most out of your company blog... education for your employees and potential customers should be priority, extra clicks should just be frosting on the cake- not the entree. Reading some of the fake articles out there by others in the flooring business makes me sad (and angry when the "advice" is clearly wrong and just worded for more clicks) as I think it is our job to inform potential customers through our company blogs, not just get some free advertising.

Ok, I am jumping off my soapbox now.

Information re: Natural or Organic Search - Wikipedia
The Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines combine advertising and search results on their search results pages. In each case, the adverts are designed to look like the search results, except for minor visual distinctions such as their background color and/or placement on the page. Further, the appearance of the adverts on all major search engines is so similar to the genuine search results that a large majority of search engine users cannot effectively distinguish between them.
Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew) realized that many of the highest placed 'results' on search engine results pages were actually adverts, it became important within the search engine optimization industry to distinguish between the two types of content. As the perspective among general users was that all the results were in fact 'results', the qualifier 'organic' was invented to distinguish the real search results from the adverts. Because the distinction is important (and the word 'organic' has many useful metaphorical uses) the term is now in widespread use within the search engine optimization and web marketing industry. It is, as of July 2009, now in common currency outside the specialist web marketing industry, being used frequently by Google (throughout the Google Analytics site for instance).
Google claims that their users click (organic) search results more often than adverts, which has led them to rebut the research cited above.
The same report (and others going back to 1997) by Pew shows that users avoid clicking 'results' that they know to be adverts.