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In today’s economy, more people are looking to supplement their income by starting a side business, or making a complete move to self-employment. An e-business often appears to be a quick and easy fix - and sometimes it can be - but it’s important to know what it takes to get started. The benefit of an online business is that the startup costs are generally lower than a brick-and-mortar store. If you choose to drop-ship items, you may not have any costs for rent, insurance on your inventory, or interest charges for purchasing stock in advance using credit instead of cash. But even companies who stock items have lower costs - rent is cheaper on warehouse space than it is on retail space, fixtures and signage are often unnecessary, and you may not need to hire staff until your business begins to grow.

But what aspects of your business should you consider in advance?

The first consideration is your image and your product offerings. Research and select a unique, memorable name for your company, one that reflects the products you plan to offer. Next, decide on a domain name, and register it - your host can help. You may choose to register .com, .net, and .org domain names to avoid desaturation of your brand in the future. Depending on your budget and your goals, you may also wish to register the name of your company as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Sourcing is the next hurdle. This term refers to finding and working with vendors who wholesale the products you are interested in selling. Consider whether you wish to drop-ship your inventory - where the vendor stocks the items and ships them directly to your customers - or if you want to stock your own items. You may also choose to do a combination of the two approaches. Vendors may require that you provide them with a resale certificate, so make sure you are registered with your state government to collect sales tax prior to beginning your work with vendors.

Next, research your web site hosting needs. Many hosts offer plans that include shopping carts, such as Miva Merchant, as part of the monthly fee. You should look for a host that has a good reputation among other businesses who use the same shopping cart software, and one that offers phone support (24/7 if possible). Purchase an SSL certificate - the software required to encrypt sensitive information such as your customers’ credit card details - through your host before you launch your website.

The next consideration is a financial one. Most likely, you need to accept credit cards, and to do so you’ll have to obtain a merchant account. Shop around for the best rate you can find, or ask your host or other business owners for a referral. Make sure the merchant account you choose supports a payment gateway that is compatible with your shopping cart. The gateway and the merchant account work together to charge customers’ credit cards and then electronically deposit the funds into your checking account.

Sometimes the trickiest part of setting up an ecommerce website is working with shipping charges and sales tax calculation. For shipping calculations, a little trial-and-error may be required. Keep a close eye on your initial orders, and make sure your average shipping costs are about the same as the average charges to your customers. You may also wish to increase your shipping charges to make a little profit on them, or decrease them to encourage more shoppers to complete their orders.

Sales tax may be easy or difficult, depending on where your business is located. You should speak with the state taxing authorities for any states in which you have nexus, which is loosely defined as a state where you have a physical business presence. Find out what your requirements are, and work with your shopping cart to make sure that the right customers are being taxed the correct amount. Learn how to complete your sales tax return, and make sure that you keep accurate and detailed records to help you maintain sales tax compliance.

Order fulfillment is the last step. When a customer places an order on your website, you then need to ship his order to him. Make sure you have facilities in place for communicating an order to your drop-shipper, or that you have the software and supplies necessary to package the products, generate a label, and print postage (unless you plan to take your orders to the local post office or carrier store). Provide customers with an easy-to-understand return policy (on your website and in your packages, if possible) and a way to contact you if they have questions or problems.

Reviewing each of these aspects of your business, prior to launching the company, should be part of your overall plan to help your company achieve the success you desire.

NetBlazon offers Miva Merchant consulting to small and medium businesses with a new or established ecommerce presence.

Text messaging has evolved into becoming one of the fastest, easiest and more common ways of communicating with other people on a daily basis.

Only a couple of years ago, mobile phones were not widely used and those who used it were mostly businessmen who had to endure carrying the big bulky models. Now, almost everyone has his or her own mobile phone, and leaving the house without your phone is considered a major mistake.

Carrying a mobile phone is now considered not just ordinary but necessary to be able to communicate with friends and others. Aside from just making phone calls, mobiles can now be used for so much more, like taking pictures, playing music, playing games, sending e-mails, surfing the internet, and sending SMS messages. Short Message Sending, also known as texting, is when someone uses the mobile phone to send short messages to another mobile phone user over the telephone network.

The popularity of texting first spread rapidly in Asia, where high school teenagers started using text messaging as a more cost effective way of communication other than phone calls. As the trend grew, texting started to evolve into its own language, giving birth to abbreviations, slang and even driving the market to create phone models that are more suited towards texting.

It is easy to start texting as long as the mobile phone being used is capable of sending them. All the user needs to do is go to the proper menu where a message may be created or composed. Then the user needs to create a message by tapping out the letters and symbols on the keypad. Once the message has been created, the user just needs to select the receiver of the message and send it.

The charges for a single SMS vary according to the service provider. Despite the fact that there used to be no extra charge for texting when it first became available, the high number of people who used texting called attention to the trend when they started clogging the networks. Big businesses saw this as an opportunity to expand their empire by including texting in their list of services and started promoting the trend.

As the texting trend grew, it evolved into its own sub culture. The trend spread out to other generations beyond the realm of teenyboppers. People started using SMS to create jokes and graphics. Forwarded messages like chain emails were created and hoaxes, pranks, and even scams were also formulated on SMS.

Texting has evolved in several ways since then. One is the advent of MMS, or Multimedia Message Sending, which lets users send audio, video and image files with simple text messages. These allow greater personalization of the individual text messages. Even simple SMS were further personalized. The smiley faces and emoticons that can be added to a text message were enhanced, allowing people to insert more emotion to their messages.

Another mark of evolution in texting is its steady commercialization. Big companies have started to use text messages as a way to have their advertisements reach the consumer. Those with phones will no doubt receive at least one unsolicited advertisement on their phone a day.

There is no question that texting has come a long way from being a cheap alternative to calling. It is now the easiest way to connect to other people constantly and consistently throughout the day.

For more information on Send a Text please visit our website.

If you have been wondering why your competitors are getting so much traffic and you still have the bare trickle of web traffic that you had when your site first started out, there is a good chance that they are using pay per click advertising and you are not! Pay per click advertising, which is often abbreviated to PPC, is one of the most powerful and popular web marketing strategies out there today, and if you have not yet considered what this advertising can do for you, you will realise that you are sorely missing out!

Basically, when you choose to try PPC advertising, you’ll find a service that will put your ad up on relevant websites or web pages. Your ad will be a fairly small link that is placed across the top of a website or along a side bar, allowing people to see it without it interfering with their perusal of the site that it is on. One of the most important things about it is the fact that it can contribute to the fact that you are looking at targeted marketing. Your ad will only show up on sites that have something to do with what you offer. This is usually determined by the use of keywords and other similar factors.

One of the most appealing things about this advertising is that you will only pay when the advertising itself works. There is no cost for you to simply leave your ad up if no one clicks it. When someone clicks on the ad and goes to your site, however, you’ll find that you will buy the advertising service on an agreed upon amount. To monitor and control this, many people will set up a daily budget for how much they are willing to pay for one day.

When you are looking for advertisers who are willing to run your ads, there is a good chance that you will decide upon Google AdWords. Google AdWords will put your ad up on top or along a sidebar whenever a relevant search is run, based on the keywords that you choose. Many people find that Google AdWords are an excellent venue for PPC advertising because of the fact that people are in a searching mindset when they come to this site; this way, they are more receptive to what you are trying to show them. You’ll also find that Google is an important hub for people who are looking to buy or retain services, so this is a good place for you to start.

When you are considering ways to really make something of your website, you’ll find that a thorough knowledge of the information is important for ensuring that your site does not get lost in the shuffle. Take some time to take a look at what PPC advertising is, what it can do for you, and how to use it effectively. There is a truly profitable resource here for people who know how to use it.

Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who represents many UK businesses. For Pay per Click, he recommends Impact Media Ltd, one of the UK’s leading specialists of Pay per Click Services.

In SEO you will run across two types of sites. There are those which may have been designed in a way that is no longer being used and others where the design is an ongoing project. Both can be good and bad points but only one will have an advantage when you are dealing with the client.

There are many pros and cons that come with SEO. When the designer is finished completing it you may still find a great deal of structural and design issue that should be revisited. Unless your designer has a great deal of skill when it comes to SE friendly designs, you will be working on a lot of structural issues. The positive side of this issue is that we get to work on the site and the designer won’t feel bad when you explain something that needs to be changed.

In another story, when you work with the designer, you will find that the designer will get personally offended when you want to make changes to his structure of your site or he may challenge you about your views on SEO friendly websites. Take for instance the argument that an All Flash Site is more appealing.

The SEO may argue that Flash will not be read properly and will have less spidered content that the search engines will see. The Designer will say that flash is read on Google easily. The SEO will tell them that it doesn’t in the same way; you have to maintain that one needs many pages of optimized content and the Flash will not do that. The designer will disagree. However the point remains that the Site needs to be converted.

It is important that the designer understands why it is important to know that conversions are essential, however so is the traffic. The designer will also need to know that if there is no traffic then even 100% conversion will be irrelevant.

However you will sometimes deal with a SEO who knows how important this to the success of the site is. Making the two balance out is a scary task, but when the SEO and the web designer mesh we are talking about an ultimate website. If you have an idea, and it is not working out to be a good solution the web designer may have an idea that will make your site more attractive as well as knowing the problem and helping you with the solution.

Picking a good web designer

The two main things you should consider is that they can build a site that is both attractive and SEO friendly.

Attractive Designs

When you choose a designer you should take a look at their portfolio to see what designs they have made in the past, and get the advice of the people who are in your target audience. It may also be a good idea to see what the leaders in your industry are doing and who designed their sites. Remember just because you like the design, does not mean that it will be good for your target market.

You will also need to know if the designer is good at the conversion optimization skill. You will want to know if they are clear about the best colors to get people to check out your site. They should have done some eye tracking studies which will see how the visitors reacted after visiting the site. You need not be concerned if they don’t know all of these things, the information is available so you will know what to look for before you approve the design.

Building an SEO friendly website

This is one of the most important areas that you must address; you will need to have a search engine friendly design if you are going to get the rank you need to be successful. The skilled web designer is going to have a strong knowledge of CSS and will know to put the main formatting into the file. Much too often people are getting a lot of sites with font tags, size tags, and color tags. This process will give the search engines a lot to dig through to find the content that they are looking for. If you have a table based design it needs to be technically sound.

Another thing to be aware of is bad internal links. You will need links on your internal pages to move up on the rank. Most sites try to target certain phrases on the homepage but internal pages will hold specific products and services. To maximize your rank on your internal pages you will need to be found by the spiders and to be associated with the keywords you will need to target.

If your designer uses image and scrip navigation that is okay, because it makes your website more appealing and makes sure that your key pages are being linked to content on the homepage and they can be spidered quickly.

You will sometimes even find some sites that are over optimized. There are designers who will pack in so many keywords that it will be hard to read and it doesn’t work for the reader of the site. Your pages need to read like you are writing to your visitor not like you are writing for the search engine. You want your keywords to be in there but you only want a density of about 3% so that it can be read by humans.

Moe Tamani is a Dallas Web Designer specializing in SEO Web Design.

There is no secret that there is a SEO boom. There are so many providers and firms claiming to be the right one for you and could fulfill all your needs, like a cheesy line out of a romantic movie. Common experience tells us that with Internet industry booms there are always providers and firms who are bound to be either cherries or lemons. Once you’ve decided to avail SEO services, how can you then decide which one can suit your needs and at the same time trustworthy with your money?

First you must know that SEO providers do not have carte Blanc authority to adopt every possible means to increase traffic to your website. Even though the SEO industries does and don’ts are still undefined by any authority (as with almost everything in the Internet), this does not mean there are no prohibited practices for SEO firms. What may be considered as the primary factor in proscribing an SEO’s practices is probably the major search engines’ Terms of Services (TOS).

Major search engines are concerned with pairing with a particular search item to a site which contains relevant content. Anything which misleads search engines in pairing up a search item with unrelated website content may be considered as a violation of the TOS as this may degrade their service’s reputation of providing quality results. Therefore, if your SEO adopts questionable practices which misleads search engines to unrelated search results, this may lead to a penalty upon your website which entails to decreased ranking or even removal from search results.

There are several forms of this prohibited practice which violate TOS of the major search engines, namely cloaking, doorway pages, and hidden links, etc., to name a few. These practices (malpractices, if you will) have their own ways of working, but they have one common purpose, which is to go around a search engine’s function of pairing up search items to websites which contain relevant content. It is important to know whether a SEO provider resorts to these practices and if they do, it is up to you to decide if you’re willing to accept the risk of a penalty. If you’re not up to that, then it’s probably for the best to pack up and look for another SEO provider.

Second, determine your SEO provider’s competency from the methods they adopt in raising your site’s stats. Mediocre SEO providers often resort to superficial means of raising stats, which result only to a temporary boost on your rankings and page views and does not result to returning patrons which do not convert into profits for a company. This may entail little work from your side of the contract because your company would not be required to produce new content coupling the optimization. Such practices can also be considered as indicators of laziness and lack of proper work ethic on part of a provider. As has already been said, such practices often fail to convert into additional revenue for your business, which is the primary reason you have gotten the SEO service in the first place.

Third, as with any other competent service provider, quality SEO firms give their client several guarantees to assure the quality of their work. Common guarantees SEO firms provide their client include increase in site-traffic, service retainer agreements which prevents them from providing their services to a particular competitors, and the handling of content revision themselves. For the latter guarantee, companies are only required to provide the SEO with a resource person from the company and they would be to handle the content revision themselves with little work and bother to the client.

Finally, it is prudent on your part to know the history of a potential SEO provider. Relevant facts include whether a client of theirs have ever been penalized and past client references. Generally, even good SEO providers have had a client or two penalized because of certain and abrupt changes of a major search engine’s TOS. Hence, if your potential provider’s last penalty was a year or two ago, consider that as ancient history. Anything later should be treated as a red flag. As for client references, providers that reason their clientele have preferred to be anonymous this cannot provide any reference should be taken as a sign of caution. Clients who have reaped benefits from SEO often are eager to brag about their site’s success. Claims that an SEO firm’s clients prefer to remain unknown should then be taken as incredulous and if any there is any truth behind that claim then the client probably had less than stellar results from their services.

Choosing the right SEO firm may either spell win or fail for your online advertising campaign. Be very careful in choosing your provider, taking the points mentioned above upon deciding on the right firm. Keep in mind that your choice may result into a happily-ever after or an operatic tragedy for your company.

Moe Tamani is a consultant with Dallas based Internet Marketing Company specializing in organic SEO.

Everyone related to the online world knows that the website owners try to improve their search engine positioning so that the rank on search engines will lead to better revenues due to higher sales of their products and service. The reason one seeks out optimal search engine positioning is because it has the potential to bring in more visitors. Repeat visitors are the ones most prized because hopefully they bring in repeat business and more money for you.

This is why PPC engines (particularly secondary engines) will help you formulate the right type of campaign strategy so that natural engines will help you get your best ROI (return on investment) that you can. But to maximize your ROI, you need to understand which correct search terms are the most commonly used for searching. This is where tools come in.

Search tools can help you figure out what Internet searchers need to know nowadays based on what search terms they usually use. But search tools have one drawback – they cannot inform you how to make those search terms raise traffic (or number of visitors) to your site. And the search tools cannot help you earn great conversion rates so that your SEO efforts pay off big time. That is up to you.

True, you will need to infuse more time into your search engine positioning schedule to make room for testing out search terms on your preferred PPC engine. But in the end, you can get better conversion rates as traffic to your site goes up.

There are certain PPC engines which will permit you to actually find out which search terms are producing great conversion rates and by how much. However, these engines can be rather expensive so you may want a cheaper alternative – the secondary engines.

The secondary engines can help you test out which keywords will produce top ranking on their pay-per-click engines, compared to a lower ranking on the major search engines. Thus, a keyword which ranks just #5 on a search engine will get #1 ranking on the secondary search engines. It also happens to be less expensive to rank on secondary search engines.

To get your best ROI, you have to estimate how much you stand to earn if you manage to convert each of your hits into actual sales (which is the whole point of this entire process actually.) You know your search engine positioning campaign was really worthwhile if you earn enough from it to recoup your investment and earn sizeable profits as well within three to six months. The rate that will determine this is the sales-per-click ratio, or how many clicks will produce how many sales for you.

Though content will help you gain an improved ranking on natural engines, your search engine positioning campaign is also important for giving you additional sales daily. And this is where the process becomes a tad difficult to assess, because you cannot force an Internet searcher to buy from you unless he really wants to. This factor falls in the realm of psychology rather than computer science – meaning, no computer or software can adequately predict this part for you.

At best, you can guess. The ranking you get per search phrase you used can help you make forecasts but you really need to use your own gut feel to figure this part out. You have to ask yourself intelligent questions like:

a) which websites would be likely to use the search phrase I am considering;

b) who are the people most likely to use that search phrase; and

c) why do they need that search phrase? This gives you a rough idea of how to brainstorm search phrases to use.

You may then test out your preferred search phrase on the PPC engines. That then gives you the numbers you need to make educated decisions rather than simply base them on guesswork.

Do not think though that a search engine positioning campaign is limited to raising your ROI by employing the PPC engines. Actually, there are other ways to apply knowledge about PPC engines. One way is to constantly measure sales levels as you do search phrase testing. When the PPC promotion happens to create more revenue than the investment you infused into it, then this promotion is worth your while and you should continue doing it. Yes, the PPC engines will help you test out search phrases but they can also help you find new leads and hike your revenue levels if you know how to apply what you know.

You should try exploring the territory and figure out how many PPC engines can be found online. You should then explore how you can employ these for your own purposes. There are, of course, PPC engines that give better results than others so you may want to choose quality over quantity (even when the search phrase testing has culminated.)

There are many PPC engines out there. We’ve researched a number of them and posted the ones that have produced the highest ROI for our clients on our PPC Engines page. These are the engines that we have found are worth sticking with once any testing phase is complete. In the case of the primary engines (Google and Overture) you will have to use your discretion based on the cost-per-click to determine whether they are worth testing or advertising on.

Moe Tamani is a consultant with Dallas based Internet Marketing Company specializing in Organic SEO.

So your company has decided to embark on an online campaign to boost sales. With so much marketing clatter filling up the Internet these days, you decide to hire someone who can bring your business to the forefront from search engine wrangling, the services of an SEO expert. At this point, you will surely be faced with a dilemma, whether to outsource your SEO needs or establish a new segment within your company, or to go for an in-house SEO department. Such problem has been argued over and addressed by many experts either in the more ideal academic perspective or pragmatic business-management approach, each espousing outsourcing SEO needs is the better choice or otherwise. All technical arguments aside, experience has proved that outsourcing your SEO needs with a proven expert is the better choice.

Despite what almost everyone says, not just anyone can be an SEO expert. It is core competency and requires certain talent and skill, namely creativity, analysis, knowledge of the target market, to name a few. Granted, talent is innate; this does not mean someone whom you hire who has that as the in-house SEO ‘expert’ can produce the increased revenue your company desires. The above-mentioned skills are required and those can only be developed over time. If your company is embarking on that online campaign with the expectation of immediate results, you definitely do not have the time to wait for that newly hired talent to blossom into the SEO expert you require.

SEO firms, however, already have within their arsenal people who can be rightfully called SEO experts. These are people have both the talent and experience required by firms that rely on SEO to suit their business needs. Firms which offer SEO services to companies seeking to outsource their needs have made it their business to develop the people who possess the right skill set so that they may deliver definite results.

Most companies fail to comprehend the dent to their finances which could be caused by the establishment of an In House SEO. This is most unfortunate since most companies establish in house SEO segments precisely as a cost-cutting measure. The cost of hiring the services of a seasoned SEO firm could be ten times more than the cost of hiring a newbie as an in house SEO employee. It bears stressing, however, that quality SEO services can be done in a “one-time-big-time” fashion.

SEO expert comes in, does his work, and you have a site which ranks top in all search engines. Choosing the right SEO firm is, of course, an integral choice for your company so that you can be assured of the quality of the work. This is in stark contrast to hiring in house SEO employees, you have to spend time and money for training and not be assured of the quality of his work. It has already been stressed that not everyone can be an SEO expert. In any case, the costs of establishing an in house SEO segment are heavier for the company in the long run.

It is likewise prudent for companies to withhold disbelief when they choose to outsource their SEO needs. SEO is not some kind of magical pill which suddenly increases online revenues to 200%. Advocates for in-house SEO services attribute this to the fact outsourced services lack the personal understanding of both the company and its product hence the lack of stellar results. However, it is necessary to remember how SEO are supposed to help companies.

What SEO does is to put your company ahead of rivals if a potential customer searches for your product, it does not make him click the ‘buy’ button on your site. If after hiring the services of an SEO, the volume of online sales do not pick up, evaluate your product and site as a whole before you blame the poor SEO service provider. See if your site’s content is user and reader friendly and if your product is something a customer would actually want.

There are so many things proponents of in house SEO services can say to you, but in the end, you only need to ask yourself this “Does my company need to have specialized in SEO services?” Chances are your answer is in the negative. You’re selling products, not SEO services.

Moreover, having an in house SEO employee is not necessary as the work could be done in a one-time fashion and you’re not really assured of the quality of his work, unless you pirate an experienced SEO expert as a permanent employee which would then lead back to the argument that SEO work is primarily a one-time thing. Really, the better choice is to outsource your SEO needs, unless of course, you actually want to become an SEO firm.

Moe Tamani is a consultant with Dallas based Internet Marketing Firm specializing in Organic SEO Marketing Services.

A pay per click campaign is visibly more costly than adopting SEO services in increasing online presence, hence companies recently are making their investment in the latter solution. After doing just that another problem arises for these companies; how do they determine which marketing strategy works better for them? A prudent company manager would not invest in anything without at least knowing whether it is actually contributing to their profits. This will also help companies decide whether to stick with PPC or SEO schemes for their online advertising needs.

Website stats and hits alone do not inform the company whether they are making money any more than numbers scrawled on a sticky note. Without understanding how SEO really works, some company analysts may evaluate its results using the same methodology in PPC, which is comparing the yield of profit per click. In such a case, SEO is almost always written off as inferior to PPC advertising because the average yield per click is always lower than that of PPC ads.

What analysts fail to consider is the essential difference between PPC and SEO schemes, one banks upon visibility while the other relies upon the inner workings of a website, respectively. It is only apparent that PPC yields more per click than SEO but upon closer examination it actually costs companies more. PPC sells only when they are visible and companies pay to be visible. When companies stop paying for PPC their yield likewise stops, no more profits for the company. Not so with SEO, once it is built into a site, it stays there and only needs to be tweaked from time to time. It needn’t be visible because it works from within a site by bringing in more page views which may convert into profit because of the increased traffic. Thus, the worth of SEO cannot be properly measure by comparing the yield per click.

Another thing is that using the yield per click analysis presupposes that an analyst knows exactly when the PPC campaign begins and when it ends. This is made by comparing the profits generated per click from the time the PPC ads were utilized to the time they are taken down. In the case of SEO, there is no clear delineation when said scheme ceases to be a factor in upping company revenues because once it is built into the site it stays there. There is no proper way then of determining how much revenue should be compared to the clicks generated from SEO.

How can companies then measure or determine the benefits they reap from adopting SEO? As of yet, there is no definitive answer to such query, so we’d better leave that to statisticians and industry analysts. To be sure, the yield per click approach is not applicable to SEO and anyone uses the former to evaluate his return of investment (ROI) with SEO results is only bound to have misleading results.

Despite this, companies should not be discouraged of choosing SEO in launching their online ad campaigns. Instead, keeping in mind the essential differences between PPC and SEO ad schemes, the advertiser may decide which works for him. PPC, despite higher costs, is visible and results from such ad campaign are easily quantifiable from beginning to end is the better choice for the company in the short run. SEO, on the other hand, despite its invisibility and difficulty in quantifying its results, appears to be a better choice in the long run. Long after a company has paid the SEO provider, the improvements upon the site stays and keeps on hauling page views thus maintaining a constant online presence. Staying ahead of the search results is crucial for companies with an online ad campaign because of all the clutter filling up the Net these days. Even the adoption of both SEO and PPC schemes is not inconceivable for the company as their aim may cover increasing their presence in both the short and long time periods.

Sure, it is hard for companies to determine whether SEO is really working for them but this should not lead them to the hasty conclusion that it isn’t working. In all likelihood it is working for them, hauling in site rankings and page views along the way, together with increased profits. In most instances it may even work better for the company than PPC advertising because SEO’s benefits continue long after the PPC ads disappear. Seeing quick and immediate quantified results should not be everything for a company. If companies stick it out with SEO long enough, it would not be surprising for them to find themselves with unexplained revenues from online growth. That’s the great thing with SEO, it is always pleasantly surprising.

Moe Tamani is a consultant with Dallas based SEO Services specializing in organic search engine optimization .

There is no secret that all the search engine positions depend on the number of links you have coming to your website. You will probably receive a number of emails offering you exchange links and explaining to you the obvious benefits of such an exchange. If you find that these sites are related, having these non reciprocal links may provide you with the higher rank you seek, and will provide the needed links with built in relevancy that will skyrocket you to the top.

The two top advantages of having non-reciprocal links instead of reciprocal links are that these links have more impact because the search engine will be able to determine that they are not reciprocated. Another advantage is they are not as closely looked at as the reciprocal links are.

With the reciprocal links you run the risk of some of the more unethical websites will take down the links or make sure that they are not seen at all by the search engines. You should know that at any time they will remove their links at your site if the action is warranted. When you have non reciprocal links you don’t have to worry about them removing links from your site because you are not linked to them.

There are many other benefits available when you are using non reciprocal links, but the two most beneficial are listed here and they help you and your website in your quest to reach the top of the search engine ladder. The question most people would ask is

why someone would want to link to your website and get nothing from you in exchange. They don’t. You must put something into it before reaping the benefits.

Non reciprocal links will be a great benefit to the search engine’s positioning and by following a few simple tactics will make your positioning campaign more successful.

Create Great Content

You may be surprised but a lot of times webmasters will link to your site because it has valuable information that their customers or visitors may find beneficial or interesting. The search engines have started giving a number value based on its assessment that the links coming in through the site had valuable information. Some people will link to your site just because your information is useful to them. You may not believe it but it is still the case today.

If your site has great content and is updated on a regular basis, people in your area of expertise will want to link to you on a regular basis. It is also good to ask others to link to your website through regular contact or just by posting a page that has images and link descriptions. Even if you get just one link out of these efforts then it is worth the time you put into it.

A Listing in a Directory

If you have a little money and time, you will want to consider directory listings as they are the easiest way of acquiring the non reciprocal links you may be searching for. However you should remember that your site must have value and is not in any way offensive, and that there may be a review fee associated with the directory listing.

There are some very well established directories like the Open Directory Project (also known as the DMOZ) or Yahoo Directory. The only problem with the Open Directory Project is that it may take a while to get your listing, because they use many volunteer editors who take there time. You will also find that with Yahoo Directory, the cost may be too steep, as it costs $299 to get one listing.

The great thing is that there are secondary directories with many thousands of directories that are topic specific which will be able to provide you with many valuable listings. These offer you the relevancy that you will need to get quality targeted traffic when you link to a directory that ranks well with the search engines.

Now you are probably wondering how much you should pay for the directory service. The normal topic specific directory listing can usually run you between $30 and $100 a year in most cases. If the link will be placed on a good page rank page and has fewer than 50 listings or so, it is worth considering.

Making Article Submissions

Using article submissions as a way to form the non reciprocal link is probably the most valuable as they are entirely relevant and can be a good avenue to receive more targeted traffic. Even though article submission is a great benefit to your link building strategies, it is however very time consuming. The time it takes you to write your article and to find some site to publish it, and the time it takes to actually submit your article, you will have spent a lot of time that could have been spent doing some other link building technique.

There is a bright spot though, that if you have already published with a site they are more likely to allow you to publish again, so that will dramatically cut down the time you spend on this link building technique. A great tip is to Bookmark the page so that you can find them quickly, and write for them on a regular basis so that they will take your articles quickly.

There are a few valuable things you should take into consideration when you write articles. The article must show why they are relevant to your topic and site. You will want to make sure that your article adds weight by using targeting keywords. You will notice that the topic here “Non Reciprocal Links” is mentioned through out the body periodically to add relevance and point people in the direction of the targeting phrase.

You may also want to submit to the search engines themselves and find out what sites are related to your site or you can use a prowler program to help you find valuable links that will ensure a place on the sites you currently submit to.

If you are going to publish a lot of articles, it is recommended that you keep track of every submission. If at all possible find additional places to submit your article to, you will find that the ranking that you get will be your reward.

Moe Tamani is a consultant with Dallas based Internet Marketing Company specializing in SEO Services.

Here are some good reasons for starting an internet-based home business.

THE PAJAMA FACTOR

Yeah, you’ve probably heard the commonly touted reason for working at a computer in your own home: you can work in your pajamas. Whoopee! Well, there may be something to that, but there are a lot more compelling reasons than casual attire. Here are a couple more that I think beat the pajama factor: lost job and burnout.

JOB’S GONE, BILLS AREN’T

You can look at this from two points of view.

The first point of view is DESPERATION. Maybe right now you’re out of a job and are having a hard time finding one. Bills are mounting and the mortgage isn’t going away. Starting an internet-based home business can definitely be a partial or complete solution.

Don’t stop looking for a job in real geography, but also look in cyberspace. There are real opportunities online for income – huge, moderate or supplemental. Some offers are scams, but with a bit of research and a good bit of reason, you can find legitimate opportunities online.

The second point of view is PROACTION. This to me is a much more reasoned point of view than desperation. You’re using your head and coming up with solutions to problems, not current problems but anticipated possible future ones.

You’ve still got your job, but you see the writing on the wall. Adverse things can happen. You know that, and you are determined to not become a victim. You are proactive.

People get laid off, it’s a fact. You know you are not immune. Nobody’s immune to losing a job. From the janitor to the CEO, people lose their jobs. It could happen to you as well as to anyone else.

A few years back, they advised us all to become computer experts for job security. Now, so many people took the advice that the computer and software professions are nearing the saturation point. Not everyone in these once wide open professions can find really good jobs and some are getting laid off.

Today it’s nursing and tomorrow it will be another profession that will attract new employees because of great need - to the point of saturation and the spector of layoffs.

My point here is not that a particular profession or career is prone to layoffs. My point is that lay-offs could affect anybody in any profession, career or position. Don’t let that prospect ruin your life. Proactively start a second stream of income on the internet.

BURNOUT

I know a medical doctor, a specialist, who got burned out in his profession. So, he quit his practice. He has made plenty of money, but still feels that for the lifestyle that he wishes to maintain, he can’t quit completely. He has taken up a small business that requires skills that are very different from the skills that he used as a medical doctor.

Do you feel burned out in your job? Do you want to slow down a bit and still pay the bills? An internet-based home business might just be what you need. Don’t quit your day job, just supplement it with a second income until you come to the point where you can say good-bye to your boss and hello to freedom. It may happen soon. It may happen later. You can make it happen with an internet business run from your own home.

CONCLUSION

If you are desperate due to a lost job, an internet home-based business can be a viable help to get you back on financial track. If you anticipate, even vaguely, future burnout or other reasons for not wanting to continue in your present job(and there are many valid ones), I suggest that you strongly consider an internet-based home business.

Richard Davidian, Ph.D., Professor of Research and Writing, writes on topics as varied as internet marketing and the outdoors. Visit his Financial Freedom site to get started on your internet-based home business. Visit also Freeoutdoors.com for outdoor equipment and OutdoorValueStore.com for survival information.